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Dumb Ideas

Can the Interior Design Itself?
March 26, 2007
Calling all interior designers: has Darwinism rendered you superfluous?  J. Scott Turner thinks so.  He wrote a book called The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself (Harvard, 2007).  It was reviewed by Claus Wedekind in last week’s Nature with the title, “The interior designer.”  This does not imply that interiors need an exterior […]
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Education

Free Speech?  Not When Darwin Is at Stake
March 25, 2007
Radicals get away with saying or doing almost anything on campuses these days.  There’s one “radical” view, however, that even though believed by a majority of Americans, is sure to be met with outrage: creationism.  It doesn’t even have to be creationism.  Just to suggest that Darwin and his views might not be infallible is […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Monkeys Bang Rocks, Invent Culture
March 23, 2007
The venerable University of Cambridge earns this week’s prize for the following statements in a press release today: New evidence of “human” culture among primates 23 March 2007 Research suggests that stone-banging by South American monkeys could be a socially-learned skill Fresh evidence that suggests monkeys can learn skills from each other, in the same […]
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Health

Lunar Dust Is Deadly
March 22, 2007
A significant fraction of lunar dust could pose deadly risks to future astronauts stationed on the moon, a BBC News report says.  About 1-3% of moon dust particles are too small to be coughed up or removed by the cilia lining the respiratory tract.  These would lodge in the lungs and become inflamed.  As in […]
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Human Body

Questions to Ask a Reductionist Neurobiologist
March 21, 2007
Can the totality of the brain be described in terms of its neurons?  Is consciousness an artifact of the movement of signals in the brain?  Can the complexity of the brain be described in terms of its evolutionary history?  Does the hardware define the software that runs on it? Gy�rgy Buzs�ki attempted to address these questions […]
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Fossils

Missing Link, or Just Jawboning About Ear Evolution?
March 19, 2007
Tetrapod vertebrates (four-footed animals with backbones) comprise a dizzying array of species, both living and extinct.  When is it justifiable to arrange different forms into an ancestral evolutionary sequence, especially when some members are extinct and others are still alive today?  On what basis can scientists claim that a discovery demonstrates evolution?  Some Chinese scientists […]
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Solar System

Did Mars Have a Global Flood?
March 18, 2007
There’s enough ice under Mars’ southern polar cap to flood the entire planet under 36 feet of water, reports Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  The MARSIS radar instrument on the ESA-NASA Mars Express determined that the ice cap is more than 2 miles thick in places.  According to the report on National Geographic News, traces of possible […]
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Bible and Theology

Have Scientists Found the Secret of Aging?
March 17, 2007
There’s a tragic disease that speeds up aging.  Known as progeria (Huntington-Gilford progeria syndrome, HGPS), it is caused by a single point mutation in exon 11 of the NMLA gene.  Children afflicted with this disease look old beyond their years and often die at 13 of heart attack and stroke – essentially, of old age. […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Calcium Channel: Meet Me at the Gate
March 16, 2007
All cells use calcium ions for signalling.  The ions flow through specialized gates in the plasma membrane.  Inside the cell, receptors line the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a kind of subway system where finishing work on proteins is done.  How do the two get together?  They arrange a meeting.     Richard Lewis, writing in Nature,1 […]
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Bible and Theology

Can Science Determine if God Answers Prayer?
March 16, 2007
An Arizona State research team has found support for the theory that intercessory prayer works, says EurekAlert.  David R. Hodge averaged 17 studies on intercessory prayer, including some that measured no effect.  His overall result contradicts a Harvard study (2006) by Benson that prayer has no influence on a patient’s health.  Still, he could not […]
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Botany

Is a 100-Year Misunderstanding about Plants Solved?
March 15, 2007
Part of “one of the biggest misunderstandings in botanical history,” a plant has moved from an upper part of the family tree down to the bottom.  Trithuria submersa, an underwater flowering plant from India and Australia that was thought to be a monocot is really not a cot at all, says Science Daily reporting on […]
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Amazing Facts

Why Our Voices Are Unique
March 15, 2007
We can usually recognize friends and acquaintances by their voices.  If we all have the same hardware, though, how is this possible?  The answer is in the vortex.  Sounds sci-fi, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati used knowledge of jet engines to explore the possibility that vortices may help solve the mysteries of the […]
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Amazing Facts

The Amazing Pigeon Techno-Beak
March 15, 2007
How do homing pigeons find home?  Scientists at University of Frankfurt may have found the answer: magnetic minerals in their beaks.  A press release from Springer Publications describes the amazing pigeon techno-beak: In histological and physicochemical examinations in collaboration with HASYLAB, the synchrotron laboratories based in Hamburg, Germany, iron-containing subcellular particles of maghemite and magnetite […]
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Dumb Ideas

An Extinction’s Long Fuse
March 15, 2007
Some scientists are claiming that when the Isthmus of Panama was formed, an extinction event occurred two million years later.  The story is reported on EurekAlert:  “We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what […]
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Dumb Ideas

Immature Kid?  Blame Evolution
March 14, 2007
Why do older children linger at home longer than they should?  Evolution, says Ker Than for Live Science.  This insight of his is based on growth patterns of teeth from an alleged 160,000-year-old juvenile skeleton in Africa.  Tanya Smith [Max Planck Institute] said of the bones, “These early fossils show a mix of primitive and […]
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