What’s Hot This Week

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As parts of the USA swelter under end-of-summer heat, learn what’s hot in the science news this week of September 9-13, 2024.

Antarctic Dinosaurs

Large theropods thrived near South Pole, Australian tracks show (9 Sept 2024, Emory University). Tracks in Australia now were made when the continent was located within the Antarctic Circle, say Emory scientists. And there were lots of them. Big ones. Track searchers found more than they expected. The mix of adults and juveniles “indicates that these dinosaurs may have nested and raised their young in the polar environment,” said one researcher who also had found bird tracks at the site last year.

Arctic Humans

Greenland voyage sheds light on little-known ancient Arctic culture (6 Sept 2024, New Scientist). “On a recent expedition, researchers braved summer storms in northern Greenland to learn the secrets of the ancient peoples who lived there 4500 years ago.” Just 800 km from the North Pole, people were braving the cold at the time the Egyptians were building the Great Pyramids. They apparently wandered this icy wilderness on foot.

Remains of Roman army siege camp from top of Masada fortress (photo by David Coppedge)

The Roman Siege of Masada May Have Lasted Weeks, Not Years (9 Sept 2024, Smithsonian Magazine). Some archaeologists are drastically revising the timeline of Masada’s siege and capture by the Romans, from years to just weeks.

If experts cannot decide something so recent in recorded history that has been documented in writings and artifacts from the time, how can they be so confident about events millions and billions of years ago?

Gumby Darwinism

How fast does evolution happen? (9 Sept 2024, Live Science). Reporter Marlowe Starling’s answer to the speed of evolution: It goes as fast as evolutionists need it to go to keep their story from being falsified. She confuses human-caused “evolution” (artificial selection) with natural selection, just like Darwin did.

This silly, evidence-free article illustrates the Silly Putty nature of the Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law, which can be stretched, squeezed and mushed into any shape. It also illustrates what happens when notions of creation are censored by the media in power: credulous absurdity takes over and gets published as truth.

Horsing Around with Darwin Years

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society − new science rewrites where and when it first happened  (3 Sept 2024, The Conversation). William Taylor just made the problem worse for the evolutionary timeline of man. The old story was that tribesmen in the steppes of central Asia first rode horses about 5,500 years ago, after having lived around horses for half a million Darwin Years and having painted them on cave walls for tens of thousands of years! That was hard enough to believe. Now, Taylor claims the old story is wrong, and humans first began riding horseback only about 4,000 years ago.

What? No teenager ever dared a friend to hop on and see how long they could stay aboard? No rodeos for over 80 times all of recorded history? That’s what you have to swallow to accept the moyboys’ Deep Time assumption.

Fruit Fly on a Treadmill

A Neural Circuit That Helps Flies Stay on Course (9 Sept 2024, The Scientist). Love them or hate them, fruit flies are expert navigators. Scientists at Harvard and Rockefeller put fruit flies on a ball-shaped treadmill to learn about the neural circuits governing the halteres under their wings thought to give them gyroscopic control. Watch the embedded video for amazement. Long-time fruit fly researcher Michael Dickinson of Caltech wrote about the new findings in Current Biology.

Strongman Science

Study of former world’s strongest man shows ‘guy rope’ muscles important for lifting (3 Sept 2024, Phys.org). Here’s an evolution-free research project to read about. Former “World’s Strongest Man” champion Eddie Hall lent his prowess to science so that researchers could learn what muscles do the most work in a deadlift. Watch him struggle and strain with the equipment in an embedded video as scientists learn that lesser-known ‘guy rope’ muscles connected to the pelvis “play a much bigger role in lifting heavy loads than previously thought.”

Look at this hulk and understand again why men should not compete in women’s sports.

Volcanic Moon Still?

The moon might still have active volcanoes, China’s Chang’e 5 sample-return probe reveals (9 Sept 2024, Space.com). Volcanic activity on the moon should have ceased billions of Darwin Years ago, because smaller bodies cool faster. But now, “tiny glass beads” (Phys.org) used as divination crystals by Chinese evolutionists are telling them that volcanoes may have been erupting when dinosaurs walked the earth. In fact, volcanoes could still be active on the moon today! “The discovery could turn what we thought we knew about the evolution of the moon on its head.”

Too late; it was never right side up to begin with, once they denied Genesis 1:14-19.

Growing key biomethane crop on peat emits 3 times more CO₂ than using natural gas (9 Sept 2024, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology). Whoops; a method to try to reduce carbon dioxide by producing biomethane actually releases 3 times as much CO₂ as just using natural gas when all the processing steps are taken into account. But climate experts still try to nudge the public to become climate activists by saying it’s a “patriotic” thing to do, suggests New York University.

Why Science Is Broken

Fixing science means an end to gaming the system (9 Sept 2024, PLoS Perspectives). This editorial by Nicholas J.L. Brown (Linnaeus University) is very damning to Big Science. It shows the huge gap between the ideal and the real. Dr Brown thought that the Open Science movement would cure some of the ills of scientific practice that led to the Replication Crisis a decade ago. It didn’t. Scientists and journals learned how to “game the system” to get around the principles of transparency in order to get funding and publish papers. One quotable quote of many:

Giving up gaming will not be easy. People do not like being asked to work harder for less reward, and especially (though not only) for senior people, being confronted with the fact that their own research careers may have been built on sand may require them to stare into the abyss. But without this frank introspection, we risk looking at ourselves in the mirror in another 10 years and discovering once again that nothing much has changed.

Tree Walkers

When did humans leave the trees for the savannah – or did they at all? (10 Sept 2024, New Scientist). The old “Savannah Hypothesis” (i.e., just-so story) that climate change pushed humans out of the trees and onto grasslands where evolution favored upright walking, is “if not entirely wrong, seriously incomplete,” writes Darwin disciple Michael Marshall. What do some want to replace the old just-so story with? A new, crazier one: that humans learned to walk upright in the trees! “This idea is controversial but has been gathering momentum for 20 years” among the storytellers.

Evolutionary Just-So Stories Evolve: The Casket of Metamorphosis

How the Butterfly Got Its Pupa (10 Sept 2024, Free University of Berlin). We learn from this article that ever since Darwin taught his just-so storytelling class to the universities, the answer to how metamorphosis evolved “has hitherto evaded a straightforward answer.” No kidding. These Darwinos speculate that in a pupal stage (for butterflies, a chrysalis), maybe the butterfly could use less resources by growing faster. That this is no answer at all has already been explained by Paul Nelson and Ann Gauger in the Illustra film Metamorphosis, where they say that a chrysalis is a casket unless the caterpillar has a plan for getting out the other side. And get out it does, with an entire new body plan that can fly! It’s like a Model T entering a garage, dismantling and melting down all its parts, and emerging out the other side as a helicopter. Explain that, Darwin! “There are also other hypotheses out there that try to explain why insects undergo metamorphosis” says one of the Darwinos at the university, “but these have yet to be investigated.” There it is: job security for storytellers.

Big Science for Leftism

As millions of Americans expect to watch a long-anticipated debate between Democrat candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump tonight, they should understand that Big Science and Big Media have sold their souls to the Democrat party, and are not to be trusted for unbiased news on political matters. Recent examples:

• UC Berkeley arouses fear over the “rise of the right” while ignoring the rise of the left in the Democrat party. (6 Sept 2024).
• Michigan State psychologists and sociologists try to fact-check an old quote by VP candidate J.D. Vance while passing over several verifiable lies and flipflops by the Democrat candidates. (4 Sept 2024).
• Nature details how scientists are “coping” with communist dictator Lula’s ban on X in Brazil without calling his blatant violation of free speech an evil thing, or standing with the public in their outcry over the censorship. But then Nature allows criticism by scientists of Elon Musk (a free speech champion) for having bought Twitter and making X “a lawless land that favours hate speech and disinformation.” Nature had earlier favored communist Lula for Brazil, but opposed Milei, a conservative president who is making Argentina great again.
• Northeastern University “experts” joined Nature in condemnation of X and excusing Brazil for banning it. These globalist “experts” say that times have changed and social media platforms must be regulated. Quote: “Increasingly, we’re seeing an evolution. Courts are rethinking libertarian free speech paradigms — rethinking this very expansive understanding of free speech online,” said Elettra Bietti Tontologically. “We have moved from a very libertarian, very hands-off approach to an increasing appetite for regulation in the digital economy.” Big Science stands with communist censors! Strangely, these “experts” had nothing bad to say about liberal social media platforms like Google and Facebook.

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