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Amazing Facts

Crows Use Tools on Tools
August 21, 2007
Crows can use one tool on another to get food.  A report in Science Daily says they appear to use analogical reasoning, not just trial and error, to figure out how to manipulate objects.  They used a short stick to get a longer stick out of a toolbox in order to reach a snack too […]
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Biomimetics

Two Ways to Look at a Fin
August 21, 2007
Two science articles this month showed very different ways to look at a fish fin.  One looked for evolution; the other looked for design.  One tried to trace an evolutionary story with no practical application; the other tried to find ways to improve our lives.     The evolutionary story involved a fossil coelacanth.  Science […]
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Genetics

Mystery of the Ultraconserved Elements, Cont.
August 18, 2007
ejerano et al reported ultraconserved elements in the human genome (05/27/2004).  These were non-coding regions that, for some unknown reason, showed no evolution between mouse and human – a time span over tens of millions of years.  Since many of these ultraconserved regions are also found in bird genomes, they added that some genetic regions […]
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Dumb Ideas

SETI Camp Promotes Make Believe
August 17, 2007
“Every kid loves to play make believe,” wrote Lisa Grossman for Space.com’s “SETI Thursday” feature.  How did Lisa spend her summer?  Playing make believe with 16 undergraduates at a NSF- and NASA-funded SETI camp.  “For many of us, the experience was nothing short of fantasy fulfillment,” she cheerfully said in her report entitled, “How I […]
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Dumb Ideas

Artificial Selection Is Not Natural Selection
August 16, 2007
From Nature1 comes this point to ponder: Evolution has crafted thousands of enzymes that are efficient catalysts for a plethora of reactions.  Human attempts at enzyme design trail far behind, but may benefit from exploiting evolutionary tactics. The subheading summarized a commentary by Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (UC Santa Cruz) on “directed […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Shark Chefs and Finger Food
August 15, 2007
A press release from University of Florida wins this week’s prize for trying to make dogmatism funny (or at least appealing to snackers): When the first four-legged animals sprouted fingers and toes, they took an ancient genetic recipe and simply extended the cooking time, say University of Florida scientists writing in Wednesday’s issue of the […]
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Dinosaurs

Largest Dinosaur Mass Grave in Switzerland Found
August 15, 2007
As many as 100 plateosaurs may be buried in a mass grave in Switzerland, reported the Reuters news service.  “The finds show that an area known for Plateosaurus finds for decades may be much larger than originally thought” – as much as a mile in width in the town of Frick, near the German border.  […]
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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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