VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Physics

Can Caves Record Climate History?
January 19, 2006
Many geologists and climatologists have assumed that cave formations, forming slowly over long ages, preserve a record of climate changes.  These assumptions have been challenged by University of Texas researchers who experimented with water dripping from stalactites in a cave in Barbados.  Their work was published in GSA Bulletin.1     Climate history could be […]
CONTINUE READING
Fossils

How to Squeeze Fossils Into Evolutionary Trees
January 18, 2006
Fossils do not come with dates or labels on them.  Sometimes it is quite a puzzle to figure out where they fit in Darwinian ancestral trees.  One such example was published in Nature on January 12 by Chinese scientists who found an oddball in the famous Liaoning fossil beds.1  They called it a “Cretaceous symmetrodont […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Dust Bunny Lays Planet Eggs
January 17, 2006
Where do planets come from?  The Dust Bunny.  That’s a line coming from a press release from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.  They measured spectra of gas and dust at radio and infrared wavelengths around a sunlike star, and concluded the dust was collecting.  “This suggests that the dust particles are sticking together, […]
CONTINUE READING
Cosmology

ID Film Takes Hollywood
January 15, 2006
Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard is a top tourist attraction in Tinseltown.  It features dozens of handprints of famous movie and TV stars, from Lucille Ball and Bill Cosby to Mickey Mouse.  This venue of many a blockbuster and glitzy opening night seemed hardly a place for naturalistic cosmology to take a thrashing, but […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Why Your Brain Has Gray Matter, and Why You Should Use It
January 13, 2006
Vertebrate brains have an outer layer of “gray matter” over the inner “white matter.”  Why is this?  “By borrowing mathematical tools from theoretical physics,” a press release from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced, two researchers found out. Based on no fewer than 62 mathematical equations and expressions, the theory provides a possible explanation for the […]
CONTINUE READING
Politics and Ethics

Plants Contribute to Global Warming?
January 12, 2006
If anyone needs a reminder that scientists still have a lot to learn, consider this major discovery of something right under their noses that caught them completely off guard.  Up to a third of methane in the atmosphere comes from plants.  This is not only a baffling puzzle about how or why plants would create […]
CONTINUE READING
Birds

Observing Animals for Fun and Profit
January 11, 2006
Whether scientists watch Animal Planet for inspiration or not, they often are fixated on the wonders in the animal kingdom and want to understand and imitate them.  Here are some recent examples: Waddle of the Penguins:  Max Kurz at U of Houston enjoys watching cuddly penguins like most of us, but wonders how they waddle […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Step Aside, Creationists: Darwinists Figured Out How Bees Fly
January 10, 2006
With an air of triumph, LiveScience announced that Caltech scientists have won one against ID: Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being [sic] rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science [sic] for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.     […]
CONTINUE READING
Genetics

Peer Review: Can You Trust a Scientific Journal Paper?
January 9, 2006
Science magazine has egg on its face – deviled, poached, and scrambled – everything but sunny side up.  Last May, it printed one of the biggest breakthrough stories of the year in stem cell research: Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, a professor at the Seoul National University and President of the World Stem Cell Hub, […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Darwin Hits Home: Adultery Rationalized
January 8, 2006
USA Today began an article with a steamy picture of a man and a woman embracing.  As could be expected, they are not married; reporter Sharon Jayson began, “Some men cheat on their partners.  So do some women.  Now researchers say it is more than a wandering eye that might cause a woman to stray.”  […]
CONTINUE READING
Intelligent Design

Bet on the Winning Dodo: Darwinism or Intelligent Design
January 7, 2006
A new film about the creation-evolution controversy is coming out, titled Flock of Dodos.  Randy Olson, a marine biologist with a PhD in evolutionary ecology and another degree in filmmaking, decided to put this documentary together to help scientists realize that they are behind the curve on marketing their ideas.  According to the Kansas paper […]
CONTINUE READING
Education

Darwin Wars Continue Unabated
January 6, 2006
The Dover decision did not end the fervent discussion about Darwinism and intelligent design.  There are too many articles to mention separately, so here is a sampler: Dover Board Rescinds Policy:  As expected, the new Dover school board quickly put an end to the policy that required reading a statement that alternatives to evolutionary theory […]
CONTINUE READING
Human Body

These Feet Were Made for Walking (and Running)
January 5, 2006
We usually walk or run.  When walking, we roll from heel to arch to toe and rock our arms back and forth.  When running, we bounce up and down slightly while pumping our arms.  Did you know that many other gaits are possible?  Why do we use only two?  A team of specialists in bio-robotics […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Health Depends on Robust Cell Machinery
January 5, 2006
When we think of health, we typically visualize the big things: firm muscles, energy, lack of a protruding stomach and the like.  Cell biology, though, is showing us how our health depends on the proper functioning of countless myriads of molecular machines.  Here are some recent samples from the science journals: Heroic Underdogs in the […]
CONTINUE READING
Cosmology

Cosmologists Can’t Escape Conclusion of Design
January 4, 2006
Geoff Brumfiel of Nature1 decided to investigate the growing fracas over the anthropic principle (see 12/18/2005 entry); i.e., that our universe appears to be more than a coincidence.  In a piece called “Our universe: Outrageous fortune,” he looked at the views of Leonard Susskind and his few critics. For two decades now, theorists in the […]
CONTINUE READING
Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly"]