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Health

Gratitude Protects Against Health Loss
August 15, 2007
A study in the “new science of gratitude” showed that thankfulness is good therapy.  Researchers at UC Davis and Mississippi University for Women tracked 12 female patients who kept journals of their hospital stays while receiving organ transplants.  A control group just reported “medication side-effects, how they felt about life overall, how connected they were […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Repair Is Highly Coordinated
August 14, 2007
The remarkable ability of cells to repair DNA damage has been the subject of several recent articles.  As a long, physical molecule subject to perturbing forces, DNA is subject to breakage on occasion.  If repair mechanisms were not in place, the genetic information would quickly become hopelessly scrambled and life would break down.  Studies are […]
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Uncategorized

Science Confronts Philosophy, or Vice Versa
August 13, 2007
Practicing scientists often disdain philosophy.  To them, it seems like mumbo-jumbo with convoluted arguments telling them why they don’t exist or why two-ness cannot be represented on a chalkboard.  To a scientist dealing with real lab rats or chemicals off the shelf, such ramblings seem detached and worthless.  Who would know more what science is […]
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Cell Biology

Immune System Appeared Early
August 12, 2007
“Social amebas” or slime molds have gotten praise recently as inventors of the immune system.  These amebas can band together in a “slug” that can move as a unit and generate stalks and spores.  Science Daily reported on research at Baylor College of Medicine that found “sentinel cells” in a colony of amebas that patrol […]
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Astronomy

“We have no idea why these galaxies grew so large so soon”
August 11, 2007
Five full-sized galaxies have been detected at the edge of the visible universe, reported Science Now.  This continues a trend over the last few years where astronomers have been detecting old objects at young ages (e.g., 07/25/2007, 09/24/2006, 08/18/2006, 03/31/2006).   “The galaxies, which are forming stars very rapidly, are big for their age, meaning […]
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Dumb Ideas

Weird-Science Origin-of-Life Theories
August 10, 2007
Two news articles on the origin of life seem bizarre at best.  One even used the word “bizarrely” in its own self-evaluation. Living dust:  Zap the dust in your living room and it may come alive.  Is that the gist of this story in PhysOrg?  A team of international scientists thinks that cosmic dust in […]
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Early Man

Homo habilis Contemporary with Homo erectus
August 9, 2007
Homo habilis couldn’t have been the ancestor of Homo erectus, because they lived side by side.  This has been all over the news since it was announced in Nature yesterday: see the Times UK, PhysOrg, the BBC News, Reuters Africa, National Geographic, and MSNBC News, which says the new discovery paints a “messy” view of […]
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Intelligent Design

Science Journals Make Dogmatic Atheist Statements
August 8, 2007
Science is supposed to be restricted to the physical and observable world, but the major journals do not hesitate to state ardent, dogmatic opinions about the non-existence of God.  Often they assert without debate that belief in God is an artifact of human evolution.  Here are some recent examples: Tinker Bell, not Jehovah:  Georg Striedter […]
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Dumb Ideas

The World Is a Free Lunch
August 7, 2007
One of the strangest Darwinian models to be put forth recently has to be a paper by James V. Stone (a psychologist at Sheffield U, UK), published in PLoS Computational Biology.1  He basically says that evolution is a free lunch.  Brains and whole body types can emerge if an organism can learn parts of adaptive […]
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Cell Biology

Can Life Survive for Millions of Years?
August 6, 2007
How long can cells and tissues last?  Two different yet related stories should raise questions about the dates claimed, because the observations are astonishing. Trees of the living dead:  Cypress trees in Hungary supposedly buried for eight million years look pristine.  The wood is unfossilized and uncoalified, said the report on Breitbart.com.  All that remained […]
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Human Body

Monkeys Prefer the Sound of Silence
August 5, 2007
Given a choice, chimpanzees choose silence over music.  The Random Samples page in Science1 mentioned experiments by scientists from MIT and Harvard where monkeys were given a choice of booths playing a flute lullaby, a Mozart concerto, techno-rock, and silence.  Between the musical booths, “The monkeys spent an average of about two-thirds of their time […]
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Astronomy

Four Evidences of Cosmic Youth
August 4, 2007
Astronomers and planetary scientists routinely talk in millions and billions of years.  Three recent science news reports raise questions about how to fit apparently young objects into a vast timeline.  Lunar burps:  The moon is passing gas, reported Science News).  This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinism Seen in Action!
August 3, 2007
An example of Darwinian evolution in action was reported by EurekAlert.  This dramatic announcement called it a “rare example” of a “controversial theory of genetic conflict” in the reproduction of certain fish: The conflict has been likened to a “battle of the sexes” or an “arms race” at the molecular level between mothers and fathers.  […]
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Early Man

Romanian Neanderthal May Have Interbred With Modern Humans
August 2, 2007
A report in National Geographic says that a skull found in a Romanian cave is shaking up ideas about Neanderthal Man and its relationship to modern humans.  The mostly modern skull shows a feature that was characteristic of Neanderthals: “The otherwise human skull has a groove at the base of the back of the skull, […]
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Marine Biology

Deep Sea Vents Tantalize Evolutionists
August 1, 2007
A team of Chinese and American scientists pulled up fragments of deep-sea vents and analyzed their contents, reported Science Daily.  They said the creatures inhabiting these vents are the “most primitive life forms on Earth,” and so thought that the fragments might provide clues to the origin of life.  Timothy Kusky of Saint Louis University […]
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