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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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Bible and Theology

Naturalism and 9/11
September 11, 2008
It’s been seven years since the horrific terrorist attacks in America woke up everyone to the reality of evil.  Secular, naturalistic evolutionists must of necessity explain evil as an artifact of pointless, aimless, purposeless acts of nature.  Did the September day that changed the world change the aims or rhetoric of the scientists and educators […]
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Education

Are You Too Dumb to Understand Evolution?
September 10, 2008
Astrobiologist David Deamer believes that life can spontaneously emerge without design, but he thinks lay people are too uneducated to understand how this is possible, so he gives them the watered-down version of Darwin’s natural selection instead, which he knows is inadequate to explain the complexity of life.  That’s what he seemed to be telling […]
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Birds

Flightlessness Evolved Four Times
September 10, 2008
An article on Science Daily claims that the famous flightless birds – African ostriches, Australian cassowaries and emus, New Zealand kiwis and South American rheas – are unrelated.  There was no flightless common ancestor.  They lost their ability to fly independently, scientists say, because of “parallel evolution.”     This would also mean that emus […]
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Solar System

Comet Conundrums Resist Bluffing
September 9, 2008
Scientists may claim they are learning about the origin of the solar system, but the fine print shows them scratching their heads.  This is apparent in a couple of discoveries about comets this week.     One Science Daily article is entitled, “Comets Throw Light On Solar System’s Beginnings.”  Scientists at the UK’s national synchrotron […]
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Physics

Modeling Just-So Stories for Earth History
September 8, 2008
Models are only simulations of reality.  In science, they have a long history of simplifying complex physical phenomena in an attempt to understand them.  Many times, empirical evidence can correct a model.  The model then becomes a more accurate simulation, and can even provide additional insights and make predictions.  Can modeling work for the unobservable, […]
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Bible and Theology

Resurrecting Stalin’s Ghost
September 7, 2008
Most people feel there are certain historical figures off limits for praise.  Hitler and Stalin are probably two of the most infamous.  Believe it or not, a new Russian textbook is trying to portray Stalin in a more positive light.  The UK Daily Mail reported that the textbook portrays the tyrant’s mass murders as “entirely […]
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Amazing Facts

Butterfly Wings Xeroxed
September 6, 2008
If you can’t build it, copy it.  Scientists have had a hard time reconstructing the photonic crystals that make butterfly wings shimmer with light (01/29/2003), so they made, in effect, a carbon copy.  PhysOrg described how scientists at Penn State made impressions of the regularly-spaced geometric shapes from a butterfly wing and transferred it to […]
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Darwin and Evolution

How Not to Prove Positive Selection
September 5, 2008
Erase all that evidence for positive natural selection in the genes you’ve read about. 
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Dumb Ideas

Spore Game: Evolution or ID?
September 4, 2008
Spore is a highly-anticipated computer game that just came out.  Evolutionists are claiming it as a model of how life evolves – but intelligent-design advocates are calling it an ID game, pure and simple.  Who’s right?     Carl Zimmer, a science writer, is among those counting Spore points for Darwin.  His blog entry from […]
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Fossils

Fully Gecko 40 Million Years Earlier?
September 3, 2008
Amber, or fossilized tree sap, usually contains remnants of insect parts.  One piece, mined in the jungles of Myanmar, contained the foot of a gecko – alleged to be 100 million years old.  That’s 40 million years older than the previously claimed oldest gecko fossil.  This critter may have skittered under the feet of dinosaurs.  […]
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Amazing Facts

Cellular Machines Work Like Cameras, Winches and Turboprops
September 3, 2008
The discovery that cells are filled with molecular motors is one of the major achievements of late 20th-century molecular biology.  Biochemists routinely use the word “motor” when describing cellular processes, because, in fact, machines made of protein actually do use energy to perform work.  Now we have a new hybrid science – biophysics – that […]
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Bible and Theology

Amazonia Supported a Cosmopolitan Civilization
September 2, 2008
Today’s naked, spear-hunting tribes in the jungles of the Amazon live in the shadow of a complex society that once thrived there.  By increasing their scope from the single site to the wider region, archaeologists from Florida and Brazil have discovered a cosmopolitan culture that left large earthworks and evidence of complex urban societies.  Their […]
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