Mt. St. Helens Recalls Overturned Paradigms
May 18, 2010
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May 1980 not only eroded mountains and canyons, it caused earthquake shifts in geological paradigms.
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Like Magic: Spiders Convert Fluid to Steel-Strong Silk
May 17, 2010
How do they do it? Spiders spin their webs with such ease, but scientists know they are working a kind of material magic. Inside the storage sac, the proteins act like a fluid. Outside the spinnerets, that fluid turns into a structural rope that is stronger than steel, but elastic enough to absorb the energy […]
Worlds Strongest Animal Discovered
May 12, 2010
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark announced the world’s strongest animal. The strength of this animal is 10 to 30 times that of any other species. Before revealing what it is, here are some additional hints: It is the most abundant multicellular animal on earth. It has the world’s strongest muscles, and outperforms man-made […]
Bacteria: Lets Harness Those Perfect Machines
May 11, 2010
Ten Italian scientists have a novel idea. They want to hitch up their wagons to bacteria and use them to power nanomachines. It’s too much work to build such “perfect machines” from scratch, they said. Why not just take advantage of what nature has already provided? Their paper in PNAS1 is downright dreamy […]
Can Darwin Be Rescued from a New Eye Discovery?
May 7, 2010
Scientists find waveguides and noise receptors built into the retina.
Scientist Sees Evolutionary Sense in Coordinated Complexity
April 30, 2010
An article on PhysOrg tells “A vertebrate story,” and a story it is: the more complex a phenomenon becomes, the more it makes evolutionary sense. Portuguese scientists were studying the interaction of Hox genes with the development of the ribs in vertebrates. You can imagine the control that these genes must have when […]
Southpaw Explanations Out of Left Field
April 30, 2010
All proteins are left handed. Some humans are left handed. Can evolution explain that? Evolutionists are never known to be at a loss for words when asked to explain anything, provided they are allowed liberal use of the word perhaps. A new projection theme for the first left-handed amino acids that comprise proteins […]
Clock Gene Same in Humans and Birds
April 29, 2010
Science Daily, this “not only sheds light on how our internal annual body clocks function but also shows a key link between birds and mammals that has been conserved over 300 million years.” Mammals, including humans, have a hormone released by the pituitary gland that controls melatonin levels – known to affect the […]
New Theory on Evolution of Bat Flight
April 27, 2010
How did bats evolve the ability to fly? Evolution helped them out by providing them with higher energy. After all, “Flight is among the most energy-consuming activities” in the animal kingdom, said a team of Chinese and Canadian scientists reporting in PNAS,1 so it’s obvious that evolution must have provided the genes to get the […]
Cosmologist Suffers Paranoid Delusions: Media Promotes His Views
April 26, 2010
“They’re coming to get us, and I’m sure of it, because I know everything.” What would you think of someone who talked like that? What if he were one of the most famous cosmologists alive today? The man is Stephen Hawking – that wheelchair-bound math wizard who talks with a speech synthesizer and once fell […]
To Sleep, To Dream: To Dream, Perchance, to Learn
April 25, 2010
When you have learned a complex task, take a nap and dream about it. A new study shows that dreaming helps consolidate the memory in your mind and helps you perform the task better next time around. Science Daily reported on research by scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. They tested 99 […]
Update on Interplant Internet
April 23, 2010
One of the early “amazing” stories reported in these pages concerned the startling observation that plants use a kind of “email” system in their own interplant “internet” (see 07/13/2001). What has been learned in the nine years since that story appeared? Quite a lot, and another fascinating article about plant communication appeared this week in […]
Maxwells Demon Helps Run Your Muscles
April 19, 2010
James Clerk Maxwell once speculated that the second law of thermodynamics could be violated if an agent or “demon” could sort the hot and cold molecules at a barrier, thus overcoming the tendency toward thermal equilibrium. Something like this has been found at work in the molecular machines in our muscles. The actin-myosin motor is […]
Genetic Subcode Discovered
April 18, 2010
Computer programmers know all about subroutines. One master program can easily call other programs, which can return results back to the master program. That’s very 1960s. Today’s modular software responds dynamically from disparate sources and responds to feedback from embedded triggers. They can call routines written in other codes or languages. We’re beginning to find […]
Psychologists Portray I.D. as a Form of Evolution
April 17, 2010
No need to draw a line between design and evolution, say two psychologists at the University of Iowa. Intelligent design is really a lot like evolution. They think we need to “better appreciate the actual forces that unite the processes of change across both evolutionary and developmental timescales.” This strange theory was announced […]