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Dumb Ideas

SETI Researcher Writes Children’s Poem
November 22, 2007
For a feature called “SETI Thursday” at Space.com, Dr. Laurence Doyle has written a childish poem about how life brought itself up from nothing to galactic explorers.  It begins, “When the Earth was young, and the Moon nearby, in a cometary sea, prokaryotic thoughts arose, what fun it is to be!”  The idea of evolving […]
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Solar System

Give Thanks for Our Rare Moon
November 22, 2007
Our moon is a rare treat, says a press release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based on findings from the Spitzer Space Telescope.  The telescope looked for indications of dust from collisions in other planetary disks thought to be the age of our solar system when our moon formed.  According to the leading theory, our moon […]
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Uncategorized

Mt. St. Helens Rebuilding Fast
November 21, 2007
Could Mt. St. Helens grow back to its pre-1980 size in just 180 years?  That’s what an article in the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune says.  The lava dome is growing fast, and so is a glacier inside the crater.  It is growing 3 feet per day.  The lava dome split the glacier because it was […]
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Early Man

How Early Man Got High on Generosity
November 19, 2007
Are you generous because of a chemical?  That seems to be the claim of researchers from UCLA, Chapman and Claremont.  They did a double-blind test with students where they played computer games that required them to make decisions about how to split up a sum of money.  The ones who got a whiff of oxytocin […]
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Dumb Ideas

Males on “Evolutionary Overdrive”
November 17, 2007
A press release from University of Florida claims males evolve faster than females, and suggests a reason.  It’s because males are simpler.  Some quotes: The observation that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin noted the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with the plainness […]
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Amazing Facts

Nature Inspires Useful Products
November 16, 2007
Some day soon you may be able to extract water out of thin air, decorate your walls with detachable wallpaper, read street signs clearly in fog, and employ reusable tape underwater.  These are some of the innovations coming from biomimetics – science inspired by nature’s designs. Venus flytrap:  Alex Crosby at University of Massachusetts was […]
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Fossils

Darwin As Prognosticator
November 15, 2007
How good was Darwin at making predictions?  A good scientific theory should make predictions, at least according to a common assumption about science.  PBS thinks Darwin hit a home run, according to an interactive feature on the website for Judgment Day, the documentary about evolution vs intelligent design shown on Nova this week (11/14/2007).  The […]
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Amazing Facts

Photo: Earthrise 2007
November 15, 2007
The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft has taken a series of “Earthrise” photos from lunar orbit, including this sequence.  The complete set of new hi-resolution photos is available at Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.  (Due to the orbital path of the spacecraft, Antarctica is at the top.)     “Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that […]
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Education

Judgment Day:  Will it Be the New Inherit the Wind?
November 14, 2007
The PBS-Vulcan film Judgment Day just aired on national TV (see 10/12/2007) and is sure to represent a new rallying point for both sides of the ongoing controversy over Darwinian evolution that has raged for 148 years.  For material on both sides, see the PBS website, which put Intelligent Design on trial, and the responses […]
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Uncategorized

Evolution: Onward and Downward
November 13, 2007
A story in New Scientist explores a growing realization about evolutionary trees: over time, things have gotten simpler, not more complex.  Better cut down the tree in your textbook and start over. If you want to know how all living things are related, don’t bother looking in any textbook that’s more than a few years […]
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Amazing Facts

More Cell Codes and Authentication Mechanisms
November 13, 2007
Here are more “cool cell tricks” that ensure a smoothly-functioning system inside the cell that can adapt to changes while protecting assets. Ribosome code:  Why don’t all ribosomes look alike?  Perhaps they know a secret code.  Another possible coding mechanism has been found in ribosomes, those important organelles in the cytoplasm that translate messenger RNA […]
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Intelligent Design

Evolutionary Algorithms Improve on Plants
November 12, 2007
A press release from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign talks design, but it’s really about evolution, but then really about design.  Confused?  So is the author of the press release, entitled “Researchers successfully simulate photosynthesis and design a better leaf.” University of Illinois researchers have built a better plant, one that produces more leaves and […]
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Marine Biology

Gone Fishing: Can Humans Counteract Evolution?
November 12, 2007
Darwinists insist that human beings are part and parcel of the evolutionary process, but once in awhile, they criticize their fellow hominids for getting in Darwin’s way.  A recent example in Nature1 took aim at fishermen: People like to catch big fish, sometimes so much so that fish sizes overall become greatly diminished.  According to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Monkey Rationalize
November 10, 2007
It’s a quirk of English that rational and rationalize have opposite meanings.  Be that as it may, the latter may have evolved into to the former, according to a story in the New York Times.  A monkey study using children as control subjects seems to indicate that Capuchin monkeys, like us, occasionally rationalize bad choices. […]
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Human Body

The Brain Evolved!… Didn’t It?
November 9, 2007
Evolutionary neurologists are so absolutely sure the human brain is a product of evolution from lower primates over millions of years, they are able to talk openly and frankly about problems with the particulars.  But in reading some of their own reviews of current ideas, it is not clear which has been evolving: the brain […]
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