VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Darwin and Evolution

Woese Slays Darwin
January 28, 2010
The king is dead!  Long live the king!  Such were the oxymoronic cries of olden times when royal succession took place.  Has Charles Darwin been dethroned?  One would think so, after reading Mark Buchanan’s article, “Horizontal and vertical: the evolution of evolution” in New Scientist.  Buchanan sets the stage: Just suppose that Darwin’s ideas were […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Barefoot Is Better
January 27, 2010
Who do we wear shoes?  It seems obvious; we expect that they help us avoid injuries and provide comfort.  Maybe we should think of the injuries we are getting by wearing them.     The image of the barefoot person is usually of someone poor, deprived, lower-class, hick, unclean, redneck or something else unattractive.  Shoes […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Chimps Produce Movie
January 25, 2010
The BBC is going to air a movie made by chimpanzees.  (Note: This is not a Planet of the Apes remake.)  A primatologist working on her PhD gave some chimps at the Edinburgh zoo a “Chimpcam,” a camcorder in a “chimp-proof” box, to see what they would come up with.  “Despite the fact that the […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Aliens Invade Science News
January 25, 2010
What are aliens doing in science news reports?  There is no evidence they even exist.  That has not hindered some scientists from speculating.  BBC News reporters Pallab Ghosh headlined an entry “Astronomers hopeful of detecting extra-terrestrial life,” and adorned it with a Hollywood-style alien corpse.  The article highlighted the optimism of Lord Rees, the president […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Dogs for Darwin
January 21, 2010
Science Daily shamelessly announced, “‘Survival of the Cutest’ Proves Darwin Right.”     Chris Klingenberg and Abby Drake, who published a study on mammal skull shapes in American Naturalist on dog breeds, said, “This study illustrates the power of Darwinian selection with so much variation produced in such a short period of time.  The evidence […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Molecular Machines Use Moving Parts
January 19, 2010
Research papers into the processes of molecular machines continue to reveal moving parts: “fingers” that open and close, ratchets that lock into place, and feet that move along tracks.  Here are a few samples from the voluminous literature that continues to pour from biophysics labs. DNA Polymerase I:  Scientific papers tend to be reserved in […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Respect Your Plant: Don’t Say it Evolved
January 17, 2010
Consider two propositions: (1) Plants are highly complex, integrated systems that we don’t fully understand.  (2) They evolved to become highly complex, integrated systems.  That’s basically what two scientists claimed in the American Journal of Botany, according to Science Daily reported.  But do these two propositions comport with one another? Mathematical models for the distribution […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Arctic Tern Maintains World Record Title
January 14, 2010
The arctic tern makes a marathoner look like a wimp.  This little bird has been confirmed as the migratory bird with the longest route, flying annually from pole to pole.  A team of international scientists obtained the results by using an implanted geolocator on several birds, and tracking their actual path.  The story is told […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

To Advance Technology, Make Like Nature
January 12, 2010
Scientists and engineers continue to find the most elegant solutions to practical problems by looking at plants and animals.  Here are a few of the recent examples. Wet computing:  Cells and brains do a superior job of complex processing, so why are our current computers singing how dry I am?  Not for much longer.  Science […]
CONTINUE READING
Cosmology

Bad Math Gets a Pass When It’s Naturalistic
January 8, 2010
“Now we know our place in the universe,” gloated Ohio State University astronomer Scott Gaudi, who told the science press that 15% of solar systems in the universe are like ours.  “Solar systems like our own are not rare, but we’re not in the majority, either.”  His calculation was based on how many relatively earthlike […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Best Look Ever at Life’s Smallest Rotary Motor
January 7, 2010
All cells trade in energy currency called ATP (adenosine triphosphate).  The molecular energy pellets are produced in profusion by molecular machines with rotary engines.  The engines contain all the standard parts: rotor, stator, energy input, and torque production.  They are embedded in the membranes of mitochondria and run on proton motive force.  We’ve reported many […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

It Takes More than Eyes to See
January 6, 2010
We think of eyes as objects that see, but vision requires a whole system of parts.  One of the most important is the brain.  Without your thalamus, vision would be a hopeless jumble of jerky signals, reported scientists from the National Eye Institute.     Writing in PNAS,1 Ostendorf, Liebermann and Ploner found that the […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Caught in the Act – of Exaggerating
January 4, 2010
A headline on Science Daily and PhysOrg announced breathlessly, suggested that mistakes are a gold mine for creative Darwinian power: “Mutations are the raw material of evolution.”     The press release went on to glorify Darwin: “Charles Darwin already recognized that evolution depends on heritable differences between individuals: those who are better adapted to […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

DNA Repair Requires Teamwork
January 3, 2010
As if the genetic code itself was’t incredible enough, researchers have been finding systems that repair it.  There are numerous pathways the cell can embark on to fix DNA errors.  Two key players were recently described in more detail in the journal Science.1     A damaged genetic code is worse than a book with […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Simplest Microbes More Complex than Thought
December 29, 2009
The smallest, simplest cells are prokaryotes.  These are the bacteria and archaea that lack a nucleus and are usually considered primitive.  Scientists are finding, though, that they know many of the same tricks as the more complex nucleus-bearing eukaryotes.     PhysOrg reported that a species of Mycoplasma, among the smallest independent-living bacteria, is more […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="2"]