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Plant Accelerates 600 G’s

February 17, 2011

Among the fastest organisms in the world is – a plant. The bladderwort Utricularia, a carnivorous plant that lives in the water, sucks in its prey in a thousandth of a second with an acceleration 600 times the force of gravity. New Scientist and Science Daily reported on work by the University of […]

Darwin and Evolution

New Ediacaran Fossils: Do They Ignite the Cambrian Explosion?

February 17, 2011

Well-preserved fossils of seaweed-like colonies have been reported from China. They are dated by the scientists at 600 million years old, from the Ediacaran period. Can these be missing links, lighting the fuse of biodiversity that culminated in the Cambrian explosion? PhysOrg summarized the findings published in Nature.1 “In addition to perhaps ancient […]

Uncategorized

Anthropology: a Science in Crisis

February 16, 2011

Students memorize the different -ologies of science – geology, biology, paleontology and others – often without knowing the history of the fields. An impression is sometimes given that each branch of science has equal validity. Some recent articles indicate that anthropology (the study of man) is struggling with internal squabbles and external credibility. […]

Darwin and Evolution

Critical Thinking Needed in Science Education

February 15, 2011

Several recent articles noted that students are being dumbed down in science education. Can this be applied to their learning about evolution? PhysOrg reported that critical thinking has been called into question at the university level of education. “A post-secondary education won’t necessarily guarantee students the critical thinking skills employers have come to […]

Dumb Ideas

Bubble Life Could Have Had Armor

February 14, 2011

A headline posted by Science Daily is self-explanatory: “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life.” The operative words are may have and could have, which, being mere suggestions, are unfalsifiable. If it didn’t happen here, it may have or could have happened on […]

Cell Biology

Tipping Point for Embryonic Stem Cells?

February 13, 2011

At any time, courts could rule on whether funding of embryonic stem cell research can continue or must be halted. Whichever way a decision is rendered, whether by Judge Lamberth on the legality of the NIH guidelines, or by the Court of Appeals for DC, the issue will probably wind up before the Supreme Court. […]

Birds

Chernobyl Mutation Experiment Fails to Support Darwinism

February 12, 2011

Under mutational load, you don’t get a choice of “Evolve or Perish”; just the latter.

Amazing Facts

This Is Your Brain on Bytes

February 11, 2011

It’s mind-boggling time. Some recent articles have tried to quantify the information capacity of the eye, the brain, and the world. Ready? Think hard. Eye boggle: Your eyes contain about 120 million rods and 6 million cones each. If each receptor represents a pixel, that is 2 x 126 million pixels, or 252 megapixels. And […]

Darwin and Evolution

Evolution Running Backwards

February 10, 2011

For Darwin’s doctrine of universal common ancestry to be demonstrably true, there must have been a common ancestor of insects and humans. That base of the family tree has just been discredited, leaving a gap in this important junction of Darwin’s tree of life. For decades, evolutionists have taught that acoelomorphs, a kind […]

Amazing Facts

How Bacteria Use Their Flagella

February 9, 2011

Do an imaginary mind-meld with a bacterium for a moment. Visualize yourself encased in a membrane, surrounded by fluid. You have no eyes, ears, or hands. You need to find where food is, and avoid danger, so you have organelles that can take in molecules that provide information about what is going on outside, where […]

Darwin and Evolution

Bizarre Fossils Raise Questions

February 8, 2011

For decades, students have been taught that the fossil record shows a long, slow, gradual progression of increasing complexity over millions of years. Scientific data are usually not so simple. Surprising youth in old fossil: When you see the word unexpected in a headline, expect the unexpected. “Unexpected exoskeleton remnants found in Paleozoic fossils,” reported […]

Biomimetics

Extreme Biomimetics

February 7, 2011

Imitating spider silk or gecko feet is one thing, but some researchers are going to extremes to try to do what living organisms do. DNA railcar: Researchers at University of Oxford have constructed a “programable [sic] molecular transport system” that travels like a railcar on DNA molecules, reported PhysOrg. And that’s not all: they would […]

Darwin and Evolution

Shrinking Brains Prove Human Evolution

February 6, 2011

Ever since Darwin, brain size has been the measure of human nature (e.g., 03/27/2007, 05/27/2009). Except for some anomalies with Neanderthal and Cro-magnon skull sizes, the iconic march of human evolution showed growing upright posture accompanied by increasing brain size (example on Daily Mail), and brain size was used to discriminate between races on the […]

Cosmology

Intelligence as a Cosmic Reality

February 6, 2011

The “I” in SETI takes “Intelligence” seriously. It requires that intelligence is a recognizable, quantifiable property of nature. The origin of intelligence is a question that separates theists from materialists – whether it is a fundamental or emergent property. Before engaging that question, it might be instructive to see how scientists who are not necessarily […]

Darwin and Evolution

Fossils by Faith

February 4, 2011

Fossils are real artifacts you can hold in your hand. The stories behind them are not. How does science connect the one with the other? Sometimes, it requires faith in incredible stories. Stay, sis: Darwin portrayed a world in flux, with natural selection continually sifting and amplifying minute changes over time. Why, then did Science […]

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