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Solar System

Making Earths the Natural Way
September 24, 2008
Creating a solar system is as easy as spinning a dust cloud around a star.  Before long, rocky orbs will emerge from the dust as platforms on which life can evolve.  Is it that simple?  We know now that planets surround a number of other stars – perhaps most of them.  Textbooks and artwork make […]
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Health

Designed for Health
September 24, 2008
Recent science reports on physiology and health contain suggestions of intelligent design as well as challenges to evolutionary theory. “Amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” kidneys:  Scientists studying the effects of hypertension on kidneys have found that ATP acts not only as an energy source but an extracellular messenger.  It’s involved in helping arterioles […]
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Early Man

End of the Neanderthal Myth?
September 23, 2008
A grim Neanderthal face stares out from the cover of the October 2008 National Geographic Magazine.  Coinciding with the cover story is a TV special, Neanderthal Code, about the Neanderthal genome.  Both are replete with artwork from the magazine’s army of illustrators charged with putting flesh on bones and bringing lost prehistories to life.  The […]
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Amazing Facts

Leaves Don’t Fall; They’re Pushed
September 22, 2008
Rocks may fall (thus the need for warning signs on highways), but leaves are pushed off of trees by a genetic program.  The process, called abscission, has been mysterious for a long time.  A team from the University of Missouri has mapped out, for the first time, the abscission pathway in one plant.  Being this […]
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Dumb Ideas

Liberals Less Skittish than Conservatives, Study Claims
September 19, 2008
A study by scientists at University of Nebraska claims that conservatives are more easily startled than liberals, reported National Geographic News.  The results, partly funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Science,1 referenced a 2006 paper from Evolution and Human Behavior that had claimed “feelings of disgust and fear of disease have been […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Ant What it Used to Be
September 18, 2008
A new species of subterranean ant discovered in Brazil is so weird, biologists have classified it as the sole representative of a new subfamily.  The alien creature has been whimsically named Martialis heureka: “the ant from Mars.”  An article about it in Nature News said, “It adds a new branch to the ant family tree […]
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Dinosaurs

Is Dinosaur Diversity an Artifact of Headline-Hunting?
September 17, 2008
Many dinosaurs classed as different species are actually the same animal with different names, a publication of the Royal Society announced.  Read two news reports on this, however, and you will get two different opinions about how serious the problem is.     Rex Dalton in Nature News sounded the alarm: “One hundred and thirty-five […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Prevolution of Evolution: Life Marches In
September 17, 2008
There’s a new word preceding the E word evolution.  Two Harvard scientists have made up a new word, prevolution, to describe a supposed stage before replication when natural selection was helping evolution evolve.  What does prevolution act on?  Simple, silly: prelife.     Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki titled their paper in PNAS, “Prevolutionary dynamics […]
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Solar System

Short-Term Flings at Saturn’s Rings
September 16, 2008
The Saturn system is assumed to be 4.5 billion years old like the rest of the solar system.  What mean the delicate dances of ring particles that have been observed by Cassini lately?  One would think moons and particles had pretty much settled into a stable old age by now, but no: some things change […]
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Philosophy of Science

Looking for Laws to Make Darwinism Scientific
September 15, 2008
Science needs natural laws.  Darwinian laws that have been put forward by evolutionists contain so many exceptions and complexities, they seem to have a bad case of physics envy. Coping with Cope’s Rule:  Evolution tends to make animals larger over time – except when it makes them smaller. In Science,1 Kaustuv Roy lamented the perils […]
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Bible and Theology

Anglican Official Says Church Should Apologize to Darwin
September 14, 2008
The Church of England official feels the Church should apologize to Charles Darwin for having been too slow to accept his ideas in the 19th century.  The statement, to be posted on a website promoting Darwin’s views, reads: Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding […]
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Amazing Facts

Turing Test Stands: Your Brain Outperforms Computers
September 14, 2008
What is the speed of thought?  Computer speeds are measured in megahertz and gigahertz, but that’s only part of the story.  The ability to compute an answer to a problem depends on the programming, too.  How does the brain compare with our best computers?  A scientist from UC San Francisco and one from the Salk […]
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Amazing Facts

Star Death Amazing – but Puzzling
September 13, 2008
Twinkle, twinkle, little stBOOM!  The explosions of some dying stars are so powerful yet so rapid, mere measurements seem inadequate to describe them.  Two death-star events were reported in recent articles.  Despite the bravado of textbook orthodoxy, the articles both mentioned that astronomers really don’t understand what’s going on all that well.     Eta […]
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Uncategorized

Sea: the Light
September 13, 2008
Some of the most abundant unicellular organisms in the ocean are diatoms.  Physicists are eagerly studying the optics of their pill-box-like shells, because they can manipulate light in surprising ways.  Imitation of diatom light tricks may lead to biosynthetic devices like improved drug delivery systems and solar cells, an article on the BBC News said. […]
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Amazing Facts

Animals Got Rhythm; Scientists Don’t
September 12, 2008
Here’s a biological puzzle with plenty of room for young researchers to solve: the workings of biological rhythms.  All animals respond to rhythms in periods of hours, days, weeks, months, and years, but as George E. Bentley (UC Berkeley) wrote in Current Biology,1 how they do it is only partially understood.  “Sometimes the questions are […]
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