Blog – Page 371

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Corn Is Fuel in More Ways than One

February 3, 2009

There’s been controversy lately about the diversion of corn crops from food for humans to ethanol for engines. Why not both? A new pilot program announced by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft saves the corn cobs for eating but makes ethanol out of the straw. If so, this would make the whole plant an energy factory for the human […]

Birds

The Early Bird Gets the Just-So Story

February 3, 2009

If a catastrophic world event wiped out the dinosaurs, why did birds survive? They’re smaller and more delicate, it seems. National Geographic published a new hypothesis: they out-thought the doomed dinosaurs. “Birds survived the global catastrophe that wiped out their dinosaur relatives due to superior brainpower, a new study suggests.” A couple of […]

Solar System

Titan Methane Age Still a Problem

February 2, 2009

“Our new map provides more coverage of Titan’s poles, but even if all of the features we see there were filled with liquid methane, there’s still not enough to sustain the atmosphere for more than 10 million years.” So said Elizabeth Turtle, lead author of a paper in Geophysical Research Letters,1 in an article on […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin Praise Service Begins

February 1, 2009

The celebrations in honor of Charles Robert Darwin for his 200th birthday (Feb. 12) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his influential book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (Nov. 29th) are well underway. It is hard to think of any other scientist who gets the kind of gushy adulation heaped […]

Cell Biology

Obama and Stem Cells: Hope Chest or Pandoras Box?

January 31, 2009

Any day now, as he promised, President Obama will likely lift funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research imposed by former President Bush. Bush had sought the council of leading scientists and ethicists before making his decision. Obama, by contrast, will be yielding to the opinions of the scientific societies who have clamored for years […]

Intelligent Design

SETI Has a Long History

January 30, 2009

Astrobiology Magazine provided a historical look at attempts to communicate with aliens. Like the weather, people talked about life in outer space, but nobody did anything about it – at least till technology made such talk a little less crazy. Michael Schirber’s survey includes some interesting characters – Kepler, Gauss, Tesla and Einstein – along […]

Dumb Ideas

Plant Lignin Found in Red Algae

January 29, 2009

Time to rewrite the textbooks again. The story of plant evolution is wrong. Lignin, a chemical that gives wood its stiffness, was thought to be unique to land plants. Now it has been found in red algae, reported Science Daily, with the title, “Billion-year Revision Of Plant Evolution Timeline May Stem From Discovery Of Lignin […]

Birds

Is Natural Selection Losing its Appeal?

January 28, 2009

Some recent science reports sound like they are ready to cast Darwin’s key phrase natural selection overboard, or at least demote it from its leading role in evolution. These articles each hint that long-held beliefs are being challenged. Make room: Science Daily asked, “Natural Selection Not The Only Process That Drives Evolution?” Scientists at Uppsala […]

Genetics

New Genetics Revolution Underway

January 27, 2009

The genetics of the 1950s was that DNA is the seat of all inheritance, and that genetic information traveled one way: from DNA to protein. That “central dogma” has been changing after decades of further researchers. Theories of epigenetics (inheritance not limited to DNA) have been gaining attention with increasing frequency. Science Daily […]

Early Man

Darwinists Frustrated at Public

January 26, 2009

“The creationists got what they wanted,” moaned Barbara Forrest in Science News of the Week (23 January 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5913, p. 451, DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5913.451b). All they got was the right for teachers to use supplementary materials in Louisiana schools. This followed a “wave of so-called academic freedom bills,” complained Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in his […]

Physics

The Moon Has Core Values

January 25, 2009

Did the moon have a molten core? There has been “a long-held consensus that objects in the solar system smaller than than [sic] Mars, can’t sustain magnetic fields,” said National Geographic News based on a paper in Science January 16.1 Apollo rock samples seem to indicate the presence of long-lived magnetism. It suggests a molten […]

Health

Immune System Has a Code, Language and Memory

January 24, 2009

“Decoding the language of memory cells” is the title of an article in Science Daily. A researcher at the University of the School of Medicine is using the concepts of codes, language and memory to understand the way T-cells “remember” a pathogen to prevent later infections. “We are currently figuring out which signals are important […]

Darwin and Evolution

Exploring the Malleability of Evolutionary Explanation

January 23, 2009

Is evolutionary theory just a very malleable and ductile idea, able to adapt to changing observations, or should it be described as a strong theory, powerful in its explanatory breadth?

Education

For His Birthday, Darwin Loses His Tree

January 22, 2009

The “tree of life” is the central icon of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s only illustration in the Origin of Species was a drawing of organisms descending from a common ancestor in a branching tree pattern. It has been reproduced, expanded, embellished and decorated into a primal symbol of what science believes about biology. Why, then, are […]

Biomimetics

Minerals Can Fool Astrobiologists

January 21, 2009

Look at this picture on National Geographic News. Looks alive, doesn’t it? It’s only a mineral. The article contains a gallery of five micrographs of minerals that form curvy crystals. They’re called biomorphs (a word simply meaning life-like shapes). “Until now scientists had thought rounded crystals, such as those found in seashells and […]

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