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Fossils

Cambrian Embryo Fossils Show Exquisite Detail in New X-Ray Imaging
August 10, 2006
The news media are all showcasing the detailed color-rendered X-ray tomographs of Cambrian worm embryos from China.  Scientists were able to determine that these embryos, alleged to be 500 million years old, are very similar to those of modern, living priapulid worms.  Despite their assumed age, some of the embryos were remarkably well preserved, displaying […]
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Amazing Facts

Birds Excel in Distance, Harmony
August 9, 2006
Bird feats are outstanding.  Two notable cases were announced this week: Air Marathon:  The longest animal migration in the animal kingdom is performed by the sooty shearwater, reported National Geographic News.  They migrate 40,000 miles a year from New Zealand to the North Pacific, in complex figure-eight patterns that touch the coasts of South America, […]
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Solar System

It’s Tough to Get a Date, but Fun to Keep Trying
August 8, 2006
Geochronology is a perverse sort of game.  Like the proverbial clock shop apprentice who went crazy trying to get all the grandfather clocks to tick together, the scientist trying to interpolate earth’s past climate patterns from geochronometers has so many uncooperative variables, he can never hope for anything better than partial conformity to accepted visions […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can Evolution Run in Reverse?
August 7, 2006
Evolutionists in Utah are claiming to have run the evolutionary tape in reverse, says the BBC News: “US researchers have taken a mouse back in time some 500 million years by reversing the process of evolution.”  How can this be?  By engineering its genetic blueprint, they have rebuilt a gene that was present in primitive […]
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Origin of Life

Ten Years Later: Mars Rock Was a Useful Lie
August 6, 2006
Almost nobody believes any more that the Martian meteorite ALH84001 contained evidence of life, but the iconic rock launched the science of astrobiology (see 04/17/2006).  So said Matt Crenson for AP (see Space.com and Chron.com) on the tenth anniversary of the highly-publicized NASA announcement that purported to show bacteria-like fossils, magnetites and PAHs thought to […]
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Early Man

Human Heads Are Shrinking
August 5, 2006
There’s no correlation between brain size and intelligence, and if anything, brains today have gotten smaller since the days of our Pleistocene ancestors.  That’s the gist of a report on ABC News Australia based on research at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research: “The genes that are thought to have helped humans evolve big brains […]
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Cell Biology

How Useful Is Evolutionary Theory to Biology?
August 4, 2006
A favorite quote by evolutionists is the line by Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  Why, then, do so many biological papers fail to mention evolution at all?  Indeed, many employ design language, sometimes with a sense of awe.  Here are more recent examples in which the E […]
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Genetics

Team Returns Pseudogene to Junkpile to Counter ID Claim
August 3, 2006
An earlier claim that a pseudogene has a function (see 05/01/2003 story) has been debunked by a team of scientists reporting in PNAS.1  Their reanalysis of the claim made in 2003 “invalidates the data upon which the pseudogene trans-regulation model is based and therefore strongly supports the view that mammalian pseudogenes are evolutionary relics.”  The […]
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Amazing Facts

Bacteria Rule the World – Benevolently
August 2, 2006
We should love bacteria, not annihilate them.  Bacteria are our friends, according to Dianne K. Newman of Caltech:1 As a microbiologist, I’m appalled when I go to buy soap or dishwashing detergent, because these days it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t say ‘antibacterial’ on it…. It’s a commonly held fallacy that all bacteria are […]
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Solar System

More Reasons You Wouldn’t Want to Live on Mars
August 2, 2006
Electric charges in dust devils on Mars may generate toxic chemicals, says a report on Space.com (see also later story posted on National Geographic News). According to two recent reports in Astrobiology journal, “Small dust devils and planet-wide storms – combined with static electricity – may lead to the formation of hydrogen peroxide and other […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Kansas Evolution Battle Heats Up Again
August 1, 2006
Update 08/02/2006: According to a news report on Live Science, conservatives have lost their majority in the primary election for seats on the state school board.  Details are reported by the Lawrence Journal-World.  The winners are gloating that this is a great day for Kansas, said Science Now, but ended by noting that the issue […]
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Politics and Ethics

Journals Consistently Tout Embryonic Stem Cells, Criticize Bush
July 31, 2006
This is not news.  It just bears repeating that the Big Science journals continue to push embryonic stem cell research and criticize Republicans.  The latest case in point was President Bush’s veto of the stem cell bill July 19, that led to a flurry of articles and editorials in the leading British and American science […]
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Dinosaurs

Opal Plesiosaurs, Flashy Pterosaurs and Hot Titanosaurs Inspire Stories
July 30, 2006
Paleontologists continue to dig up bones of fascinating species of long-lost animals.  When it comes to extinct species, the line between observation and interpretation becomes fuzzy, since there is no way to be absolutely sure how they behaved and what they were doing when they died.  This does not prevent scientists from freely speculating on […]
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Cell Biology

Self-Correcting RNA: Is It a Missing Link?
July 28, 2006
A team of Russian scientists at Rutgers discovered a remarkable phenomenon: RNA that proofreads itself during its own synthesis.  The work was reported in Science1: “We show that during transcription elongation, the hydrolytic reaction stimulated by misincorporated nucleotides proofreads most of the misincorporation events and thus serves as an intrinsic mechanism of transcription fidelity.”  It […]
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Amazing Facts

Eye Sends Information at Ethernet Rates
July 27, 2006
Neuroscientists from Pennsylvania and New Jersey calculated the information rate of the eye.  Using guinea pigs (real guinea pigs, not humans as guinea pigs), they came up with a number and interpolated it for humans: In the classic “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain,” Lettvin and colleagues showed that different types of retinal […]
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