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Birds

How Can They Call This Duck a Missing Link?
June 16, 2006
The news media are abuzz with the phrase “Missing Link” again.  This time, it’s about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1  The article calls it a “nearly modern” bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers.  They said it “possesses advanced anatomical […]
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Bible and Theology

New Noah’s Ark Claims – From Iran
June 15, 2006
Bob Cornuke was interviewed by John Kasich on Fox News Saturday evening, with the first public showing of videos of an anomalous feature in northern Iran proposed as a candidate for Noah’s Ark.  The find has also been announced on Christian Worldview Network with 18 photographs and a video.  Cornuke, a former police investigator turned […]
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Birds

More Darwinian Assumptions Shot Down
June 14, 2006
Here are two articles that appear to kick out some once-solid props from evolutionary theory.  Readers are encouraged to get the details from the original papers, listed in the footnotes. Environmental Impotence:  Many evolutionists have claimed that the environment produces strong selection effects.  Indeed, the fitness landscape itself evolves, carrying with it the constraints driving […]
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Early Man

When Evolutionist Rebukes Evolutionist, Watch Out
June 14, 2006
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” Solomon said.  Sometimes comrades need to rein in their own when they stray too far.  Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan (Dept. of Anthropology, Penn State) had some stern rebukes for Nicholas Wade, who was just trying to praise Darwin in his new book Before the Dawn: […]
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Amazing Facts

Reach Out and Touch Some Robot
June 13, 2006
The news media were excited to report an advance in materials science last week that could pave the way for touchy-feely robots (see BBC News, News @ Nature, LiveScience and National Geographic News, for instance).  Two scientists produced a thin film with touch resolution comparable to that of a human finger, an order of magnitude […]
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Amazing Facts

Foot Facts: Frogs and Flies Fulfill Feet Feats
June 13, 2006
How do frogs walk on wet leaves without slipping?  Eric Jaffe in Science News1 describes how they have dual-purpose footwear: a mucous film that holds on by wet adhesion, plus microscopic bumps that protrude above the wet layer to make dry contact.  Though a frog foot doesn’t appear as fancy as that of a gecko, […]
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Politics and Ethics

Nature of Peer Review Undergoing Review at Nature
June 13, 2006
The science cops are on trial.  Peer review, the process that many are led to believe enforces objectivity and validity in scientific papers, has come under fire lately (see 03/17/2006, 02/05/2006, 01/31/2006, 01/09/2006).  In response to scandals and criticisms that the peer review as practiced is no guarantee against fraud, Nature is stepping out into […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can the Origin of Life Be Simplified?
June 12, 2006
Evolutionists looking for a materialistic explanation for the origin of life know that there is a huge gap between a sea of chemicals and a self-replicating cell.  Over the years since the Miller experiment (see 05/02/2003 entry), there have been several approaches trying to bridge this gap.  One has been the RNA World hypothesis, that […]
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Mammals

Domestic Housecat Trees Wild Bear
June 11, 2006
Donna Dickey has quite a watchcat.  This declawed tabby chased a roaming black bear up a tree and held it at bay for 15 minutes.  When the bear slid down to try to get away, Jack chased it, hissing and snarling, till the bear escaped up a second tree.  That’s when Donna called her cuddly […]
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Dinosaurs

Mini-Dinos Found in Marine Sediments
June 10, 2006
Sauropods were not all the lumbering giants we think of; they could be the size of a pet dog (images of Deeno in the Flintstones come to mind).  This came to light from recent discoveries announced in Germany (see BBC News and LiveScience) of adult sauropods smaller than human height, ranging five to 20 feet […]
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Cell Biology

Eukaryote Evolution Proceeded from Complex to Simple
June 9, 2006
As if reprimanding simpletons, three scientists writing in Science1 preached that the old picture of evolution from simple to complex is simplistic.  This is particularly true, they claim, for the story that eukaryotes were born from a blessed union.  “Data from many sources,” they counter, “give no direct evidence that eukaryotes evolved by genome fusion […]
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Amazing Facts

Plant Hula-Hoop Railroads Build Cell Walls
June 9, 2006
Solving a long-standing mystery about how plants build cell walls, Stanford scientists imaged molecular machines traveling along hoop-shaped rings around the inside of the cell.  Publishing in Science, Paradez, Somerville and Ehrhardt proved that cellulose synthase (CESA), a machine that manufactures cellulose composed of six subunits arranged in rosettes, rides like a rail car on […]
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Genetics

Evolutionary Trees “Positively Misleading”
June 8, 2006
According to an article in PLoS Genetics,1 there is a fundamental flaw in the way species trees are inferred from gene trees using molecular genetics that is guaranteed to produce erroneous results: Because of the stochastic way in which lineages sort during speciation, gene trees may differ in topology from each other and from species […]
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Solar System

Update:  Crater-Count Dating Squabble Unresolved
June 8, 2006
Remember the revelation last year that many craters on Mars used to infer ages may have been secondary impacts from fallback debris? (see 10/20/2005 entry).  Well, a microsymposium on this subject was held in Houston in March, and Richard Kerr in Science1 said that “125 planetary scientists deadlocked over how to apply crater-dating techniques to […]
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Amazing Facts

Beavers Achieve Environmental Reprieve
June 8, 2006
In what might be considered an unexpected convergence between geology and zoology, it has been found that beaver dams influence large tracts of land both above and below ground.  “Impact of beaver dams wider than thought” announced a headline on LiveScience summarizing studies by scientists in Rocky Mountain National Park.     The dams take […]
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