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Amazing Facts

Plant Hula-Hoop Railroads Build Cell Walls
June 9, 2006
Solving a long-standing mystery about how plants build cell walls, Stanford scientists imaged molecular machines traveling along hoop-shaped rings around the inside of the cell.  Publishing in Science, Paradez, Somerville and Ehrhardt proved that cellulose synthase (CESA), a machine that manufactures cellulose composed of six subunits arranged in rosettes, rides like a rail car on […]
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Solar System

Update:  Crater-Count Dating Squabble Unresolved
June 8, 2006
Remember the revelation last year that many craters on Mars used to infer ages may have been secondary impacts from fallback debris? (see 10/20/2005 entry).  Well, a microsymposium on this subject was held in Houston in March, and Richard Kerr in Science1 said that “125 planetary scientists deadlocked over how to apply crater-dating techniques to […]
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Genetics

Evolutionary Trees “Positively Misleading”
June 8, 2006
According to an article in PLoS Genetics,1 there is a fundamental flaw in the way species trees are inferred from gene trees using molecular genetics that is guaranteed to produce erroneous results: Because of the stochastic way in which lineages sort during speciation, gene trees may differ in topology from each other and from species […]
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Amazing Facts

Beavers Achieve Environmental Reprieve
June 8, 2006
In what might be considered an unexpected convergence between geology and zoology, it has been found that beaver dams influence large tracts of land both above and below ground.  “Impact of beaver dams wider than thought” announced a headline on LiveScience summarizing studies by scientists in Rocky Mountain National Park.     The dams take […]
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Cosmology

The Universe Is Made Out of… Fudge!
June 7, 2006
[Guest article]  According to the July issue of Astronomy magazine, the Universe is comprised mostly of fudge – or at least fudge factors, anyway.  The article by James Trefil from George Mason University describes the current thinking among astrophysicists as to the eventual fate of the universe.  Since the Big Bang, there has been an […]
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Amazing Facts

Protein Dressing Room Has Electronic Walls
June 7, 2006
Properly folded proteins are essential to all of life.  When a polypeptide, or chain of amino acids, emerges from the ribosome translation factory on its way to becoming a protein, it looks like a useless, shapeless piece of string.  It cannot perform its function till folded into a precise, compact shape particular for its job.  […]
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Bible and Theology

Update:  Iraq Marshlands Recovering Quicker Than Expected
June 6, 2006
How is south-central Iraq doing?  Recall that Saddam Hussein nearly obliterated, intentionally, one of the world’s premier wetlands (05/01/2003, 02/18/2005).  His fall from power enabled scientists to measure the damage and estimate hopes for recovery.  The outlook was pretty bleak at first.  Now, after two seasons of above-average rainfall upstream, fresh water has again been […]
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Early Man

Hobbit Man, Neanderthal Man Further Scrutinized
June 6, 2006
The positions of two alleged human ancestors in the family tree is becoming clearer, or murkier, depending on whom you ask.  This illustrates the uncertainty and disparity of opinions in this field. Hobbit workshop:  Regarding the diminutive skeletons dubbed Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia, opinions seems to be condensing around the idea they were true […]
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Amazing Facts

Hummingbirds: Small Wonders
June 5, 2006
Do you enjoy watching the world’s smallest birds, right from your backyard?  Susan Healy and T. Andrew Hurly provided interesting tidbits about them in a Quick Guide to Hummingbirds in Current Biology this week.1     There are 330 species of these small flyers noted for their aerobatics and iridescent colors.  Typically, they weigh a […]
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SETI

Researcher Denies SETI Is a Religion
June 3, 2006
Apparently irritated by charges that SETI research is like a religion (see, for instance, the article by novelist Michael Crichton mentioned in our 12/27/2003 entry), David Darling of the SETI Institute has issued a response.  On Space.com, his title was direct: “Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?”  The answer was a forthright NO […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Handy Dandy Modus Operandi
June 2, 2006
Charles G. Gross and Asif A. Ghazanfar win the prize for this gem in Science1 from a book review of The Sensory Hand by Vernon B. Mountcastle (Harvard, 2006): In one of the first systematic attempts to describe the differences between primates and other mammals, Thomas Huxley argued that the former are distinguished by virtue […]
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Solar System

Asteroid Sticks Together While Theories Disintegrate
June 1, 2006
[Guest article]  In an story entitled “Rubbly Itokawa revealed as ‘impossible’ asteroid,” New Scientist Space reported on findings gathered from the recent visit of Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa to the asteroid Itokawa (see 11/28/2005 bullet).  There seems to be no end of problems for scientists trying to fit the solar system into billions of years.  Now […]
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Intelligent Design

Leading Evolutionist Provides His Best Proof: HIV
May 30, 2006
[Guest article]  Sarah Crown reports in the Guardian Unlimited (“Why Creationism Is Wrong”) on biologist Steve Jones’ speech to a crowd at an English bank holiday, the Hay Festival: The aim of the talk, he explained, is to establish the testability and therefore prove the truth of evolution.  After gaining the audience’s sympathy with a […]
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Early Man

A Challenge to our Victorian Ethics: Humans and Chimps Interbreeding
May 22, 2006
[Guest article]  Newspapers chipped away at Christian ethics last week with articles describing evidence that “early humans” bred (hybridized) with their supposed ancestors, the chimpanzees, for millions of years after becoming another species.  The New York Times reports: David Page, a human geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the design of the new […]
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Biomimetics

Bioneers Update: International Conference Held on Animal-Inspired Design
May 13, 2006
Georgia Tech came out with a press release about progress at their Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) that opened last year (see 10/29/2005).  At a two-day conference May 11-12, international representatives from 20 institutions shared their inspirations on how nature can “help them solve some of the most complex problems of the day,” just […]
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