VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Cosmology

Science News or Tabloid Journalism?
October 19, 2009
Science news outlets have put out some bizarre headlines recently.  Readers can judge whether they should be blessed with the label “science” or belong instead at supermarket checkouts. Women are evolving fatter:  New Scientist and PhysOrg said that natural selection is making women shorter, plumper and more fertile.  “The take-home message is that humans are […]
CONTINUE READING
Education

Science Awards Young Darwinist
October 19, 2009
A young PhD has been awarded grand prize in an essay contest by Science Magazine for studying a complex system and deciding it evolved one way or another.1  Richard Benton won the Eppendorf Grand Prize for Essays on Science and Society, beating out two others who studied neurons but failed to give pre-eminence to evolutionary […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Beethoven: It All Began With a Thump
October 17, 2009
Live Science in all seriousness, “When monkeys drum, they activate brain networks linked with communication, new findings that suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and shed light on the origins of language and music.”     Choi reported on work at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics to determine […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Everything You Know About Natural Selection Is Wrong
October 16, 2009
It’s called “a fresh theoretical framework” but it undermines the popular conception of natural selection.  It’s called a “dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology” but it criticizes as simplistic and false the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken proponents of natural selection as “the greatest show on earth.”  […]
CONTINUE READING
Mind and Brain

Freud’s Out; Who’s Next?
October 15, 2009
Nature is "shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence."
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

What’s in a Name?  Sima Fossils Confuse Human Evolution Story
October 14, 2009
“A hush fell over the room….”  Ian Tattersall had just astonished paleoanthropologists gathered for a meeting on human origins in Gibraltar.  The group was puzzling over a treasure trove of hominin bones found in the mid-1990s at Sima de los Huesos in Spain.  What should they be called?     The co-discoverer, Juan Luis Arsuaga, […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

DNA Organization Is Fractal
October 13, 2009
How would you pack spaghetti in a basketball (07/28/2004) such that you could get to any strand quickly?  You might try the “fractal globule” method.  You form little knots, or globules, on each strand.  These become like beads on a string.  Now you fold the beads into globules, and then fold those into higher-level globules.  […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Fossil Said to Enlighten Evolution of the Ear
October 13, 2009
Did mammal ear bones evolve?  If so, it was not a straightforward Darwinian progression.  Authors of a paper in Science who announced a new Cretaceous mammal fossil from China had to invoke convoluted explanations to keep the evolution story intact. Science Daily shows an artist’s conception of Maotherium, a chipmunk-sized mammal said to have lived […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

How to Name a Protoplanet
October 12, 2009
Pallas has long been classified as an asteroid, but all of a sudden in the news media, everyone is calling it a protoplanet.  How did it get promoted?     The picture being painted of asteroid 2 Pallas is that of a planetary building block that failed in its attempt to grow into another real […]
CONTINUE READING
Bible and Theology

Conservationists Moan Lack of Hikers
October 11, 2009
When hiking and backpacking were popular in the 1970s, the number of environmentalists and conservationists rose accordingly.  Since then, many content themselves to watch TV and remain city-bound.  The internet exacerbated the problem.  Science Daily said, “a recent fall-off in strenuous outdoor endeavors portends a coming decline in the ranks of conservation backers.”     […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Darwinists Celebrate Raunchy Pagan Festival
October 10, 2009
The “Burning Man Festival” is an annual event in a remote Nevada desert that draws the weird and wild into an orgy of self-expression.  About 50,000 free thinkers arrive with body paint and outlandish costumes or minimal clothing – often none at all.  Sexual activity, drug use and alcohol consumption is open and uninhibited.  The […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Chemistry Nobel Celebrates Cell Complexity
October 10, 2009
A discovery rivalling the elucidation of the genetic code is the structure of the ribosome – the “molecular machine” that translates the DNA code into proteins.  Untangling the complexity of this multi-part system won three scientists the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (see BBC News).  The winners are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath.   […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

How to Copy a Butterfly Wing
October 9, 2009
Here’s what you have to do to copy a butterfly wing without destroying it: create compounds using Germanium, Selenium and Stibium.  Combine thermal evaporation and substrate rotation in a low pressure chamber.  Immerse in an aqueous orthophosphoric acid solution to dissolve the chitin.  If you are lucky, you can copy the delicate nanostructure of a […]
CONTINUE READING
Awards

Cosmology: Truth or Style?
October 8, 2009
If you follow cosmology, you’re familiar with WMAP, Type-1a supernovae, gravitational lensing, inflation and a host of technical terms.  They seem authoritative because they rely on respectable laws like gravity and general relativity.  In an article in Nature today, however, Richard Massey pictured the whole enterprise as a matter of fashion, not fact.     […]
CONTINUE READING
Physics

Giant Backward Ring Found Around Saturn
October 7, 2009
Saturn has a newly-discovered ring to add to its decor – the largest of all.  It’s so big, it makes Saturn look like a speck in the middle of it.  The ring, located at the orbit of the small outer moon Phoebe, is inclined 27 degrees and revolves backwards around Saturn.  This was announced today […]
CONTINUE READING
Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly"]