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Amazing Facts

Amazing Animals
February 28, 2011
Three recent articles about amazing animals and fossils deserve entries of their own, but due to lack of time, will be corralled here lest, like strays, they wander off. Turtle navigation:  Wired Science has a beautiful photo of a marine turtle in an article about how they achieve a difficult navigational skill: determining longitude from […]
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Media

Philosophy Roundup
February 27, 2011
Philosophy of science is a broad discipline incorporating many sub-disciplines such as intellectual history, sociology, ethics, rhetoric, logic, demarcation of science from pseudoscience, classification, discovery, verification, explanation and more.  A dozen recent news stories discussed some of these topics. Medical ethics:  PhysOrg reproduced an AP story about medical research on humans in the US in […]
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Intelligent Design

Habitable Zones Constrained by Tides
February 26, 2011
The idea of a circumstellar habitable zone – a radial range around a star where an earth-like planet could support life – may be too simplistic.  Science Daily reported that “Tides can render the so-called ‘habitable zone’ around low-mass stars uninhabitable.”  Astronomers at the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam studied the effects of tides on planets around […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Turn Misses into Wins
February 25, 2011
Evolutionists have evolved a skill by design – the ability to turn falsification into confirmation.  It’s a kind of philosophical judo, or parry, that can turn the energy of a criticism into a win for Darwin.  Convergent turnarounds:  A good example of an evolutionary parry can be seen in a post on Science Daily entitled, […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Racial Evolution Education Proposed
February 24, 2011
Skin color provides a “handy tool for teaching evolution,” says a anthropologist at Penn State.  PhysOrg reported that professor Nina Jablonski believes “The mechanism of evolution can be completely understood from skin color.”  She proposes using the easily-observed trait in humans to teach evolution to students.  “People are really socially aware of skin color, intensely […]
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Physics

Busted!  Planet-Making Theories Don’t Fit Extrasolar Planets
February 23, 2011
Famed planet-hunter Geoff Marcy is giving theorists headaches.  The leading theories of planet formation won’t stand up to observations of hundreds of planets we know.  In National Geographic News reporter Richard Lovett lamented, “The more new planets we find, the less we seem to know about how planetary systems are born, according to a leading […]
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Darwin and Evolution

New Cambrian Fossil: Missing Link?
February 23, 2011
A weird animal from Chinese Cambrian strata looks like a worm with legs, the whole body studded with spines.  Was it on the way to becoming an arthropod?  The authors think so, but other members of its group were already known from the Cambrian fossil record.     The “walking cactus” with ten pairs of […]
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Cosmology

Is Star Formation Understood?
February 22, 2011
Astronomers often speak with apparent confidence about regions of active star formation in nebulae or galaxies. A look at the fine print, however, shows plenty of wiggle room when observations don’t quite match theory.
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Bible and Theology

Human Genome Project Supports Adam, Not Darwin
February 21, 2011
Science magazine last week had a special series of articles on the 10-year anniversary of the Human Genome project.  Most of the articles expanded on how different the findings were from predictions.  The publication of the genome did not identify our evolution; it did not lead to miracle cures.  What it did most of all […]
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Solar System

Titan’s Methane Lakes Shallow, Dynamic
February 19, 2011
Strange things are happening on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon: lakes are appearing and disappearing.  This can only mean that the lakes are shallow and the liquid hydrocarbons in them are moving around.     Lakes were discovered a few years ago in the northern regions of the Mercury-size moon.  They consist predominantly of methane (CH4) […]
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Birds

But Is it Evolution?
February 18, 2011
Scientists have been noticing some things that seem contrary to Darwin’s predictions – but they give Darwin credit anyway. Not till us:  The chambered nautilus is a “living fossil,” that uses “jet propulsion,” New Scientist said, with origins way back in the Cambrian.  Has its fitness improved over all that time?  “Its movement is ungainly […]
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Amazing Facts

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 […]
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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 […]
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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.     […]
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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 […]
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