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Cosmology

Another Record Distant Galaxy Found
September 29, 2005
The Spitzer Space Telescope found a “positively gigantic” galaxy at a time the universe was supposedly only 800 million years old – just 5% the assumed age of the universe – according to a press release from Jet Propulsion Lab.  For the galaxy to be this big that far back, it must have “bulked up […]
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Education

Scientific Institutions Root for Darwin
September 28, 2005
With the Dover trial in the midst of its first week (09/26/2005), the Goliath fans are sounding off, led by their cheerleaders, Nature, Science and other institutions: Nature had two pieces this week, claiming the Dover trial represents Do or Die for Design.  This editorial ended, “Scientific organizations are well aware of this case’s significance, […]
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Solar System

Do Dead Meteorites Tell Tales?
September 28, 2005
Several researchers lately have claimed that meteorites can tell us the history of our solar system.  How can this be? Messages from Heaven:  Richard Kerr in Science1 reported on work by Strom et al. in the same issue2 that the asteroid belt was the source of the so-called “late heavy bombardment” that is said to […]
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Early Man

Hobbit Update
September 28, 2005
BBC News posted an article updating the story of Homo florensiensis, the so-called “Hobbit Man” miniature-human fossil (see 10/27/2004).  Opponents of the “missing link” interpretation are becoming more ardent in their claim that the fossils represent diseased modern humans with a condition known as microcephaly.  The discoverers are not convinced. Wait for this story to […]
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Cosmology

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos Is Back
September 27, 2005
MSNBC News reported that Carl Sagan’s popular 13-part series Cosmos is returning to TV this week, digitally remastered and enhanced with new up-to-date animations.  The 1980 series, which began with its own Agnus Dei invocation “The cosmos is all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be,” went far beyond the […]
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Education

Rhetoric Heats Up Over Dover IDea
September 26, 2005
Now that the ACLU’s lawsuit in Dover, Pennsylvania has gone to trial, more and more news media are writing about the controversy over intelligent design.  Many seem to think that the school board is trying to replace Darwinism in high school science classrooms with I.D.; actually, the Dover case does not mandate the teaching of […]
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Early Man

Is Archaeology Like SETI, or is SETI Like Religion?
September 24, 2005
Archaeologists have their Rosetta Stone, but so far, SETI investigators have no artifacts.  Still, Douglas Vakoch wrote for Space.com, archaeologists and anthropologists can teach SETI researchers how to prepare for encountering “exotic cultures with strange languages.”     Vakoch recounted the interest in this angle at an anthropology conference last year: One of the best-attended […]
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Genetics

Alternative Gene Splicing May Be Common
September 23, 2005
Scientists at MIT publishing in PNAS1 detected instances of alternative splicing in over 1,000 genes of stem cells.  They also computed possible isoforms of mRNA transcriptions and found 80% of them in the cells.  Not only that, the isoforms (alternatively spliced versions of exons from the same gene) appeared to be functional: “We find that […]
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Early Man

More Indications Neandertals Were Like Us
September 23, 2005
Two more hints that Neandertals were only variants of modern humans have surfaced recently.  British and American researchers publishing in PNAS1 studied tooth enamel growth patterns, and found that “Neandertal tooth growth and, by extension, somatic growth, appears to be encompassed within the modern human range of interpopulation variation.”  This finding was summarized on National […]
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Mammals

Evolutionists Finally Figure Out the Eye – Well, Partly
September 22, 2005
As if tackling Darwin’s worst nightmare with gusto, evolutionary biologists published a paper in Current Biology1 about the evolution of the eye – at least the lens.  Though the paper is restricted to a discussion of genes involved in making the crystallin proteins that make up the lens, EurekAlert announced this as “Insight into our […]
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Intelligent Design

Museums Train Docents to Deal with Evolution Skeptics
September 22, 2005
Being a museum docent wasn’t supposed to be this hard.  Many have always led peaceful groups of compliant tourists through the halls of science, telling their near-memorized lines without incident: Sixty million years ago, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor, but their descendants are still with us today.  Anyone know who those might […]
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Astronomy

Cosmic Baby Boom Becomes Baby Explosion
September 21, 2005
There has been a trend in deep space astronomy to find more and more mature-looking stars and galaxies farther back in time (04/06/2005, 03/10/2005, 07/08/2005).  That trend just doubled or tripled.  An announcement in Nature1 (see press release by European Southern Observatory), a thousand galaxies were found at distances corresponding to estimated ages of 9 […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can Chemicals Be Fertile?
September 21, 2005
Simon Conway Morris wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for the following entry in Current Biology.1  Ostensibly he was trying to be light-hearted and funny about mass extinctions.  We’ll see if anyone is laughing about whether massive impacts are a blessing or a curse: Manna from heaven.  So yet more violence, with the Earth […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Big Guys Finish First, Except in Drought
September 21, 2005
Nigel Williams tried to explain in Current Biology1 why “size matters” among marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands: the vectors of natural and sexual selection don’t always line up.  Females appear to like the big males when times are good, but when drought comes, the smaller dudes do better.     There’s a difficulty with […]
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Education

Elie Wiesel Gathers Nobel Laureates to Urge Kansas to Nix ID
September 19, 2005
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has gathered 38 Nobel prize winners to join him in urging the Kansas school board to reject their new science standards that question evolution (see 08/11/2005).  According to MSNBC News, their document calls evolution an “indispensable” foundation of biology.  The story was reprinted by LiveScience.com. Odd.  Biology got along just fine […]
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