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Solar System

Iapetus Cracked Like a Nut
January 7, 2005
Saturn has a moon named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, but the real two-faced moon is the larger Iapetus.  Since Jean Dominique Cassini discovered the moon in 1671 and noticed its varying brightness, scientists have been mystified by its two hemispheres, one as black as coal, the other white as snow.  Investigators were sure […]
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Origin of Life

Astrobiology: Follow the Money
January 7, 2005
To date, astrobiology remains, as George Gaylord Simpson once quipped, “an area of study without a known subject.” Yet it is one of the hottest research areas within NASA. A renowned origin-of-life researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Dr. Jeffrey Bada, found out why when he read the new book The Living Universe: NASA and […]
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Human Body

Why You Breathe Deep to Sniff a Flower
January 6, 2005
It may sound like a 747 when your uncle blows his nose, but scientists at Imperial College found nose airflow to be more complicated than the aerodynamics of a jumbo jet’s wing, according to a press release by the reporting the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council .  They made a 3D model of the […]
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Intelligent Design

ID Blog Opens
January 5, 2005
The Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think-tank in Seattle, has initiated a new blog, Evolution News & Views, that analyzes how evolution is presented in the media (see mission statement).  One of the first entries concerns how a PBS station in New Mexico censored the showing of the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life after […]
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Birds

Bird Studies Overthrow Evolutionary Assumptions About Population Genetics
January 5, 2005
The assumption was that gene flow homogenized a population, and selection diversified it.  But now, two studies in Nature1,2 of an English songbird called the great tit, Parus major, carried on for decades, has shown that differences between closely-associated populations can persist in spite of homogenizing gene flow.  Garant et al. explain the significance of […]
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Media

Media and Journals Conflict Over Mars Life
January 5, 2005
Timed for the one-year anniversary of the Mars Exploration Rovers, PBS aired a NOVA program last night about Spirit and Opportunity, and the teams that landed them and operated them on Mars.  As is common for popular programs about Mars exploration, NOVA suggested that evidence for past water found (especially by Opportunity at Meridiani Planum) […]
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SETI

SETI Has News
January 5, 2005
…no, not a discovery of an alien civilization, just better hardware.  Seth Shostak listed for Space.com some of the improvements in technology and search strategies that should speed up and narrow down the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by orders of magnitude.  “Of course, it would be nice to say, ‘well, we detected three Type II […]
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Uncategorized

Gecko Has Self-Cleaning Feet
January 4, 2005
Imagine self-cleaning, reusable tape.  No matter where you stick it, you can remove it and stick it on another surface, no matter how dirty, and it always acts like new.  The tokay gecko has achieved such a feat on its feet, according to a physicist and a biologist from Lewis and Clark College, Oregon, publishing […]
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Uncategorized

Theologians Wrestle with God’s Role in Disasters
January 3, 2005
As international rescue efforts accelerate in the aftermath of last week’s tsunamis in Asia (see Caltech for the geological story, and Nature News for the earthquake’s affect on Earth’s rotation), commentators and theologians are beginning to ask the “why?” questions.  The liberal Archbishop of Canterbury is doubting the existence of God, according to the UK […]
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Early Man

Anthropologist Claims Humans, Neanderthals, Australopithecines All Variations on One Species
January 1, 2005
According to a news story in the UK News Telegraph, all fossil hominids, including modern humans, Australopithecines, Neanderthals and the recent Indonesian “hobbit man,” belong to the same species: Homo sapiens.  Reporter Robert Matthews wrote about Maciej Henneberg (U of Adelaide) and his argument, based on skull sizes and body weights for 200 fossil specimens, […]
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Amazing Facts

Cellular UPS Gets Right Packages to Chloroplasts
January 1, 2005
If all your packages were sent correctly over the holidays, consider the job a plant cell has getting 3000 proteins into a chloroplast.  Mistakes are not just inconvenient.  They can be deadly, or at least bring photosynthesis to a halt.  To guarantee proper delivery of components, plant cells have a remarkable shipping system, described in […]
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Uncategorized

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week
January 1, 2005
The authors of the second paper in the previous story compared endosymbiosis to mergers of companies, apparently unaware they were comparing undirected natural processes with intelligently planned decisions by human minds: Imagine you are running a successful small business converting carbon dioxide into sugar.  Suddenly, you are taken over by a bigger company.  They commandeer […]
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Early Man

Human Evolution Falsified
December 30, 2004
The title of this entry comes from the data, not from the claims being made about it.  The cover story in Cell1 this week has set off a flurry of startling headlines: EurekAlert pronounces, “Evidence that human brain evolution was a special event” and “University of Chicago researchers discovered that humans are a ‘privileged’ evolutionary […]
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Cell Biology

Flagellar Oars Beat Like Galley Slaves In Synchronization
December 26, 2004
The Dec. 14 issue of Current Biology1 investigated another mystery in the operation of eukaryotic flagella: Flagella are microtubule-based structures that propel cells through the surrounding fluid.  The internal structure of a flagellum consists of nine parallel doublet microtubules arranged around a central pair of singlet microtubules (Figure 1).  Force for propulsion is provided by […]
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Solar System

Huygens Heads for Titan
December 24, 2004
At about 7:25 p.m. JPL time Christmas Eve, anxious scientists and engineers watching their monitors received bits from 800 million miles away, indicating that the Cassini spacecraft had successfully released the Huygens Probe over an hour earlier, with no faults or problems, right on schedule.  In mission control, engineers with Santa hats could be seen […]
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