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Where Did Humans Learn Geometry?

January 22, 2006

In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates illustrated his view that certain foundations of knowledge are innate rather than learned.1 He took an untutored slave boy and, with a series of sketches in the sand, got the boy to deduce the Pythagorean Theorem by his own reasoning (see Encarta). In a modern version, Harvard scientists […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Spite

January 21, 2006

Since everything evolves, according to consensus science, why not attitudes like spite? The BBC News reported about a University College London study on attitudes of revenge between the sexes. They found that men seemed to get more satisfaction out of hurting foes than women. This is all part of an evolutionary explanation for altruistic behavior […]

Genetics

Soil Provides Library of Antibiotic Resistance

January 19, 2006

Genetic information that confers antibiotic resistance is already present in the environmental resistome.

Uncategorized

Orion Nebula Revealed in Hubble Splendor

January 19, 2006

The Hubble Space Telescope’s new mosaic image of the Orion Nebula (M42) made Astronomy Picture of the Day. For those of us who grew up admiring the old Palomar observatory’s photo of it, the upgrade is worth a thousand words. This is a keeper. The next day, APOD posted a portion of the image that […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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, […]

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.” […]

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 […]

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