Blog – Page 374

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Which Evolution Should Be Taught?

December 19, 2008

Two articles in Scientific American’s cover feature on evolution in preparation for Darwin Day (12/15/2008, 12/16/2008) quoted a favorite line by Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Assuming a teacher or textbook writer wants to illustrate how true this proverb is, which evolutionary proposal should be presented? Recent articles […]

Solar System

Cassini Celebrates Season of Change

December 18, 2008

It’s approaching equinox on Saturn. Cassini is now well into its first extended mission, aptly dubbed the Equinox Mission, till Sept. 2010. The Cassini Team just exhibited its snazzy new website. It’s not all bells and whistles. The science is ringing the phones off the hook. Even without the pictures the following announcements could stop […]

Health

Who Wants Embryonic Stem Cells?

December 17, 2008

Amazing treatments continue to spring forth from adult stem cells – the stem cells with no ethical qualms attached. With adult stem cells easy to obtain doing so much good, why would anyone want embryonic stem cells (the stem cells with ethical qualms attached), when no usable treatments have yet been found? Here are some […]

Dumb Ideas

Blame Hiccups on Your Inner Fish

December 16, 2008

Why do humans get hernias and hiccups? Neil Shubin says it’s because of your inner fish. In the Scientific American series on Darwin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik was trying to show how evolutionary theory sheds light on human anatomy. He looked back to fish and amphibians and found insight. “A glimpse inside the […]

Education

Expel the Creationists

December 16, 2008

Apparently Eugenie Scott of the NCSE is feeling no remorse from her appearance in Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where she defended the actions of those who ruined careers, denied tenure, and deprived students and teachers of their academic freedom because they dared to question Darwin. Her latest piece in Scientific American is […]

Uncategorized

Sci Am Jumpstarts Darwin Day

December 15, 2008

It’s not even Christmas or 2009 yet, but the cover stories on Darwin have started to hit newsstands. Latest to feature a whole issue to Darwin is Scientific American. Predictable themes are all there: Darwin was a genius, he was the greatest scientist in history, evolution is the keystone of all biology, and creationists are […]

Bible and Theology

Darwins New Terror: Islamic Creationism

December 13, 2008

The Darwinists must be feel like victims of a pincer strategy. After years of hassling with American creationists and the Intelligent Design movement in the west, here come the Muslims on the east. A couple of recent reports express the uneasiness evolutionists feel over the rise of anti-Darwin sentiments in Turkey and other parts of […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Evolutionary Mutualism Flutters

December 12, 2008

A story on Science Daily is decorated with a butterfly collection. Amazonian butterflies studied by an international team were chosen to test Darwin’s theory of mutualism – a kind of symbiosis in which two species benefit one another. The test yielded a surprise. The idea going in was that sister species would evolve […]

Marine Biology

Fish and Reptiles Converge on Magnetic Navigation

December 11, 2008

Two very different kinds of animal both have outstanding ability to navigate by earth’s magnetic field: salmon and sea turtles. A new hypothesis by scientists at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published in PNAS,1 suggests that the young are “imprinted” with their local magnetic field signature at birth. From a navigational perspective, some […]

Cell Biology

Applying the Scientific Method to Prehistory

December 10, 2008

What could be more scientific than the scientific method? A scientist observes an unexplained phenomenon. He or she gathers data, analyzes it, proposes a hypothesis to explain it, and tests it. The results are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Mission accomplished, right? Here are two papers on very different phenomena – one dealing with the […]

Cell Biology

Nature Plagiarizes Behes Mousetrap

December 9, 2008

The prevention of genomic instability – and cancer – can be attributed to a “complex mousetrap” mechanism, said Robert M. Brosh, Jr (Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology, NIH) in Nature.1 This not-so-subtle reference to Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex system described in Darwin’s Black Box even has a mousetrap illustration with the following caption: The BLM protein […]

Biomimetics

Fly Swiftly

December 8, 2008

Swifts are amazing little birds in more ways than speed. They are inspiring advanced technology.

Uncategorized

Are Religious People Weird?

December 7, 2008

Some scientists treat religious people as a class. They put them in a test tube, so to speak, to see how they react to a stimulus, then write up the results in scientific papers. The implication seems to be that these fellow humans of theirs are some kind of odd lot. Reactionary: The BBC News […]

Amazing Facts

Thanks to Clam Design, Stronger Materials Are Coming

December 6, 2008

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs have produced a lightweight composite material 300 times stronger than its constituents. How? By taking inspiration from clams. The team, writing in Science,1 described nacre, the shiny mother-of-pearl found inside clam shells. Because of the way it sandwiches crystalline aragonite with layers of protein (07/26/2004), nacre resists […]

Cosmology

Cosmologists Taste the Forbidden Fruit

December 5, 2008

Everyone agrees: our universe appears fine-tuned for human existence. You have two choices: it was designed by God, or there is a multiverse (other universes we cannot detect). Amanda Gefter is unhappy with that choice. In New Scientist, she asked, why can’t we have more options? Calling the God-vs-multiverse choice a false dichotomy, […]

Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly"]