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Amazing Facts

Human Face Book Is Customized
June 17, 2008
Make a face.  How do you make a face?  We are all made with faces that can make unique facial expressions, thanks to unique combinations of subcutaneous muscles.  Nature News said that humans have unique faceprints of 16 common expression-making muscles.     We all have the same 5 subcutaneous muscles that can make us […]
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Dinosaurs

Big Dino Site Found in Utah
June 17, 2008
A big dinosaur fossil quarry has been found in Utah near Hanksville, reported the Associated Press (see copy on PhysOrg).  The Bureau of Land Management says it may be comparable to the Dinosaur National Monument site and other well-known quarries in the region.  Apparently feeling a need to appeal to the MTV generation, a National […]
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Amazing Facts

Magic Box in the Cell Baffles the Experts
June 16, 2008
Put a string of amino acids into this magic box, and it comes out all precisely folded into a protein.  How does it do it?  A molecular machine described by Science Daily has scientists baffled.  Ironically, its name is TRiC.     TRiC is a chaperonin, a member of a class of molecular machines that […]
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Amazing Facts

World’s Fastest Computer Approaches Brain Power
June 13, 2008
IBM has broken the petaflops barrier.  What’s that, you ask?  In computing lingo, it stands for a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.  The new Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory has set a new record for computing speed that may usher in a new era of scientific analysis of complex systems: “Roadrunner gives scientists […]
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Cosmology

Divining the CMB
June 12, 2008
What do you see in this pattern?  Look very closely.  The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a faint glow of electromagnetic radiation that pervades the universe.  What it means is a matter of intense and sometimes bizarre speculation by cosmologists.     The spectrum of the CMB matches almost perfectly that of an ideal radiator, […]
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Amazing Facts

Few Typos Get Past Your Spell Checker
June 11, 2008
Inside your cells are thousands of spell checkers that put any human typist to shame.  In a process critical to all living things, RNA Polymerase II transcribes DNA into RNA rapidly with high fidelity.  Even very similar chemical letters are accurately discriminated by this wonder of a molecular machine that is described in Science Daily. […]
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Cell Biology

Darwinism Demonstrated in the Lab
June 10, 2008
Lenski’s done it.  The champion of Avida, a computerized evolution demo (see Evolution News) has demonstrated Darwinian evolution with real live organisms.  His achievement announces his inauguration into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.1     Lenski and team ran one of the longest-running evolution experiments ever with E. coli bacteria.  After more than 30,000 […]
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Uncategorized

The Andes: Pop-Up Mountains
June 10, 2008
The majestic Andes of South America did not rise smoothly and gradually, a team of geologists reported in Science.1  Instead, long periods of stasis for tens of millions of years were punctuated by rapid periods of uplift.  It sounds as if punctuated equilibria theory has been stolen from evolutionary biology and applied to geology.  They […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolution’s Tinkerer Creates the Brain that Creates Evolutionary Theory
June 9, 2008
A tinkerer usually implies a human being with a brain.  A man in his garage, for instance, might look around for spare parts to arrange into some new contraption.  What would he think if he were told that his own brain was made that way?  That’s what evolutionists commonly teach: our bodies and our brains […]
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Early Man

Will Evolutionary Psychology Be the First Darwinian Theory to Go?
June 6, 2008
Evolutionary psychologists are not getting much respect these days.  Some evolutionists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, criticized them for years.  Now, a new book came out against them and Science gave it a good review.1  To turn a Darwinian phrase, reviewer Johan J. Bolhuis said that the field of evolutionary psychology is undergoing […]
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Intelligent Design

Alien Messages via Neutrinos
June 6, 2008
Three scientists are suggesting that SETI researchers comb neutrinos for alien messages.  Nothing natural could produce high-energy neutrinos, they said in Science,1 so aliens may use their cosmic accelerators to send neutrino packets across the intergalactic internet.  They suggested watching for them in the neutrino detector at the South Pole. 1.  Random Samples, Science, Volume […]
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Uncategorized

Living Iridescence Dazzles Scientists
June 5, 2008
The flashing colors of butterflies and birds (peacocks being the classic example) do not come from pigments, but from black structures on a microscopic scale.  How and why they do it is of great interest to scientists and engineers.  Susan Milius explored this topic in Science News this week.1     The basic principle behind […]
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Amazing Facts

Asian Bees Speak European
June 4, 2008
Asian honeybees and European honeybees went their separate ways millions of years ago, say evolutionists.  Why, then, were Asian bees able to readily learn the European language?  An international team watched this happen.  They ran some affirmative-action integration experiments on the two species, and reported their results today in PLoS One.1     “The honeybee […]
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Birds

An Evaluation of Evolution as an Explanatory Device
June 3, 2008
It is very common for scientists to claim this or that phenomenon “evolved.”  How well do such statements qualify as scientific explanations?  How much scientific heavy lifting is done by merely stating that things are the way they are because they evolved that way?  The following recent examples can be considered representative of the evolutionary […]
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Genetics

Can Darwin Fit into Designer Genes?
June 2, 2008
Humans are tinkering with DNA in ways that appear to blur the boundaries between design and nature. PhysOrg reported that geneticists at the University of Nottingham have created capsules that can coax bacteria to transfer their genetic information.  The title is “Life, but not as we know it?” PNAS reported that scientists at UC Santa […]
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