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Life: Do Ingredients Imply Emergence?

October 8, 2010

Science articles continue to push the idea that if water is found somewhere, life is certain to emerge. Other articles look for so-called “building blocks of life” or “ingredients for life,” implying or even plainly stating that life simply emerges from its parts. While many have complained that this kind of thinking is as ridiculous […]

Solar System

Keeping Saturn Old

October 7, 2010

Keeping a planet like Saturn going for billions of years has been a problem lately, especially when evidences show that what we see today of its rings and moons could not have lasted that long. Ringside gambling: The rings of Saturn are majestic, colorful, and young-looking. Their ices are too clean, and the forces acting […]

Amazing Facts

More DNA Repair Wonders Found

October 7, 2010

One of the most phenomenal discoveries since the structure of DNA was revealed must surely be the discovery of multitudes of protein machines that repair DNA (01/04/2002). The repair machines are themselves coded by DNA, but DNA would quickly decay into nonsense without them. Another “fundamentally new” repair mechanism was discovered by researchers at Vanderbilt […]

Early Man

Animals Can Skew Archaeological Dates

October 6, 2010

Archaeologists date stone age artifacts by the depth of the layer. They may not have paid sufficient attention to one factor that could have shoved them deeper down: animals trampling over them. “Animals push human tools into ground�and back in time, study says,” was a subtitle of a report in National Geographic News. This factor […]

Dinosaurs

Kinder, Gentler Dinosaurs Envisioned

October 6, 2010

See if this statement by Tim Rowe [U of Texas at Austin] meets your mental picture of dinosaurs after a lifetime of movies: “We used to think of dinosaurs as fierce creatures that outcompeted everyone else,” he said. “Now we’re starting to see that’s not really the case. They were humbler, more opportunistic creatures. They […]

Bible and Theology

Cosmology Faces More Chaos

October 5, 2010

Most of us have experience with orderly things going to chaos: an unkept room, the garden, our list of things to do. We all work hard to overcome that universal tendency. Clara Moskowitz reported on two cosmologists who think the universe went the other way. She wrote in Space.com, “The universe was in chaos after […]

Cell Biology

Big Gains for Adult Stem Cells Announced

October 4, 2010

Ever since Shinya Yamanaka figured out how to coax skin cells to become pluripotent stem cells in 2007 (something for which he is being considered for a Nobel Prize, see PhysOrg), other researchers have been improving on his idea. Three big gains were announced recently. PhysOrg and New Scientist reported work by Derrick […]

Cell Biology

Cosmic Accidents Are Not Scientific Explanations

October 3, 2010

Sunday Meditation Oct 3, 2010 — The classic understanding of science is that it explains things with reference to natural laws, makes predictions, is testable, quantifiable, and falsifiable. Depending on the branch of science, many researchers still attempt to hold to those ideals. Eugenie Scott put it this way: “modern science operates under a rule […]

Bible and Theology

Galileo Affair: Plenty of Blame to Go Around

October 2, 2010

What is the true account of Galileo Galilei’s troubles with the Catholic church? We may never know. Complex historical events are often difficult to interpret, and new details sometimes shed different light on commonly-accepted views. One thing does seem certain, according to Thomas Mayer, historian at Augustana College, Illinois: “The notion that Galileo’s trial was […]

Birds

Super Penguin: Seeing Is Believing, But Is It Understanding?

October 1, 2010

Another fossil of a giant penguin in Peru has been found (cf. 06/26/2007). It apparently had reddish-brown underwings and stood as tall as a man. It must have been a strong swimmer. Nicknamed “water king,” the mammoth penguin was placed at the 36 million mark on the evolutionary timeline. One remarkable feature of this fossil, […]

Genetics

Fruit Flies Not Evolving

September 30, 2010

A long-running experiment trying to get fruit flies to evolve has failed. A research team forced selection on the flies to explore the limits of natural selection. Only minor changes were detected after 600 generations. The research team was disappointed and surprised; there was even less evolution in these sexual organisms than in similar experiments […]

Media

Probability Life Not Found on Exoplanet: 100%

September 29, 2010

Headlines are screaming that an earthlike planet in its star’s habitable zone has been found. Many sources, though, are claiming that life must certainly exist on this planet. Their hubris stems from the words of Steve Vogt, an astronomy professor at UC Santa Cruz. “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever […]

Intelligent Design

SETI Calls Alien Signals Unnatural

September 29, 2010

It may be harder to find alien radio signals than thought. If aliens follow the human technological path of progress, they will move from analog to digital broadcasting in a century or less. In that case, it will be much more difficult to eavesdrop on intelligent signals, because digital signals tend to be more focused, […]

Intelligent Design

SETI Uses Design Inference

September 29, 2010

Some astronomers are concerned that we may never detect aliens. If alien civilizations “go digital” within a short time period, as humans have in a century since the invention of radio, the possibility of detecting their radio signals may be much smaller than earlier thought. Zoe Macintosh wrote for Live Science, “Finding E.T. May Become […]

Darwin and Evolution

Morphogenesis: Evolution of Form Solved?

September 28, 2010

The body plans of organisms are hard to account for in linear strands of DNA. How do you get a backbone, vertebrae, and ribs out of a chain of nucleotides? Recognizing the mystery of morphogenesis (the origin of form), the director of the Synthetic Life Lab in New York, Stuart Pivar, has published an “Innovative […]

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