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Grand Canyon Age Estimates Fluctuate Wildly
April 10, 2008
Just when the park rangers were getting familiar telling the public the Grand Canyon was carved about 5 million years ago, some geologists announced the shocking news that it might be less than a million (05/31/2002, 07/22/2002).  The age was plummeting as recently as November (11/30/2007).  But then last month, another revision came: it’s 17 […]
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Intelligent Design

Big Science Fights Its Customers
April 9, 2008
Has “Big Science” lost contact with the public it serves?  Several recent reports show the scientific establishment (as represented by the leading journals) taking positions at polar opposites of the majority, and wagging the dog of the body politic. Chimeras:  Even though ethicists have called it “a monstrous attack on human rights,” to blend human […]
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Education

Darwin on a Chip
April 8, 2008
PhysOrg, EurekAlert and and Science Daily announced “Evolution on the table top.”  Reporting on a paper in PLoS Biology by Brian Paegel and Gerald Joyce at Scripps, the article claims that the two scientists “have produced a computer-controlled system that can drive the evolution of improved RNA enzymes—biological catalysts—without human input.”  The scientists claim they […]
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Cell Biology

Watch for Falling Amino Acids
April 8, 2008
A long-standing problem of origin-of-life theories is how proteins became left-handed.  Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, come in right-handed and left-handed forms, yet life uses only the left-handed form.     The two isoforms are otherwise identical—yet one amino acid of the wrong hand in a protein spells doom for its function.  Wherever […]
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Intelligent Design

Expelled: Battle of the Reviews
April 7, 2008
Two weeks before Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed hits the theaters (April 18), reviewers are starting to weigh in.  One could hardly find a bigger contrast between two reviews that came out a day apart.     Dave Mosher, writing for Live Science, used every trick in the book to call this “a bad film in […]
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Fossils

Evolution After the Fact
April 4, 2008
Many scientific theories are evaluated on their ability to make predictions.  Good theories suggest experiments that lead a researcher to discover new things.  In biology, however, “evolution” is a word often invoked as an after-market explanation for observations that emerged outside of the theory.  Here are some recent examples: Ant farm:  Science Daily reported on […]
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Health

Mars Lacks Safety Shield for Humans
April 3, 2008
Forget all those optimistic, futuristic sci-fi tales of humans landing on Mars.  It isn’t safe, said Space.com.  NASA’s space radiation program doubts that a human body could survive prolonged exposure to space.  This is a problem for long stays on the moon, too.     “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwin and Complexity: Another Genetic Solution?
April 2, 2008
It remains one of the biggest obstacles to belief in evolution that a random, unguided process could build an eye, a wing or any of thousands of complex structures.
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Dumb Ideas

Fooling Oneself About Aliens
April 1, 2008
Would you give a Bible to a Neanderthal, or invite a porpoise to your church?  Who would ask such questions?  Seth Shostak would – director of the SETI Institute.  On Space.com, he speculated about “alien sociology.”     Shostak wrote the weekly SETI column for Space.com to answer critics who think that broadcasting our presence […]
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Amazing Facts

Seeing Vision in a New Light
March 31, 2008
The eye is like a camera, right?  That picture is way too simplistic.  The eye-brain visual system does image processing and gleans information from photons in diverse and remarkable ways.  Here are some recent findings by scientists: Upward mobility:  A team of Harvard scientists found some retinal ganglion cells that sense upward motion.  Writing in […]
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Biomimetics

Squid Beak: “A Truly Fascinating Design”
March 30, 2008
A new class of flexible yet tough materials may be in our future, thanks to a study of squid beaks.  Scientists at University of Santa Barbara, reported National Geographic News and Science Daily, were curious how the squid anchors its tough, hard beak in soft tissue.  Try anchoring a knife in Jell-o and you get […]
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Intelligent Design

Expelled Surges in the Blogosphere
March 29, 2008
There are probably few people who haven’t heard about Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  The film documents persecution of intelligent-design advocates by Darwinists.  Unusual for a non-fiction documentary, it seems to be the talk of the blogs.  On March 24 it was #1 on BlogPulse, a Nielsen meter of the hottest topics […]
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Dumb Ideas

Explaining Two Billion Years Without Evolution
March 28, 2008
How does an evolutionist explain the perception that (within their timeline), no multicellular animals emerged for two billion years after the origin of life?  Jonathan Wells has compared this to walking down a football field and encountering nothing but single cells till the 60 yard line, then boom! – all the animal phyla with their […]
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Amazing Facts

Scientist Harnesses ATP Synthase
March 27, 2008
How would you like shorter waits at airports?  fast screening for disease?  the ability to detect biological warfare agents quickly?  That may be possible soon – thanks to an amazing man-and-nature cooperative technology reported by Science Daily.  A team led by Wayne Frasch at Arizona State is on the verge of an invention that can […]
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Origin of Life

Enceladus: Hotter Chemical Plume Found
March 26, 2008
Initial results of Cassini’s March 12 flyby of Enceladus have been published.  You can watch a replay of today’s press briefing, read the blog, and read illustrated bulletins about the organic material, chemical signatures, hot spot locations, the stellar occultation (see also the Quicktime animation).  Another article shows the plume locations.  An astrobiologist (Chris McKay) […]
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