VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Uncategorized

Religion and Charity Evolved, Claim Darwinists
March 16, 2005
“Charity begins at Homo sapiens,” quips Mark Buchanan in New Scientist, noting that only human beings exhibit “true altruism” (i.e., helping genetic strangers, such as those suffering from the Asian tsunamis) when such behavior cannot help the individual pass on his or her genes.  He evaluates the various theories that evolutionary psychologists have come up […]
CONTINUE READING
Origin of Life

Mars Makeover Underway
March 16, 2005
Amazing claims about Mars are coming in almost too fast to fathom, reports Space.Com, especially from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter.  These include evidence for recently active volcanos, frozen ice beds, methane and vestiges of glaciers and waterfalls.  Activity is “only yesterday” in the standard geological timescale.  One said, “it could start up […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinian Law Protect the Unfit?
March 15, 2005
Eggheads at Vanderbilt import evolutionary ideas into legal policies that could negatively affect individual rights in devastating ways.
CONTINUE READING
Cell Biology

The Future of Biology: Reverse Engineering
March 14, 2005
Just as an engineer can model the feedback controls required in an autopilot system for an aircraft, the biologist can construct models of cellular networks to try to understand how they work.  “The hallmark of a good feedback control design is a resulting closed loop system that is stable and robust to modeling errors and […]
CONTINUE READING
Fossils

Oldest Fossils Aren’t
March 11, 2005
A new analysis of the world’s oldest claimed fossil rock, a banded deposit off the coast of Greenland said to be 3.8 billion years old, probably contains no signature of life, reports Stephen Moorbath (Oxford) in Nature.1  He has visited the Akilia site twice where rocks were purported to contain graphite of biological origin.  He […]
CONTINUE READING
Cell Biology

Bacterial Engineering On Par With Higher Life
March 11, 2005
Bacteria aren’t the simple life-forms microbiologists used to envision, writes Zemer Gitai in Cell.1 Recent advances have demonstrated that bacterial cells have an exquisitely organized and dynamic subcellular architecture.  Like their eukaryotic counterparts, bacteria employ a full complement of cytoskeletal proteins, localize proteins and DNA to specific subcellular addresses at specific times, and use intercellular […]
CONTINUE READING
Origin of Life

Martians Might Be Troglodytes
March 11, 2005
According to an article on Space.Com, Spirit and Opportunity aren’t going to find critters on the surface.  Since the surface is harsh because of radiation, a safer environment might be found in caves.  The discovery of soluble rock and methane is leading some to imagine that extensive caves might exist on Mars, and maybe that […]
CONTINUE READING
Early Man

Are Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers Evolving or Devolving?
March 11, 2005
Anthropologists typically view stone age tribes as stuck in an eddy from primitive beginnings, never advancing into civilization.  Yet some tribes of hunter-gatherers in Thailand and Laos appear to have been farmers in their past, reports Science Now with apparent surprise: Traditionally, anthropologists thought that modern hunter-gatherer tribes like the Mlabri descended through the ages […]
CONTINUE READING
Solar System

Titan: Case of the Missing Methane (and Ethane)
March 11, 2005
In Astrobiology Magazine this week, an article explained why the lack of methane and ethane oceans on Titan is so mysterious.  Jonathan Lunine, a chemist and astrobiologist who has been studying Titan for over two decades, explained why these hydrocarbons ought to be there.  Methane (CH4) is split by ultraviolet light from the sun.  The […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Plants Produce Jigsaw Puzzles
March 11, 2005
The cells on a leaf interlock one another, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  In a manner similar to jigsaw puzzles, which can be lifted by the hand even though composed of individually-weak pieces, this gives the leaf structural strength.  How does this come about?  In the current issue of Cell,1 Jeffrey Settleman (Harvard) explains […]
CONTINUE READING
Politics and Ethics

Mad Science: Stanford to Create Rat with Human Brain
March 10, 2005
Those who thought stem cell research was about helping people afflicted with disease may become alarmed over Stanford’s latest experiment, reported by the UK News Telegraph: the creation of a lab rat with all human brain cells.  The article quotes Wesley Smith of Centre for Bioethics and Culture warning, “biotechnology is becoming dangerously close to […]
CONTINUE READING
Cosmology

Complex at the Beginning: Distant Galaxy Cluster Highly Developed
March 10, 2005
Observations from the European Southern Observatory have pointed to a “surprise” discovery: a cluster of galaxies 9 billion light-years away that is “in a very advanced state of development.”     The press release points to just how surprising is this find: “The discovery of such a complex and mature structure so early in the […]
CONTINUE READING
Health

Tissues Build Firebreaks to Avoid Disease
March 9, 2005
An article in the March 3 issue of Nature1 explains how tissues communicate to fight off infection.  As reported before, cells display samples of the proteins they contain on their outer membranes, a process called presentation.  Killer T cells wander around, like cops, looking at the presentations.  When they recognize alien proteins (antigens), they respond […]
CONTINUE READING
Physical Science

Water Can Get Hotter than the Sun
March 9, 2005
When vacuum bubbles form in turbulent water, they can collapse violently in a process called cavitation.  Scientists reporting in Nature1,2 March 3 showed that the energy of cavitation can heat the plasma in the bubble to 15,000 degrees Kelvin – hotter than the surface of the brightest stars.  The resulting flash can sometimes be seen […]
CONTINUE READING
Politics and Ethics

Did Haeckel’s Defunct Recapitulation Theory Influence the Supreme Court?
March 8, 2005
One of our readers uncovered an amicus brief from the American Psychological Association (q.v. on American Bar Association website) encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn capital punishment for minors (see 03/04/2005 entry).  One of the key arguments in the brief is that “Neuropsychological research demonstrates that the adolescent brain has not reached adult maturity.”  Zeroing […]
CONTINUE READING
Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly"]