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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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Uncategorized

Archaeologists Discover Biblical Pool of Siloam
December 24, 2004
MSNBC News reports that a team of archaeologists working in an Arab portion of Jerusalem believe they have located the pool of Siloam, where according to the Gospel of John, ch. 9, Jesus healed a blind man.     In other archaeology news, MSNBC also reported that the Israeli Antiquities Authority is calling an alabaster […]
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Cosmology

Galaxy Evolution Explorer Finds Living Fossils
December 21, 2004
Some galaxies are 10 times brighter in ultraviolet than others, and are thought to be “young” galaxies undergoing violent star formation with frequent supernova explosions.  In theory, they populated the early universe but should have quieted down by now.  The Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an ultraviolet wide-field orbiting telescope, launched April 2003, has just made a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Paleoanthropologists Fight Tooth and Nail
December 21, 2004
Ann Gibbons, reporter for Science, seems to enjoy watching the fights about human ancestry.  At Science Now, she began a news item about an alleged fossil human ancestor with a joke: How many paleoanthropologists does it take to locate a molar on the correct side of a fossil jawbone?  The short answer to this joke, […]
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Uncategorized

Da Vinci Code Not Gospel Truth, Says National Geographic
December 17, 2004
National Geographic News took a break from its usual nature articles to discuss the popular novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and examine its historical claims.  “No Gospel” in the story, it decides; while giving Brown’s theory a hearing, it concludes there is no evidence Mary Magdalene married Jesus, that they had a […]
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Uncategorized

Did Early Islam Promote Science?
December 16, 2004
Nature published a news feature this week crediting a religion, Islam, with advancing science, but saying nothing about the Christian roots of science.1  It begins, Western science owes much to Islam’s golden age – a debt that is often forgotten.  To help redress the balance, Fuat Sezgin has reconstructed a host of scientific treasures using […]
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Dinosaurs

Cretaceous Temperature Estimates Point Out Flaws in Climate Models
December 15, 2004
Nature1 this week described evidence for high temperatures in the Arctic during the Cretaceous that it termed “astounding.”  Based on work by Jenkins et al. that Arctic waters were 15°C, as warm as modern coastal waters off France and Maryland. For a region blanketed in darkness for half of the year, the Arctic Ocean was […]
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Uncategorized

Late Bloomer Galaxy Just Now Getting Into Star Formation?
December 15, 2004
According to a story in New Scientist, a “young” galaxy is just now starting its process of star formation.  Most galaxies formed more than 10 billion years ago.  Those born later tend to be fashioned from recycled gas rich in metals that were forged by previous generations of stars.  But astronomers Trinh Thuan of the […]
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