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Spleen Scores, Darwin Loses
August 4, 2009
Hold onto your spleen if you can. The lowly organ, “known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.” Natalie Angier reported in the New York Times that Harvard researchers found that the spleen acts like a fort for disease-fighting monocytes, […]
Cosmologist Has a Sobering Thought: We Are Forever in the Dark About Dark Energy
August 3, 2009
An evangelist for the standard model of cosmology is having a moment of penitence. He is admitting to himself, and to the world, that “we will remain resolutely in the dark about dark energy.” In a piece in New Scientist, Pedro Ferreira [Oxford] has revealed the vicious circle of assumptions that undermine confidence […]
Dino Protein Confirmed
August 2, 2009
An independent study of bone marrow contents from a T. rex that was reported in 2007 to contain fragments of protein has confirmed the claim, reported Science Daily. Seven peptides from collagen, and apparently traces from hemoglobin, were detected. The findings are scheduled to be published in the Sept. 4 issue of Journal of Proteome […]
Fertile Crescent Disappearing
August 1, 2009
The birthplace of civilization and empire, the Fertile Crescent, is drying up. New Scientist posted a worrisome story that modern Iraq is in dire straits as dams upstream in Turkey are threatening to reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a quarter of their natural levels. This is happening in a land already parched by […]
Does Evolution Need a Helping Hand?
July 31, 2009
New Scientist didn’t think about that question, because reporter Ewen Galloway he said, “If humans want to persuade microbes to produce vast quantities of fuels or pharmaceuticals, we may need to give evolution a helping hand.” His article was about researchers at Harvard Medical School using computers to do “rapid evolution.” How this […]
Dark Matter: Where Is It?
July 30, 2009
If physicists and astronomers are going to continue to tell us that 95% of the mass in the universe is hidden in some unobservable dark matter, they had better find it soon. Two articles on PhysOrg (#1, #2) reported on continuing efforts to find the elusive stuff – if it exists at all. The first […]
Oil Can Come from Rock
July 29, 2009
Methane and other hydrocarbons can be produced in the mantle, reported Science Daily. This disputes earlier beliefs that oil and gas are products of organisms that lived and died. Carnegie Institute scientists have produced ethane, propane, butane, molecular hydrogen, and graphite in high-pressure equipment simulating conditions 40 to 95 miles deep in the crust and […]
Sexual Selection Discounted in Toucan Bill
July 28, 2009
Darwin thought that the large bill of the toucan might be an ornament produced by his theory of sexual selection. A new study says, rather, that the bill serves as a heat radiator the bird uses to control body temperature. National Geographic News summarized a paper in Science that explained the process.1 The authors studied […]
Epigenetics Rising in Consciousness of Geneticists, Embryologists
July 27, 2009
The old story of genetics was that all the information is in genes, and when sperm and egg unite, it’s only the combination of genes from parents that affect the offspring. That view has been under challenge for years now as geneticists and embryologists find more and more evidence for additional heritable factors that affect […]
Weekend Roundup
July 26, 2009
Here’s a quick collection of recent news articles bearing on questions of origins, morals, fossils, outer space, science, health and Darwin. Mars risks: The dust on Mars may be toxic to humans. New Scientist reported that evidence from the rovers shows the electrically-charged dust clinging to everything. “If the dust is toxic and you bring […]
Selfish Gene Mutates, Dies a Metaphorical Death
July 24, 2009
Richard Dawkins proposed in his book The Selfish Gene that a gene, being the target of natural selection and unit of replication, is the entity most likely to get passed on to posterity; as such, it is “selfish” in that the rest of the organism is really only incidental to its immortality. Dawkins expanded this […]
Nanotech Blurs Line With Biophysics
July 24, 2009
Machines on the molecular scale – in the literature these days, one needs to dig to find whether a news article is talking about man-made machinery or the living cell. Both employ laws of physics to do work. Notice how seamless the connection is in the following examples. Kinesin tightrope walk: Scientists at Northwestern University […]
Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life
July 23, 2009
Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s […]
More Going On in the Brain Than We Realize
July 22, 2009
The news story about a girl who can see in both eyes with half a brain has stunned neurophysiologists (see New Scientist and Live Science). Somehow, the remaining parts of her brain underwent a massive reorganization of the circuits involved in vision. “It was quite a surprise to see that something like this is possible,” […]
Systems Biology Oddly Silent About Darwin
July 21, 2009
Two papers on the rise of “systems biology” appeared in Nature last week. Both are astounded by the complexity of the cell, but neither had anything to say about evolution, Darwin, or phylogeny – mildly surprising when the proponents of evolution keep saying that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” […]
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David Coppedge, B.S. Education, B.S. Physics, founded Creation-Evolution Headlines in late 2000 as a way to share science news he was encountering at NASA. It has grown into a highly-trusted source of news and commentary critical of the pro-Darwin consensus, providing analysis of breaking news of interest to creationists and evolutionists, without the Darwin spin. He has authored over 7,000 entries at CEH since its inception.
