VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
More Details of Photosynthesis Coming to Light
March 20, 2002
Photosynthesis, the light-harvesting capability of plants, was a black box 30 years ago, but more and more details have been elucidated by advanced probing techniques. In the March 18 issue of Nature,1, a team of Chinese scientists determined the X-ray structure of a principal component acts like a light-harvesting antenna. The structure utilizes special molecules […]
A Bad Kind of Sexual Selection
March 20, 2002
51; Darwin taught a kind of sexual selection that presumed mate choice can lead to extravagant sexual differences. There is a kind of sexual selection going on among humans that is by intelligent design – with bad consequences. In this case, the selections are not being made by potential mates, but by parents. […]
Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes
March 20, 2002
51; What’s new with flagella? These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process. More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]
Evolution Rules
March 20, 2002
51; It would be convenient if all a scientist had to do to prove his theory was declare it to be a law of nature. Is that what scientists from UC Berkeley and Imperial College have done with evolution? “First ‘rule’ of evolution suggests that life is destined to become more complex,” announced a press […]
Alliance for Science or for Silence?
February 20, 2002
The American Association for the Advancement of Science had an unusual item on their agenda for their annual meeting in St. Louis: fight intelligent design. The St. Louis Dispatch reported that while churches were preaching the gospel Sunday morning, the AAAS was preaching battle tactics. According to the article, though, they were preaching to the […]
SETI Sans ETI So Far
February 20, 2002
There’s “no din of alien chatter in our neighborhood,” writes Richard Kerr in the Feb. 20 issue of Science.1 “Early-generation searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are coming up empty-handed, but the SETI community is carrying on,” he writes. Search pioneer Frank Drake admits “We found nothing” in the latest Project Phoenix, a survey of 700 nearby […]
Darwin Propagandist Reveals Too Much
February 20, 2002
You can’t always tell a chocolate by its coating. Similarly, a positivistic, pro-evolution article might have surprises inside. “Billions of years of evolution have produced organisms of stunning diversity,” begins E�rs Szathm�ry in the Feb. 17 issue of Current Biology,1 with vintage Darwinian confidence. A theoretician at heart, Szathm�ry explores the evolutionary transitions […]
Define Pseudoscience
February 20, 2002
A couple of articles lately have lumped creationism in with astrology, ESP, space aliens and lucky numbers. How valid is this grouping? Randolph E. Schmid (Associated Press; see Live Science) conveyed statistics presented by Jon Miller (Michigan State U) and a panel of researchers at an AAAS meeting in San Francisco this past […]
Florida Wises Up and Teaches Evolution Uncritically
February 20, 2002
The Florida State Board of Education adopted, by a vote of 4 to 3, science standards that require the teaching of evolution as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology” without critical analysis or alternatives. Evolution News said that calling evolution a “scientific theory” instead of a scientific fact represented a meaningless compromise with the […]
Dinosaurs of the Month
February 20, 2002
The tools of paleontologists continue to turn up interesting things. Here are some of the latest dinosaur discoveries reported this month: Mighty mouth: An African theropod with massive, shark-like teeth was found in the African Sahara, reported National Geographic News and PhysOrg. It was named Eocarcharia dinops, or “fierce-eyed dawn shark.” Another similar individual, presumed […]
Back to Nature, Back to Health
February 20, 2002
People need access to nature.
Scientists Are Studying Your Garden for Ideas
February 20, 2002
51; Your garden plants are visited by a butterfly and various insects as you sip tea in a lawn chair. Did you have any idea that inventors are watching the same things with an eye to making money? Or that military officers are getting ideas from the garden to use against the enemy? Biomimetics – […]
Some Exoplanets May Be Exostars
January 20, 2002
A brown dwarf was measured with more precision, and was found to be more massive than expected. Robert Roy Britt in Space.com says this may call into question some of the discoveries of bodies orbiting other stars that were assumed to be planets. I. Neill Reid,1 writing in Nature where the measurement was announced,2 explained […]
Is Dark Matter Going Out of Style?
January 20, 2002
Dark matter has been a staple in cosmological theories for decades. One of the initial reasons was that galaxy rotation curves could not be explained without it. Another was that galaxy clusters, to be held together over long ages, needed more “stuff” to bind them. Finally, Big Bang cosmologists invoke copious amounts of dark matter […]
Fish Gill Evolves toward Tetrapod Ear?
January 20, 2002
“This is another nail in the coffin of the creationist view, in my opinion,” said the curator of Chicago’s Field Museum about a paper published in Nature,1 reported the Washington Post yesterday (see MSNBC News). Brazeau and Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden examined the skull of Panderichthys, a Devonian lobe-finned fish, and found what […]
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id=""]