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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cosmology

Cosmologists Cant 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 […]

Cell Biology

Minimal Cell More Complex Than Expected

January 3, 2006

Craig Venter’s lab has been working on an interesting project in theoretical biology: what is the minimum set of genes needed for life? They have taken one of the simplest organisms, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knocked out genes to see which ones are essential and which are nonessential for viability. (This is part of the “top […]