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Health

Rip Van Winkle Revives
July 3, 2006
A man in a coma 19 years has regained some brain function, surprising scientists.  Terry Wallis is relearning how to count and speak, and thinks Ronald Reagan is still president.  The story of his remarkable recovery has been reported widely in the news (see Fox News) and was featured on both News@Nature and Science Now.  […]
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Astronomy

Paper View:  Why SETI Hears Only a “Great Silence”
June 30, 2006
Enrico Fermi posed a curious question in 1950: “Where is everybody?”  If life emerges on planets as a consequence of evolution, there should be other intelligent civilizations out there, and some of them must have colonized other worlds.  He thought there must have been plenty of time for galactic colonizers to achieve technologies far beyond […]
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Uncategorized

Rockfish Prefer Oil-Rig Real Estate
June 30, 2006
Environmentalists may complain about offshore oil platforms, but the rockfish in the Santa Barbara channel aren’t paying attention.  According to a study announced by UC Santa Barbara, rockfish are finding better living through human chemistry.  The platforms provide security and prime nursing habitat, such that their numbers, once dangerously low, are now resurging.  The artificial […]
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Intelligent Design

Ant Pedometer Discovered
June 29, 2006
Ants have dumbfounded scientists again.  It appears they count their steps when they walk, and keep track how far they have gone.  Reporting in Science,1 a trio of German and Swiss scientists tested desert ants by making some walk on specially-designed stilts and others walk on stumps of cut-off legs.  The first overshot their target, […]
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Education

Doubters Defy Darwin Dogma
June 29, 2006
One would think that the near unanimous opinion of international scientific societies opposing creationism and ID would carry a lot of weight with the public, but it doesn’t.  There are indications that a substantial percent of the population is not impressed with the dogmatic pronouncements that evolution is a fact, and that anyone who disagrees […]
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Early Man

The Evolution of Immaturity
June 28, 2006
[Guest Article]  Blame evolution for your teen’s immaturity.  The Discovery Channel has published a review of an upcoming paper by Bruce Charlton, professor of biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England.  Charlton is a promoter of Evolutionary Psychology, a developing field of Psychology that attempts to explain all human characteristics in light of […]
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Genetics

Stem Cells Protect Against Defective Copies
June 27, 2006
The Pasteur Institute (see Louis Pasteur) has found evidence supporting a controversial theory known as the “immortal DNA” theory.  According to News-Medical.Net, researchers at the institute believe that stem cells keep the best copies and allow only defective ones to differentiate and specialize.  If so, this may be another mechanism for minimizing the effects of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Find Pegasus in the Gene Epic
June 26, 2006
When you conjure with genes, you never know what might appear.  Japanese scientists, publishing in PNAS,1 tried to find evolution in mammalian retroposons and found an unexpected relationship.  New Scientist explains: “You could call it a batty idea, but bats seem to be more closely related to horses than cows are.”     “Despite the […]
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Amazing Facts

Plants Use Electrical Sunscreen
June 23, 2006
Perhaps only a scientist, or a kid, would worry about how a plant doesn’t get sunburn, but it took elaborate scientific work for six months to find the answer.  EurekAlert told about research at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State that found how plants get rid of excess solar energy.  They use carotenoids, molecules responsible […]
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Fossils

Science Reporters Spin Spider Web Data Into Evolutionary Program
June 23, 2006
A spider was found perfectly preserved in amber (fossil tree sap), complete with its web and prey.  It is identical to modern spiders.  Isn’t evolution amazing?     If you just experienced a software crash, there must be something wrong with your BIOS.  All the news media ran that program just fine.  A patch is […]
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Cell Biology

Rubisco “Highly Tuned” for Fixing Atmospheric Carbon
June 22, 2006
Rubisco sounds like a brand of cracker or something, but it’s actually an air cleaner your life depends on.  It’s an enzyme that fixes atmospheric carbon for use by photosynthetic microbes and plants.  In doing so, it sweeps the planet of excess carbon dioxide – the greenhouse gas implicated in discussions of global warming – […]
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Education

The World Against I.D.
June 21, 2006
The Inter-Academy Panel (IAP) on International Issues, a global network of scientific academies, has issued a statement endorsing cosmic and biological evolution.  It urges “decision makers, teachers, and parents to educate all children about the methods and discoveries of science and to foster an understanding of the science of nature.”  Though the statement does not […]
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Education

A.P. Learning to Report Science Wars More Accurately
June 19, 2006
The Discovery Institute’s media-watchdog blog Evolution News watched Associated Press fumble at first, but then get it right to show that new science standards adopted by South Carolina do not mandate teaching intelligent design.  The AP story printed in South Carolina’s Channel 10 News included a comment that certain officials “worried the change would open […]
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Fossils

Cambrian Explosion Precursors, or Drops in the Bucket?
June 18, 2006
Two recent presentations, one in person and one in print, tried to fill in the gap of fossils that led to the explosion of diversity in the Cambrian, known as the Cambrian Explosion (see 04/23/2006 entry). Darwin’s Dilemma Solved?  Dr. J. William Schopf (UCLA), renowned discoverer of Precambrian microfossils, triumphantly announced the solution to “Darwin’s […]
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Birds

How Can They Call This Duck a Missing Link?
June 16, 2006
The news media are abuzz with the phrase “Missing Link” again.  This time, it’s about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1  The article calls it a “nearly modern” bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers.  They said it “possesses advanced anatomical […]
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