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Amazing Facts

Why Your Eyes Jitter
June 18, 2007
The coach’s advice “Keep your eye on the ball” is impossible, because your eyes are constantly in motion with tiny jerks called fixational eye movements or saccades.  Why do the eyes move all the time?  Some scientists at Boston University decided to find out.  Reporting in Nature,1 they found that saccades help you discriminate fine […]
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Health

More Reasons to Enjoy Creation Outdoors
June 17, 2007
Evidence keeps mounting that exercise is good for almost every body.  It can prevent and alleviate many ailments.  But isn’t that only natural? Low back pain:  Laziness increases the risk of back pain, reported EurekAlert on work from Australia.  Staying in bed shrinks muscles needed to support the back.  So does prolonged inactivity at a […]
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Amazing Facts

More Optical Design in Eye Retina Than Seen Before
May 2, 2007
For decades, evolutionists have used the vertebrate retina as an example of poor design (dysteleology).  They have mocked how any designer could have been so unintelligent as to get the wiring backwards – with the photoreceptors behind a jumble of light-scattering cells.  Creationists have countered that despite the arrangement, it works well.1  Now, they may […]
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Amazing Facts

Snot Serious: Artificial Nose Works Better with Mucus
April 30, 2007
What will they think of next?  Designers of electronic noses cannot yet come close to the natural nose in sensitivity.  But in trying to improve their devices, they tried another trick from nature: artificial boogers.  Yes, believe it or snot, adding a layer of synthetic mucus “improved the performance of their electronic nose allowing it […]
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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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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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Amazing Facts

Preprocessed Sound Produces Tone Map in the Brain
April 6, 2007
Most of us know that our ears involve three domains: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.  We learned in school how the eardrum transmits the sound to tiny bones that transmit it to fluid in the cochlea, which stimulates hair cells that send the impulses down the auditory nerve to the […]
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Human Body

Questions to Ask a Reductionist Neurobiologist
March 21, 2007
Can the totality of the brain be described in terms of its neurons?  Is consciousness an artifact of the movement of signals in the brain?  Can the complexity of the brain be described in terms of its evolutionary history?  Does the hardware define the software that runs on it? Gy�rgy Buzs�ki attempted to address these questions […]
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Amazing Facts

Why Our Voices Are Unique
March 15, 2007
We can usually recognize friends and acquaintances by their voices.  If we all have the same hardware, though, how is this possible?  The answer is in the vortex.  Sounds sci-fi, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati used knowledge of jet engines to explore the possibility that vortices may help solve the mysteries of the […]
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Amazing Facts

Music Can Make You Smarter
March 12, 2007
Musical training in childhood can help one develop better language processing skills, reports a news item on EurekAlert.  Scientists at Northwestern University found that English-speaking adults who had musical training were better able to track intonations of Chinese tonal words than those who did not have such training.     The study contradicted an evolutionary […]
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Health

Skin Includes Built-In Damage Protection
March 11, 2007
Ultraviolet radiation that tans skin can also cause skin cancer, right?  Right, but the skin also produces a cancer fighter to come to the rescue, reported EurekAlert.  Scientists at the Dana-Farber cancer institute detected a known cancer fighter named p53 that is produced right under the skin.  Their results, published in Cell (see summary on […]
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Human Body

Evolutionary Theory Not Even Skin Deep
March 2, 2007
A book on skin just was published – no, not one of those books, but a book on the physiology of human skin.  Nina Jablonski wrote Skin: A Natural History (UC Berkeley, 2006) and Qais Al-Awqati (Columbia U) reviewed it in Science.1  The reviewer noticed that “In its discussion of the human skin, the book’s […]
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Health

3 Out of 5 Doctors – Leaves 2
February 28, 2007
Every once in awhile it’s good to be reminded that yesterday’s nutritional advice can be wrong.  We need to beware of simplistic approaches to health.  For instance, the cliches “If a little is good, more is better” or “it worked for me” can be deadly.  TV commercials are filled with glowing promises for this or […]
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Early Man

Music Out of Range of Darwin’s Instrument
February 9, 2007
In Science this week,1 Michael Balter reported on a Montreal meeting of the Brain, Music and Sound Research Center (BRAMS).  The center is gaining attention for its renewed interest in the biology of music, and why human beings are so good at this skill with its dubious survival value.  The topic came up about how […]
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Human Body

The Space Race: Just Staying Alive
January 30, 2007
“Ad astra!” the sci-fi slogan announces with eternal optimism: “To the stars!”  Medical doctors and astrobiologists are not sure you would want to stay there long, though.  Some recent findings give a dismal picture of the prospects for life – human or bacterial – at least in our solar system, if that can be assumed […]
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