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Simple Darwinian Theories Have to Be Abandoned
January 17, 2005
Mutate one gene and a cascade of changes can result.  This effect is called pleiotropy (see 10/01/2003 entry).  According to an article by Stephen Strauss reporting for the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, “The emerging richness of pleiotropy means that any simple Darwinian notion of what is going on during natural selection has to be […]
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Solar System

Flying Saucer Lands on Titan
January 15, 2005
The Huygens Probe successfully landed on the surface of Titan Friday morning, and appears to have remained active for an hour after impact. See the official European Space Agency site for latest scientific results.  Download this 27-page Mission Description from JPL (2.0mb) for a detailed plan of the now highly successful mission.     At […]
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Education

Critical Thinking Outlawed in Georgia School District
January 13, 2005
A federal judge has ordered the stickers removed from Cobb County, Georgia biology textbooks that encourage students to think critically when examining the theory of evolution (see 11/08/2004 entry), according to Yahoo News.  The attorney defending the stickers tried to argue that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and that the school board was […]
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Human Body

Robots Don’t See as Well as You Do
January 12, 2005
Robot designers are still working on ways to emulate the human eye.  Just when you thought digital cameras were all the rage, we learn from EurekAlert they are miserable substitutes when put into the eye sockets of robots.  Robot-vision export Vladimir Brajovic explains: Often, when we take a picture with a digital or film camera, […]
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Dinosaurs

This Badger Ate Dinosaurs for Breakfast
January 12, 2005
BBC News claims a new fossil discovery published in Nature,1 a large badger-like carnivorous mammal, ate dinosaurs for lunch.  But then again, who knows what time of day the Cretaceous restaurants were open?     The fossil, another in a series of spectacular finds from the Liaoning Province in China, is creating a sensation, because […]
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Uncategorized

DNA Translators Cannot Tolerate Editor Layoffs
January 12, 2005
We’ve explained elsewhere about the family of molecular machines called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (see 05/26/2004 entry and its embedded links).  Their job is to associate each word of DNA code (codon) with its corresponding piece of a protein (amino acid).  In a very real sense, they translate the DNA code into the protein code.  One amazing […]
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Education

Dover, PA Administrators Will Read ID Statement
January 11, 2005
In a compromise aimed at relieving recalcitrant teachers, the Dover, Pennsylvania school board decided that administrators will read a four-paragraph statement about evolution and intelligent design (ID) to high school students for any teachers that want to “opt out” of the new policy (see 11/04/2004 headline).  The decision, according to the York Daily Record, was […]
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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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