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Amazing Facts

Cilium Likened to GPS
December 27, 2008
A story on Science Daily says that the primary cilium, a protrusion on most human cells that looks like an antenna, acts like a GPS system.  They “orient cells to move in the right direction and at the speed needed to heal wounds, much like a Global Positioning System helps ships navigate to their destinations.” […]
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Amazing Facts

That Spring in Your Step Is Semi-Automatic
December 2, 2008
Cross-country runners know the challenge of running on uneven terrain.  What they may not know is that they are executing one of the most difficult operations for robot designers: how to make an upright, walking machine make rapid decisions on irregular surfaces without falling.     Monica Daley of the Royal Veterinary College wrote about […]
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Dumb Ideas

How Floppy Feet Produced Marathoners
November 26, 2008
A picture of a muscle-bound furry gibbon adorns a story on Science Daily that claims, “Floppy-footed Gibbons Help Us Understand How Early Humans May Have Walked.”  The story describes how two European researchers photographed the footwork of wild gibbons to find connections to human evolution.  It turned out that gibbon footfalls are very different from […]
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Cell Biology

Far-Out Science
November 25, 2008
The following list of bizarre stories coming from science news outlets is jarring on two fronts: it shows how little scientists understand, and calls into question what counts as science these days.  Some stories illustrate one or the other; some both. Roar of the aurora aura:  Both Saturn and Mars turned up auroras that are […]
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Human Body

Defining Nature Produces a Dilemma
November 9, 2008
The evolution wars often revolve around the word “nature.”  Evolutionists insist that science must use natural instead of supernatural explanations.  It seems obvious that before arguing such issues, one must first define nature.  That is not easily done, wrote a scientist at the University of Bergen in a letter to Nature.1     Fern Wickson’s […]
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Dumb Ideas

Proving the Obvious
November 8, 2008
The well-known IgNobel Prizes are awarded each year for silly, useless research projects (see Improbable Research).  There seem to be a lot of contenders that may never win the prize, but get reported anyway.  One can only wonder why the reporters aren’t putting these on the funny pages: Well duh:  Science Daily reported that serial […]
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Human Body

Body’s Junk Is Useful Stuff
November 7, 2008
What’s the difference between junk and stuff?  The jokester replies that stuff is the junk you throw away, and junk is the stuff you keep.  When it comes to stuff in your body that scientists have called junk, you had better keep all of it, because your life may depend on it. Junk DNA:  The […]
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Cell Biology

Biological Complexity Continues to Astound
November 3, 2008
There’s more going on in your thinking apparatus than you think.  New scientific discoveries continue to unfold new layers of complexity and control.  Here are a few examples: Meta-code:  Your body has codes directing codes.  Geneticists were initially dismayed to find only 20,000 to 30,000 genes in the human genome.  “We were expecting that something […]
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Human Body

Evolutionizing Religion: Who’s Assuming What?
October 26, 2008
“Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion,” said Pascal Boyer in Nature.1  His essay summarized studies that offer an evolutionary explanation for mankind’s propensity to embrace religion.  “We can probe the shared assumptions that religions are built on, however disparate, and examine the connection between religion […]
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Human Body

Minding the Brain, or Braining the Mind?
October 23, 2008
There’s a battle brewing over who controls your brain: nature or your mind.  Materialist scientists are recognizing that creationists are getting a foothold on this hill and “declaring war over the brain,” according to an article in New Scientist.  Psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz fired this salvo: “Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs […]
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Dumb Ideas

Reducing Human Behavior to Natural Laws
October 2, 2008
Can human behavior be reduced to natural laws that science can study in a morally neutral way?  Darwin sought to incorporate all aspects of the living world, including behavior, in natural laws that were amenable to scientific explanation.  Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists continue in that tradition today.  Consider two recent examples in the literature that […]
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Health

Designed for Health
September 24, 2008
Recent science reports on physiology and health contain suggestions of intelligent design as well as challenges to evolutionary theory. “Amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” kidneys:  Scientists studying the effects of hypertension on kidneys have found that ATP acts not only as an energy source but an extracellular messenger.  It’s involved in helping arterioles […]
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Amazing Facts

Turing Test Stands: Your Brain Outperforms Computers
September 14, 2008
What is the speed of thought?  Computer speeds are measured in megahertz and gigahertz, but that’s only part of the story.  The ability to compute an answer to a problem depends on the programming, too.  How does the brain compare with our best computers?  A scientist from UC San Francisco and one from the Salk […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionist Calls Everyone Crazy
August 27, 2008
Last month she called everyone a hypocrite (07/06/2008).  This month, Robin Nixon of Live Science called everyone crazy.  Her latest article is entitled, “Why We Are All Insane.”  But then, how could we trust her explanation?     Attributing everything about humanity to a blind process of evolution, Nixon wove a tale of mythical ancestors […]
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Amazing Facts

New Camera Imitates Eyeball
August 7, 2008
Scientists at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have succeeded in manufacturing stretchable optical electronic sensors on curved surfaces.  This will open up a whole new world of new imaging products – inventions that imitate the human eyeball.  The team said this about the eyeball in their paper in Nature:1  The human eye is […]
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