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Amazing Facts

Plant Pores March to Their Own Beat
December 22, 2006
Plants have pores called stomata that open and close (see 09/13/2006).  These gates of the leaf surface provide plant protection from invaders, and allow the transpiration of gases and water vapor in and out, depending on conditions.  The stomata of many plants open wide during the day to allow in carbon dioxide, but close at […]
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Birds

Big Dino Found, But How Did it Eat?
December 21, 2006
A few interesting dinosaur stories came to light this month. I was a Spanish monster:  A new giant sauropod has been found in Spain, reported EurekAlert based on a paper in Science.1  Named Turiasaurus riodevensis by the discoverers, it ranks among the largest of dinosaurs and is the first giant sauropod found in Europe, weighing […]
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Uncategorized

Frozen Storms in Sandstone
December 19, 2006
Impress your friends at the water cooler with this phrase: “hummocky cross-stratification.”  Let’s call this mouthful HCS and talk about it.  It has a story to tell.     HCS is a kind of geological formation characterized by alternating three-dimensional hummocks (convex up) and swales (convex down).  Discussed in the geological literature since the 1970s, […]
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Physics

Crisis in Comet Formation Theories
December 18, 2006
Results from the Stardust mission last week (12/15/2006) are causing quite a stir.  Detailed analysis of comet dust particles from Comet Wild 2, published in Science Dec 15, reveal the wrong stuff.  Scientists found olivine, pyroxene and osbornite – minerals said to form at high temperatures – instead of the cold volatiles expected for an […]
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Health

Are Embryonic Stem Cells a Stepping Stone to Eugenics?
December 16, 2006
In Paris, according to Science Dec. 8, “One cherished French institution has attacked another in a bruising battle over embryonic stem cell research.”  The cause of the “Jeremiad” as Science dubbed it, was a Catholic Archbishop’s statement to a French health institute that any research “instrumentalizes the embryo or borders on eugenics.”  The “News of […]
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Amazing Facts

Animal Plan IT
December 15, 2006
Imitating animal technology is one of the hottest areas in science.  The engineering and information technology (IT) observable in living things continues to astonish scientists and makes engineers want to imitate nature’s designs.  Biomimetics is leading to productive, useful discoveries helping solve human problems and leading to a better life for all.  Here are some […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Comets as Life’s Lego Jumper Cables
December 15, 2006
Results of the Stardust mission made the cover of Science this week.1  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a press release that condensed the abstruse papers into a simplistic story built around the L word life.  Publicist David Agle wrote for the Lego generation: Just as kits of little plastic bricks can be used to […]
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Cell Biology

Mutations Accelerate Each Other’s Damage
December 14, 2006
As reported in our 10/14/2004 entry, mutations do not work in isolation; even the good kind usually conspire against the host.  This fact has been largely ignored by neo-Darwinists.  Some researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, writing in Nature,1 tested the interaction of mutations (epistasis) on proteins.  They found, in short, that harmful […]
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Fossils

Life Out of Place, Life Out of Time
December 13, 2006
Evolutionists have a standard timeline based on Darwin’s “tree of life” that indicates when complex life forms should have appeared.  What happens when the wrong animal shows up in the wrong place or time?  The theory is never falsified; it is just accommodated to the new data, as simply as rearranging branches on a Christmas […]
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Education

Judge Jones Took Credit for ACLU Writings
December 12, 2006
Judge John E. Jones has become somewhat of a celebrity of late, traveling and speaking about his judgment against the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board on December 20, 2005 (see 12/23/2005).  He has stated that he felt his opinion should set forth the case once for all that intelligent design is not science but religion in […]
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Bible and Theology

Experiment: Take a Darwinist to Church
December 11, 2006
“Go to church and breathe easier,” announced an unusual entry on EurekAlert.  A study at Temple University found a positive correlation between religious activity and lung function.  They said that “religious activity is emerging as a potential health promoting factor, especially among the elderly.”  In addition, “going to church provides social contact and emotional support, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinists Award New Inductee
December 11, 2006
The journal Science published the winning entry in the 2006 contest “GE and Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.”  The Grand Prize went to Irene A. Chen (Harvard) for her essay entitled, “The Emergence of Cells During the Origin of Life.”1  Her chemical-evolution scenario makes generous use of that word emergence and its synonyms. Modern […]
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Dumb Ideas

To Get Complex Life, Just Add Oxygen
December 10, 2006
A story is circulating in the science news media that a burst of complex organisms in the Cambrian coincided with a rise in oxygen in the atmosphere.  Reporters seem to be drawing a cause-and-effect relationship.  Examples: News@Nature:  “A sharp increase in the amount of oxygen in the air may have sparked the evolution of complex […]
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Uncategorized

Fish Species in African Lake Diversified Rapidly
December 9, 2006
Two related articles in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) show that a large number of species can branch out of a small population in a short time.  Hobbyists familiar with tropical fish appreciate how wide is the variety found within Cichlids.  In the first article,1 the author alleged that in the last 15,000 years, […]
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Education

A Tale of Two Videos: Advocacy and Censorship
December 8, 2006
A teacher gets a free video on science, and likes it.  She thinks it fits in with the lesson plan and curriculum guidelines.  Should she be allowed to show parts of it in the classroom?  At what point should the government step in and say the material is inappropriate, or even ban it outright, if […]
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