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Solar System Update

What’s happening at Mars and Saturn?  In this golden age of planetary science, the extraordinary has become commonplace.  Let’s check in and see what the spacecraft have found lately. Mars.  The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still going strong, well past their nominal mission.  Despite a few minor problems (and decreasing sunlight as […]

How Cells Build Hard Parts

You have rocks in your head, and it’s a good thing, or you would die of starvation and imbalance.  Living things have need of inorganic structures for various functions.  Can you name the mineral structures in your body?  The answer is: bone, dentin, enamel and otoliths.  The last three are specific to your head.  Dentin […]

Think Before You Speak

Children are capable of thoughts before they have the words to vocalize them, according to a study published in Nature July 221 (see also summary by Paul Bloom in the same issue2 and report on Science Now).  This contradicts the postmodernist view that thought is conditioned by language, and instead suggests that humans are innately […]

Evolutionists Consider Non-Darwinian Mechanisms

According to classical Darwinian evolutionary theory, variations in the germ lines produce phenotypic changes that, on rare occasions, prove beneficial to an individual, and cause an organism to outcompete its peers in the struggle for existence.  The hypothesis of Natural selection claims that the individual with a slightly beneficial variation, being more “fit,” leaves more […]

Zoo Monkey Walks Upright

For what it’s worth, there’s a story going around about a macaque in an Israeli zoo started walking on its hind legs after a near-death experience (see MSNBC News and picture).  One news source is calling it a missing link, another claiming the strange behavior is due to brain damage. This calls for a monkey […]

Old Rivers Cut Fast, Fast, Fast Through Solid Rock

A press release from University of Vermont says, “Geologists Discover Water Cuts Through Rock at Surprising Speed.”  A five-year study concluded that the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers cut through 10 to 20 meters of solid rock in 35,000 years, “a rate far more rapid than previously thought,”  especially since most of the cutting occurred during […]

Plant “Evolutionary Leftover” Now Deemed Vital

Photorespiration, “a biological process in plants, thought to be useless and even wasteful” and “just an evolutionary leftover” from an age when carbon dioxide was more prevalent, has been found to be “necessary for healthy plant growth and if impaired could inhibit plant growth,” according to a UC Davis study published in PNAS.1 (see also […]

New Book Reveals China’s Cambrian Explosion

Nature July 221 has a book review about the first volume in English of the Chengjiang biota of China, where tens of thousands of soft-bodied organisms are preserved in early Cambrian strata.  The book, The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China: The Flowering of Early Animal Life by Xian-Guang Hou et al., is praised by reviewer […]

SETI Researcher Predicts Success Within 20 Years

According to New Scientist story reported on EurekAlert, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute predicts we will know within 20 years if there is intelligent life out there in the Milky Way.  He plugged his numbers into the Drake Equation and estimated between 10,000 and a million radio transmitters spreading messages across the galaxy.  He […]

Engineers Envy Diatoms’ Glass-Sculpturing Prowess

What is it?  An ornate crown?  A crystal serving dish cover?  A work of art?  The photo on the cover of the July 17 Science News, labeled “silicon jewels,” is a microphotograph of a diatom, a one-celled organism that lives in the sea and builds itself a glass house too small to see with the […]

You Have Motorized Sunscreens in Your Eyeballs

The pain of walking suddenly into a bright light sets up an amazing reaction, according to EurekAlert.  An alarm is sent to the fire station in the retinal cell.  There, protein firefighters hop onto a motorized shuttle on the molecular railway, and once firmly attached, are ferried swiftly to the scene of danger.  There, they […]

Blame Evolution

Men can’t help themselves.  Evolution made them that way.  That’s the gist of a science story on ABC news.  Accompanied with a picture of rebel without a cause James Dean, it begins, “Research shows that simply being male means you’re more likely to die as a young adult.  Why?  Blame evolution…and pursuit of the opposite […]

1400 Genes Essential to Grow a Fish

A team from MIT scanned the genome of the zebrafish and concluded there are about 1400 genes essential for embryonic and early larval development.  They did hands-on mutation experiments with 315 of these and found that mutations usually produced visible defects within 5 days that were invariably lethal.  Estimating that they had experimented on about […]

Haemoglobin More Complex than Thought: Regulates Blood Flow

Physiologists have long known that haemoglobin, the molecule that adds the redness to red blood cells and carries oxygen to the tissues, releases its oxygen as the blood vessels constrict.  Now, increasing evidence shows that haemoglobin (composed of four complex proteins that surround a central iron atom) is not just a passive oxygen carrier.  It […]

AIDS Policy: Morality a Casualty at the Intersection of Politics and Big Science

A news item in the July 15 issue of Nature1 seems to take sides against President Bush’s AIDS policy.  The United States, the largest donor for AIDS prevention and treatment, “is promoting a mantra known as ABC: abstinence, be faithful and use condoms.”  Although it would seem these simple preventative steps would quickly diminish the […]
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