VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Uncategorized

If You Like Cancer, You Can Live on Mars
December 8, 2003
The optimistic title, “Humans could survive Mars visit,” belies the bad news in the body of the article on BBC News.  The article reports on findings announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, based on data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft instrument, Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE), which, unfortunately, stopped working after […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

The Fruit Fly in the Flight Simulator
December 8, 2003
The simplest things can be the most extraordinary.  If you like finding amazing wonders in everyday things, you’ll be fascinated to read about the common fly in the cover story of Caltech’s magazine E&S (Engineering and Science).1  Michael Dickinson, a zoologist turned engineer, has described his Caltech team’s work trying to reverse-engineer the flight systems […]
CONTINUE READING
Intelligent Design

Evolutionary Theorizing: Only Atheists Need Apply
December 7, 2003
Simon Conway Morris is a thorough-going evolutionist and anticreationist.  You would think that would make the editors of Science happy, but on Dec. 5 they printed a scathing review by Douglas E. Irwin1 of his recent book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.  Though Morris accepts the full story of Darwinian common ancestry, […]
CONTINUE READING
Fossils

New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists
December 5, 2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers.  Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years, evolution has dished […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Intracellular Railroad Has Park-and-Ride System
December 4, 2003
Cells are like miniaturized cities, with elaborate transportation systems ferrying their cargo to and fro (see Feb. 25 headline).  Just like a city may have railroads, busses, cars and monorails, the cell has multiple kinds of transport motors: dyneins, kinesins, and myosins.  Scientists have learned that most of the roadways are like one-way monorails: actin […]
CONTINUE READING
Dinosaurs

If a Meteor Roasted the Dinosaurs, Where’s the Charcoal?
December 4, 2003
A majority of scientists continue to believe that a falling asteroid felled the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but problems remain.  London geologists went looking for evidence of charcoal at the Cretaceous-Tertiary layers, when the assumed impact occurred, assuming that the force of impact would have ignited a worldwide conflagration (thus the extinction of the […]
CONTINUE READING
Fossils

Got That?  The Complex Story of African Mammal Evolution
December 3, 2003
The article by Jean-Jacques Jaeger in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1 is pretty upbeat about the evolutionary history of African mammals, but takes a bit of untangling to follow.     He begins confidently, “For some 40 million years, the Afro-Arabian landmass existed in splendid isolation.  A newly described fossil fauna from the end […]
CONTINUE READING
Fossils

Fossil Fingers Fuddle Phylogeny
December 3, 2003
Another fossil complicates the evolutionists’ picture of tetrapod origins (see Aug 9 headline).  Chinese paleontologists have reported1 a new marine reptile from Triassic strata (242 million years old, more or less).  Unexpectedly, it has extra digits (a condition called polydactyly) just like the putative ancestors of tetrapods from the earlier Devonian strata (370-354 million years […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Adaptive Radiation: A Darwinian Mechanism Inherits the Wind
December 3, 2003
Another Darwinian assumption needs to be re-examined.  Adaptive radiation, the belief that a species isolated on an island will diverge into many species, has been hit by a hurricane.     Calsbeek and Smith, writing in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, studied lizards on the Bahamas after Hurricane Floyd devastated the islands.  “Islands are […]
CONTINUE READING
Politics and Ethics

Editorial: The Cult of the Prize
December 3, 2003
In a letter to the editor in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, historian Robert Marc Friedman (U. of Oslo) asks, “Is science losing out in the race for recognition?”  The race for honors, he feels, is diminishing science: Raymond Damadian’s public dispute (see “Physician launches public protest over medical Nobel” Nature 425, 648; 2003) […]
CONTINUE READING
Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered
December 2, 2003
A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News.  It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together.  To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]
CONTINUE READING
Solar System

Vega Has a Neptune?
December 1, 2003
The BBC News and EurekAlert are pretty excited about a discovery at Vega, the sapphire-blue star that hangs overhead in summertime (from the Northern Hemisphere; Aussies see it at the horizon).  Astronomers think they see a clump of material that might be at the distance from the star similar to Neptune’s distance from the sun.  […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Elaborate Quality Control Governs the Cell’s Protein-Folding Factory
December 20, 2002
If it weren’t for quality control in our cells, we’d be dead.  That’s the gist of an amazing Insight article in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature.1  “Aberrant proteins are extremely harmful to cells,” the authors begin.  How harmful?  Here is a short list of diseases that can result from improperly folded proteins or failures […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Evolution As Assumption
December 20, 2002
51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted.  Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.”  They used an evolutionary […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?
December 20, 2002
51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories?  “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist.  “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.”  The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence.  […]
CONTINUE READING
Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly"]