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Visual Aid: Chance or Design?

March 1, 2005

A TV commercial for the Honda Accord has been circulating around the net as a popular download (see Steel City’s Finest). It shows the parts of a car, without human intervention, interacting in strange ways like a Rube Goldberg device, resulting in a finished car rolling off the ramp. Garrison Keillor adds the punch line, […]

Origin of Life

Aliens of the Deep Preaches Astrobiology and Chemical Evolution

March 1, 2005

Titanic director James Cameron has released a large-format, 3D film of undersea life around hydrothermal vents, entitled Aliens of the Deep and released by Walt Disney pictures. National Geographic News interviewed Cameron. When asked why he speculated in the movie that life could have originated around deep-sea vents, he said: Presumably the hydrothermal activity was […]

Uncategorized

Mars Life in Embalming Fluid?

March 1, 2005

A researcher with the Mars Express project claims to have found formaldehyde along with methane in exceptional amounts, reports News@Nature. Since methane is destroyed by radiation in hundreds of days, and formaldehyde in several days, there is either a geological source for it, or it comes from living organisms in the soil, Vittorio Formisano claims. […]

Solar System

Cassini Shines in the Light of Saturn

February 28, 2005

Since its arrival at Saturn last June (see 07/01/2004 entry), the Cassini orbiter has achieved a string of phenomenal successes, and these just 15% of the way into its tour of Saturn’s rings, moons and magnetosphere (see JPL press release). The prize has been publication of initial science results in Nature1 and Science2 – the […]

Early Man

Dating Disaster: Is Neanderthal the New Piltdown?

February 25, 2005

We all know it by heart: Neanderthal Man was a big-boned, hairy cave-dweller that got pushed out of northern Europe 40,000 years ago by the smarter modern humans. Could this all be wrong? Did some bones actually belong to real people living in recorded history? The man who dated some of these bones, […]

Dinosaurs

South American Dinosaur Find Modifies Theories

February 23, 2005

A deinonychus-like dinosaur has been found in Argentina. Representatives of this group, including velociraptor, had previously only been known in the northern hemisphere and Asia. Since South America was supposedly on another land mass at the time, “The new discovery demonstrates that Cretaceous theropod faunas from the southern continents shared greater similarity with those of […]

Cell Biology

Clutch Enables Your Motors to Achieve 100% Efficiency

February 23, 2005

Those little ATP synthase motors (see 01/30/2005 entry) in your body and (in all living cells) made news again in Nature1 last week. Scientists in Tokyo performed an ingenious set of experiments to measure the efficiency of the F1 synthesizing domain. They attached a tiny magnet to the camshaft so that they could turn it […]

Cosmology

State of the Cosmos Address Offered

February 21, 2005

On the occasion of the centennial of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Alan Guth, the father of inflationary cosmology, with colleague David I. Kaiser of MIT, took stock of cosmological theories in the Feb. 11 issue of Science.1 How has inflation fared since its controversial but hopeful proposal in 1981? “Inflation was invented a quarter of […]

Politics and Ethics

Iraqi Marshlands on Slow Mend

February 18, 2005

The ecological disaster wrought by Saddam Hussein’s policy of drying up ancient marshes along the Tigris and Euphrates (see 08/18/2003 and 05/01/2003 entries) is still severe, reports Science,1,2 but groups are working hard on restoration. It may take many years and will probably never be the same. About 20% has been reflooded, with portions coming […]

Uncategorized

Pot Shots at Hot Spots

February 18, 2005

Say that title five times, and you’ll be as flummoxed as geologists reporting in Science1 last week that long-believed assumptions are wrong. They looked at three seamount chains in the Pacific, long thought to provide evidence of tectonic plates moving across stationary hot spots, and found that current theory cannot account for them: Our findings […]

Early Man

Is Darwinism a Free Lunch Scam?

February 18, 2005

Neurobiologist William H. Calvin commented at the AAAS meeting this week about the claim that modern humans lived much earlier than thought (see 02/16/2005 entry). To him, it means that we need to rethink our assumptions that bigger brains are smarter, according to a report on EurekAlert. If “Homo sapiens was walking around Africa 200,000 […]

Uncategorized

Mars Dry Most of Its Life

February 18, 2005

If Mars had liquid water, it was only briefly early in its history. Observations from the Mars Express, which just celebrated its first year in orbit, show no hint that liquid water has existed any time recently, reports Nature Science Update. It’s not that H2O is rare; it is abundant at the poles, for instance, […]

Uncategorized

Introns Engineered for Genetic Repair

February 18, 2005

Scientists at Purdue University are using bacterial machines to treat cancer and other diseases. These machines, called Group I introns, were thought to be useless: Once thought of as genetic junk, introns are bits of DNA that can activate their own removal from RNA, which translates DNA’s directions for gene behavior. Introns then splice the […]

Bible and Theology

New Date for Edom Fits Biblical Record

February 18, 2005

The critics were wrong, and the Bible was right, according to new dates established for the kingdom of Edom southeast of the Dead Sea. This is the gist of a report from UC San Diego that found evidence of extensive copper mining in the area much earlier than previously thought. The area studied had “been […]

Dinosaurs

Jurassic Park Revision #76: Bonehead Dinosaurs Not Head-Butters

February 16, 2005

Pachycephalosaurs, or bone-heads, were dome-headed dinosaurs with skulls nine inches thick. Interpretation: they rammed each other like rams, or head-butted jeeps filled with hapless human tourists in the movies. Wrong, reports National Geographic in the March 2005 issue: research by Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin has shown that the thick skulls, surprisingly, could not have […]

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