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How You Tune In

December 5, 2005

Studies on rats have shown there are certain neurons that respond to changes in the background sound (see LiveScience story on MSNBC News). We humans probably have these, too. Rather than firing continuously, they search for changes in the auditory landscape that might be of interest: changes in pitch, loudness or duration in single sounds […]

Cosmology

SETI vs. Intelligent Design

December 3, 2005

Intelligent Design proponents have often pointed to the similarity between what they are doing and what SETI is doing. For example, SETI is attempting to detect evidence of intelligence in coded signals from space, and design biologists are detecting evidence of intelligence in the DNA code. Seth Shostak, Director of the SETI Institute, decided to […]

Birds

Archaeopteryx in the Headlines Again: New Specimen Reported

December 2, 2005

The best-preserved fossil yet of Archaeopteryx was announced in Science this week,1 the tenth in all. This one, described by Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Natural History Museum (Frankfurt, Germany), had a better-preserved foot than the others (all found in the Solnhofen Limestone beds of Bavaria) with indications it had a hyperextendable second toe somewhat […]

Cell Biology

Cell Ribosome Assembly Is Like Throwing Car Parts Together

December 1, 2005

Ribosomes are the protein-assembly machines in the living cell (11/24/2005, 07/26/2005, 01/19/2005). A bacterium can have thousands of them. They are composed of two large RNA complexes; the smaller one has 20 unique proteins that fit snugly in various parts of the apparatus, and the larger complex has even more. How do the parts all […]

Politics and Ethics

Mao Tse-Tung Killed 77 Million for Darwin

November 30, 2005

World Net Daily reported that the body count from Mao’s reign of terror in China has been revised upward to 77 million by R. J. Rummel, a Nobel Peace Prize winning political scientist who had earlier estimated it at half that (38 million). This augments Mao’s Guinness reputation as the worst mass murderer in history. […]

Early Man

Mexican Footprints 1.3 Million Years Old? Impossible, Señor

November 30, 2005

Paleoanthropologists have a major conundrum on their hands, or feet. EurekAlert reported about controversial footprints found in Mexico ash deposits that had been thought to be 44,000 years old. Even that was too old for many to swallow, but new argon-argon dates show them to be 1.3 million years old – far older than those […]

Education

Darwinism: Struggle for Existence of a Controversial Theory

November 30, 2005

Darwin taught that the struggle for existence in nature produced the survival of the fittest. A struggle between Darwinism and intelligent design (ID) seems to be producing media red in tooth and claw, as seen by the following recent stories. Define the Opposition Out of Science: Another University of Kansas professor is offering a class […]

Health

Ecotherapy: Nature Is Good Medicine

November 29, 2005

The British Medical Journal, according to EurekAlert, says, “Getting close to nature is good for you.” Ecotherapy is the fancy new buzzword for “restoring health through contact with nature.” What are the benefits? Improving quality of life, healing emotional problems, learning practical and social skills and the obvious one: better health through exercise. Doctors and […]

Bible and Theology

Welcome to the Religion Department; I Am Your Evil Atheist Professor

November 29, 2005

The religion professor who organized a class at U of Kansas called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies” (see 11/21/2005) was caught red-handed expressing his real intentions. According to Knight-Ridder stories in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Macon.com, an email from Paul Mirecki became public in which he had said, “The […]

Solar System

Enceladus Eruptions Caught on Camera

November 28, 2005

Enceladus, one of the small icy moons of Saturn, is undergoing eruptive activity right now. Evidence from previous flybys has now been corroborated visually in stunning images that made the lead stories on NASA, JPL and Cassini. Amateur enthusiasts were already expressing excitement at the images before the announcement (see Unmanned Spaceflight). The complete set […]

Solar System

News from the Solar Neighborhood

November 28, 2005

Here’s a collection of recent items of interest under the sun. (Don’t miss the big story above, too.) My Rhea Lies Under the Spacecraft: Cassini added another trophy to its moon collection Saturday, skimming just 300 miles above the surface of Saturn’s large moon Rhea. (Saturday is named after Saturn, hey). Rhea is the largest […]

Genetics

Genes Attack the Trees

November 26, 2005

Evolutionary tree-building (11/14/2005) is a tangled business. Now that scientists can compare genomes of diverse animals, they can compare the resulting molecular evolutionary trees with traditional ones – those produced by inferring relationships based on outward (morphological) characteristics of living or fossil organisms. What happens when the trees don’t match? Two recent studies, […]

Human Body

Eyesight: More Reasons to Be Thankful

November 24, 2005

So much is going on in your body when you look at that sliced turkey and raise it to your salivating mouth, a human mind can only fathom bits and pieces of the story. Everyone knows the eye is the quintessential example of a complex organ, but Current Biology1 focused on one of the wonders […]

Cell Biology

Nature Cover Exploits Intelligent Design While Inside Attacks It

November 24, 2005

The 11/24 issue of Nature included two very caustic letters attacking intelligent design, yet its cover story highlighted the promising new field of Synthetic Biology. In one of the leading papers,1 David Sprinzak and Michael B. Elowiz of Caltech (see 06/25/2005 entry) described the synthetic approach in terms reminiscent of William Paley’s old Divine Watchmaker: […]

Dumb Ideas

On the Origin of Hee-Hees by Natural Selection

November 22, 2005

From slime to smile in 200 million years: some Darwinists feel they have explained the evolution of laughter. In all seriousness, EurekAlert announced, “The first laugh: New study posits evolutionary origins of two distinct types of laughter.” The story is about a new hypothesis by Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson. The origin of comedy, […]

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