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Education

Human Adaptation Can Be Rapid
April 25, 2007
How long does it take for humans to adapt to environmental changes?  Some recent papers investigated this question. Paleface:  If it is assumed that humans started out medium or dark-skinned, how long did it take for Europeans to lose much of that original pigment?  An article in Science April 20 says maybe just 6,000 to […]
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Amazing Facts

Scientists Track Homing Pigeons with GPS
April 24, 2007
How do homing pigeons find their way?  Scientists are still not sure.  They know that the birds use a sun compass and magnetic fields, but what other cues guide them back to the specific roost they know as home?  A new study shows they are smarter than we thought.  They use multiple cues and weigh […]
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Genetics

More “Candy” Found in Junk DNA
April 24, 2007
Powerful regulators that play a crucial role – this is how non-coding sections of DNA are now being described.  A story in Science Daily says that these regions of “junk DNA” once dismissed as “gene deserts” actually orchestrate the expression of genes during development.     In a related paper in PNAS,1 researchers found regulatory […]
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Fossils

Fossil Forest Found in Coal
April 23, 2007
A Carboniferous forest extending some 4 square miles has been found in the ceiling of a coal mine, reported Science Daily, Live Science and News@Nature.  About 50 species have been identified, including ferns and horsetails over 10 times taller than those alive today.  News@Nature remarked that the forest contained some mangrove-like plants.  The article quoted […]
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Amazing Facts

Fatty Acid Synthesis: A Machine with “High Degree of Architectural Complexity”
April 19, 2007
As Bruce Alberts said in 1998, the biology of the future was going to be the study of molecular machines: “the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”1  One of those machines is […]
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Amazing Facts

Spider Silk Admired, Not Duplicated
April 18, 2007
Spiders still maintain the edge in a technology humans want: a material that absorbs huge amounts of energy without breaking.  The dragline silk spun by spiders is extremely robust – ounce for ounce stronger than steel, yet more flexible than Kevlar.  If a web the size of a football field could be erected in the […]
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Dinosaurs

Jurassic Park Gets Overhaul
April 17, 2007
How much do we understand the dinosaurs?  ABC News reported on some big-time updates and revisions being made to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History dinosaur exhibits.  The title of the article is, “Getting Their Dinosaur Facts Right, at Least for Now.” The problem is that even though the newest of the dinosaurs are 65 […]
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Uncategorized

Keeping the Media Safe for Darwin
April 17, 2007
The world’s mainstream science journals often discuss Darwinian ideas.  From these fountainheads, science reporters and popularizers collect and distribute their libations.  Considering that a large population of the public maintains serious doubts that Darwinism is true, it is instructive to see how issues of origins are stated, and what parts are left unstated.  Here are […]
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SETI

Are the Red Dwarfs Ready for SETI?
April 16, 2007
There are oodles of M-type red dwarf stars.  Before now, most SETI researchers didn’t pay them much attention, because their habitable zones are narrow.  Also, because the habitable zones are closer in, any planets in the lucky radius would most likely be tidally locked to the star, leaving one hemisphere in darkness and the other […]
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Astronomy

Cosmology: Crisis or Confidence?
April 13, 2007
What is it with cosmology these days?  On the one hand, astronomers seem more confident than ever.  They speak of this as the era of “precision cosmology,” when the only task remaining seems to be refining the decimal points; e.g., the first refinements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) won John Mather and George Smoot […]
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Dinosaurs

Proteins Found Preserved in T. rex Bone
April 12, 2007
Preserved fragments of collagen have been found in a dinosaur bone alleged to be 68 million years old.  Read all about it in Science Daily.  Analysis of soft tissue found by Mary Schweitzer and team turned up the recognizable protein fragments.  Protein was also detected in soft tissue from a mastodon said to be half […]
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Dumb Ideas

Cave Chimps Suggest Cave Men
April 11, 2007
Some chimpanzees have been found in Senegal using caves for shelter from the heat.  Jill Pruetz (Iowa State) took note of this and is publishing a paper about it in Primates.  National Geographic speculated that this sheds light on human origins: The adaptations of savanna chimpanzees are particularly interesting to researchers because early humans are […]
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Health

Dirt for Physical and Mental Health
April 11, 2007
Live Science has an article suggesting that exposure to dirt can improve your mood by boosting the immune system.  This is an unexpected twist on the “hygiene hypothesis” that childhood exposure to dirt and animals helps innoculate the body to certain diseases (see 08/02/2006).  Certain bacteria might not only boost the immune system, but also […]
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Uncategorized

Co-Evolution Theory Challenged
April 11, 2007
A classic case of co-evolution has been called into question.  EurekAlert reported that a “paradigm change” is needed regarding plant-eating beetles and their angiosperm hosts.  Dr. Jes�s G�mez-Zurita and collaborators in the Natural History Museum in London have challenged the view that the two groups co-evolved, diversifying rapidly in response to one another.  Neither the […]
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Early Man

Lucy the Gorilla?
April 10, 2007
Three scientists from Tel Aviv found a “gorilla-like” jaw structure on a recently discovered specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, of which “Lucy” is the best-known example.  This is a problem, because Lucy was supposed to be transitional between chimpanzees and humans, not gorillas.     Publishing in PNAS,1 they said, “The presence of the morphology in […]
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