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Intelligent Design

Dodo Prey Fights Back
February 7, 2007
Irked at falsehoods promulgated by Randy Olsen’s film Flock of Dodos, the intelligent design (ID) think tank Discovery Institute (DI) is fighting back.  The film presents a viewpoint that what ID lacks in science it makes up for in public relations.  The DI is convinced the reverse is true.  In an attempt to rebut what […]
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Early Man

Turkana Boy Causes Museum Ruckus
February 7, 2007
Christians want the boy arrested and locked up.  Scientists want to put him on stage.  The stage is Kenya’s National Museum, and the boy is Turkana boy, a fossil classified by evolutionists as Homo erectus and claimed to be 1.6 million years old.  CNN reported that the museum is showcasing the fossil, the most complete […]
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Cell Biology

Contingency and the Structure of Life’s Building Blocks
February 6, 2007
Some Yale scientists found they could construct protein-like molecules using amino acids of a type not found in living things.  They found that beta-amino acids can fold into shapes similar to the proteins made of alpha-amino acids used in living things.  Beta-amino acids have an extra carbon on the backbone.  “Yale chemists show that nature […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: What Thou Doest, Do Quickly
February 5, 2007
This award should be for last week since the article on EurekAlert was dated Jan 29.  From a press release at Rice University, it begins: It’s a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time.  For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years […]
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Dinosaurs

First Euro-Stegosaur Found
February 4, 2007
A Stegosaurus fossil has been found in Portugal, reported Live Science.  Previously this species with its spiked tail and prominent rows of plates on its back was only known from North America.  A tooth, some leg bones and part of the backbone have been unearthed.  So far, the fossil looks indistinguishable from its North American […]
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Uncategorized

Darwinists Topple Darwin’s Tree of Life
February 1, 2007
Darwin’s “Tree of Life” is a myth.  It’s based on circular reasoning.  It is a pattern imposed on the data, not a fact emerging from the evidence.  We should give up the search for a single tree of life (TOL) as a record of the history of life on earth, because it is a “quixotic […]
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Amazing Facts

Cells Perform Sporting Interactions
January 31, 2007
The components of living cells perform such acrobatic moving interactions, one would think they are having fun.  Here’s the news from the Wide World of Cellular Sports. Speedway:  A news release from Penn Medicine talks about how motor proteins step on the gas and the brakes in their motions around the cell.  The announcer from […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Quality Control Runs a Tight Ship
January 31, 2007
Without the surveillance and rapid response of quality control, cells would collapse and die.  Here are some recently-published examples of nanoheroes in action. Plant checkpoints:  Picture a child watching the wonder of a seedling breaking through the soil into the light for the first time.  Within hours, the ghostly-white stem turns green, and a day […]
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Human Body

The Space Race: Just Staying Alive
January 30, 2007
“Ad astra!” the sci-fi slogan announces with eternal optimism: “To the stars!”  Medical doctors and astrobiologists are not sure you would want to stay there long, though.  Some recent findings give a dismal picture of the prospects for life – human or bacterial – at least in our solar system, if that can be assumed […]
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Astronomy

Dating a Star is Glamorous Only in Theory
January 30, 2007
Hollywood stars may be fickle, but so are great balls of fire in outer space when it comes to understanding them.  Some recent examples: Taking the pulse:  The Chandra X-ray Observatory wrote a glowing report about a “textbook supernova,” which is a nice pairing of observation and theory.  It added this caveat, though, about dating […]
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Amazing Facts

Squid Eye Beats Zeiss
January 29, 2007
A squid whose scientific name means “vampire from hell” wears specs with excellent specs (that’s lenses with excellent specifications, for the pun-challenged).  Elisabeth Pennisi in Science reported on a talk given at an Arizona science conference about the vampire squid, whose “lenses are designed for seeing details, even in virtual darkness.”  Researchers studying cephalopod eyes […]
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Amazing Facts

Muscles Use Gears, Automatic Transmission
January 28, 2007
Analogies may not be perfect representations of reality, but it must pique the interest of all of us the way Elisabeth Pennisi in Science1 compared muscle to cars and bicycles: One look at a ballerina as she pirouettes and poses drives home the remarkable ability of our muscles to adapt to diverse biomechanical demands.  Manny […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Membrane Has Ticket-Operated Turnstiles
January 27, 2007
Cells are like castles surrounded by walls.  A wall without gates, however, would prevent commerce and trap the inhabitants inside.  The cell has ingenious gates that control the flow of goods and services through its outer membrane under tight surveillance and quality control.  This controlled flow, as opposed to passive diffusion or osmosis, is termed […]
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Solar System

Moon Origins Not Set in Stone
January 26, 2007
The leading theory for the origin of the moon has been for some time now that a massive object hit the Earth, and the debris formed the moon.  New Scientist reported one astronomer who doesn’t buy it.  “The collision has to be implausibly gentle,” said Peter Noerdlinger to the American Astronomical Society.  “You practically need […]
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Amazing Facts

Robot Legs Can’t Keep Up With Animals
January 25, 2007
Robot designers are envious of animals.  Insects, crabs and lizards leave them in the dust.  Alison Abbott in Nature (Jan 18) described the latest attempts to get the bugs out of insect-imitating “biological robots.”1  “Programming a robot to think like an insect is tough,” the subtitle reads, “but it could help breed machines as manoeuvrable […]
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