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Squid Beak: A Truly Fascinating Design
March 30, 2008
A new class of flexible yet tough materials may be in our future, thanks to a study of squid beaks. Scientists at University of Santa Barbara, reported National Geographic News and Science Daily, were curious how the squid anchors its tough, hard beak in soft tissue. Try anchoring a knife in Jell-o and you get […]
Expelled Surges in the Blogosphere
March 29, 2008
There are probably few people who haven’t heard about Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film documents persecution of intelligent-design advocates by Darwinists. Unusual for a non-fiction documentary, it seems to be the talk of the blogs. On March 24 it was #1 on BlogPulse, a Nielsen meter of the hottest topics […]
Explaining Two Billion Years Without Evolution
March 28, 2008
How does an evolutionist explain the perception that (within their timeline), no multicellular animals emerged for two billion years after the origin of life? Jonathan Wells has compared this to walking down a football field and encountering nothing but single cells till the 60 yard line, then boom! – all the animal phyla with their […]
Scientist Harnesses ATP Synthase
March 27, 2008
How would you like shorter waits at airports? fast screening for disease? the ability to detect biological warfare agents quickly? That may be possible soon – thanks to an amazing man-and-nature cooperative technology reported by Science Daily. A team led by Wayne Frasch at Arizona State is on the verge of an invention that can […]
Enceladus: Hotter Chemical Plume Found
March 26, 2008
Initial results of Cassini’s March 12 flyby of Enceladus have been published. You can watch a replay of today’s press briefing, read the blog, and read illustrated bulletins about the organic material, chemical signatures, hot spot locations, the stellar occultation (see also the Quicktime animation). Another article shows the plume locations. An astrobiologist (Chris McKay) […]
Peacocks Dont Dress for Success
March 26, 2008
The male peacock’s fancy feather show: an icon of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, right? Then why did Japanese scientists tell Discovery News that the females pay them little attention? The article claims that the male’s appearance fails to interest, much less excite, the females, who seem to pay more attention to his […]
Crater Dater Deflator: Impactors Can Be Recycled
March 25, 2008
They came from outer space – that was the old paradigm about impactors that made craters on planetary bodies. Then, we learned how secondary craters can confuse a surface’s history (06/08/2006, 09/25/2007). Now, two papers in Icarus show that moons can do a lateral pass. Alvarellos et al,1 showed that Jupiter’s moon Io […]
March Moon Madness
March 25, 2008
Moons of our planetary system are supposed to behave themselves. They were expected to just quietly orbit their host planets like nice, cold, frozen, inactive chunks of rock and ice. It seems like whenever we get a close look at them, they are madly at work destroying theories – just like their planets have been […]
Tuatara Genes Are Running in Place
March 24, 2008
One would expect a living fossil to show extreme stasis at the genetic level. Not so for the tuatara, a New Zealand reptile, reported EurekAlert: researchers found that “although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving – at a DNA level – faster than any other animal […]
Psychology Without Darwin
March 21, 2008
Can psychology kick the Darwin habit? For years it has been conventional to express all human actions in Darwinian terms. We struggle with city life, for instance, because we evolved to hunt prey in the savannah – not the Georgia kind, but the African plains where we first climbed down from the trees to walk […]
Adulterers: Evolution Made Us That Way
March 19, 2008
Two articles that appeared the same day on Live Science are a study in contrasts. One was titled, “Surviving Infidelity: What Wives Do When Men Cheat.” The other was titled, “Are Humans Meant to Be Monogamous?” The thread that tied them together was evolution. The first article admitted the distress, shame, and sense […]
Simple Molecules: The Building Blocks of Lie
March 19, 2008
At a physical level, everything in the universe is made of atoms and molecules. Life, being a subset of everything in the universe, is composed of a subset of all molecules that exist. It could be said that any atom or molecule present in a living thing is a building block of life, but how […]
Electronic Nose Cant Outsniff Yours
March 19, 2008
Electronic nose makers are smelling your dust, said Science Daily. “Despite 25 years of research, development of an ‘electronic nose’ even approaching the capabilities of the human sniffer remains a dream,” the article said. Biological noses are great at discriminating between volatile compounds. We can immediately sense things that are fruity, grassy, and […]
Planet Formation: Just Add Water?
March 19, 2008
The Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence of water in a dust disk around a star. Does this mean we understand how the earth, with all its water, formed? Using the Spitzer infrared instrumentation, John Carr (Naval Research Laboratory) and Joan Najita (National Optical Astronomy Observatory) found spectra of organic molecules and water in […]
Neanderthals: Random Drift, Not Natural Selection
March 18, 2008
The differences between Neanderthals and modern humans were not due to evolution for bigger brains or anything of the sort. They were due to genetic drift, says an article on Live Science. “A team of anthropologists has compared measurements of Neanderthal skulls to modern human skulls, and argues that most variations among them […]
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