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Solar System

Ethane Lake Found on Titan
July 31, 2008
Liquid ethane has been detected in a lake near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Titan, reported JPL yesterday.  This confirms long-held suspicions that ethane, a byproduct of methane disruption by the solar wind, accumulates on the surface of the large atmosphere-shrouded moon.  A problem remains why there is so little of it.  Pre-Cassini predictions […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Soft Tissue: Fooled by Slime?
July 30, 2008
The claim made in 2005 that soft tissues in dinosaur bone had been discovered (see 03/24/2005) has been challenged by new research published in PLoS One.1  Maybe the pliable stuff is just slime.     Thomas Kaye from the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle with two colleagues were actually hoping to find more […]
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Uncategorized

Leaf Assumption Challenged: Affects Climate Modeling
July 29, 2008
A reasonable-sounding assumption has been overturned, leaving climate models in upheaval.  The assumption was that leaf temperature stays in equilibrium with air temperature.  It doesn’t.  Leaves are hotter than assumed during active periods of growth, such as at midday in the growing season.  They maintain a relatively constant temperature through their own biological air conditioning, […]
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Intelligent Design

History Channel Airs Evolve
July 29, 2008
A new 13-part series on the History Channel, called Evolve, begins with an episode on the evolution of the eye.  To sell the story, the blurb needed to cast Evolution as an inventor: They are one of evolution’s most useful and prevalent inventions.  Ninety five percent of living species are equipped with eyes and they […]
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Dumb Ideas

Gems and Hot Ideas About Life’s Origin
July 28, 2008
It seems that origin-of-life speculations are constantly looking for new plot lines.  PhysOrg published a new idea that life started on diamonds.  Yes, “Diamonds may have been life”s best friend on primordial Earth,” it began, raising the interesting question whether friendship was a concept before consciousness emerged.  Since diamonds are thought to be among the […]
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Amazing Facts

Can Worms Outsmart Humans?
July 27, 2008
Worms may seem creepy to some people, but they possess some amazing abilities.  How many of you had to struggle through calculus class, for instance?  Worms know it by heart, reported Greg Soltis at Live Science.  Their brains instinctively apply the logic of calculus to input signals from sensory inputs.  A University of Oregon biologist […]
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Amazing Facts

Lick Your Wounds
July 27, 2008
Saliva contains a powerful anti-infection protein, say scientists from the Netherlands.  Science Daily reported that if this compound could be mass-produced, it offers hope for those with diseases, burns and injuries prone to infection.     Saliva is a complex concoction with many kinds of molecules.  With controlled experiments, the researchers were able to identify […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs Placed in Big Tree
July 26, 2008
Dinosaurs didn’t take advantage of the big rise in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous, say British researchers.  Their big “supertree” of dinosaur evolution shows that the dinosaurs were just evolving at a regular speed while flowering plants, social insects, birds and mammals were evolving like crazy.     Science Daily and New Scientist […]
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Uncategorized

Did Lyell Lie a Little?
July 25, 2008
Science is supposed to be a collective process involving presentation of arguments by many people making reference to observational data.  Ideally, no one person’s world view should dominate what other scientists think.  Yet in the history of geology, the figure of Charles Lyell has loomed large as a guiding influence.  With rare exceptions, his principle […]
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Education

What Can Science Really Know?
July 24, 2008
Two book reviews on philosophy of science appeared in the leading general-science journals Nature and Science last week.  Both of them downplayed the oft-told triumphalist portrayal of science as a progressive path toward infallible knowledge – the picture most students get in school.     In Nature,1 N. David Mermin (Cornell) gave a surprising reprimand […]
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Genetics

Tree of Life in the Genes? Not Yet
July 23, 2008
Now that we have hundreds of animal genomes in the bank (the GenBank), is Darwin’s tree of life becoming visible?  If the image is present, it is extremely weak, said Michael J. Sanderson of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona.  Writing for Science,1 he showed that only a small fraction […]
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Genetics

Mangrove as Metaphor
July 22, 2008
The mangrove – that shoreline tree with the salt-tolerant roots that grows into dense thickets – is the fulcrum of two unrelated news stories.  It never met a force it couldn’t handle.  It also provides metaphors for evolution and creation.     PhysOrg reported that the mangrove is a key to saving lives.  “The replanting […]
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Solar System

Earth from Space Is a Special Place
July 21, 2008
The Deep Impact spacecraft, 31 million miles away, captured images of the moon circling the Earth, reported Space.com (for the sequence of images, click here).  “Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would […]
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Health

Adult Stem Cells May Cure Muscular Dystrophy
July 19, 2008
Muscular dystrophy leaves children and adults in a nearly helpless state.  Parents watch in agony as their children suffer rapid and progressive weakness.  Attempts to support research, like the annual Labor Day events Jerry Lewis has held for over 40 years, have betrayed their inability to find a cure by the very fact of their […]
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Amazing Facts

Cellular Trucks Use Moving Highways
July 18, 2008
Imagine how cool it would be to get in your car and have the road do the driving.  The highway would stretch or shrink, moving this way or that, till you saw your destination and hopped off.  That appears to be what the cargo-bearing motors do in the cells in your body.  A new paper […]
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