Awards – Page 181

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Are You Cereous? Life Came from an Asteroid?

March 5, 2009

Ceres is an icy asteroid way out in space that has a lot of ice. The DAWN spacecraft is heading there. When it arrives in 2015, maybe it will find out if a substantial part of the water is in liquid state under an ice crust. Say the word water, and some think… life. […]

Dumb Ideas

Using Engineering to Prove Evolution

March 3, 2009

David Deamer smiling at a tide pool: is there an evolutionary connection? The picture accompanies an article on Science Daily about Deamer’s latest thinking on the origin of life. He’s going to share his ideas at a symposium in Oakland, California, organized by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE. According to Deamer, life began with complex […]

Astronomy

Star Children for Darwin

February 28, 2009

Why should we be looking for alien intelligence around other stars when it is right behind your eyeballs? You may not have known that you are a star child, but that’s what a leading astronomer called you. As a good star child, you need to pay tribute to Charles Darwin. In New Scientist, […]

Amazing Facts

Cell Motors Play Together

February 27, 2009

If one molecular machine by itself is a wonder, what would you think of groups of them playing in concert? Recent papers and news articles are claiming that’s what happens in living cells: molecular motors coordinate their efforts. Science Daily led off a story on this by saying, “Even within cells, the left […]

Amazing Facts

Assassins Roam Our Highways

February 22, 2009

Slinking surreptitiously through our blood streams, the assassins prowl about, looking for their targets. These are not terrorists or vigilantes. They have a license to kill. Be glad they are there; they have saved your life many times. They are called natural killer cells. PhysOrg reported on work going on at Howard Hughes […]

Amazing Facts

Songbirds Sing on a Fast Wing

February 17, 2009

Purple martins and wood thrushes are common songbirds of the eastern United States. Until recently, it has not been possible to follow their movements accurately. Now, a team of biologists in Toronto, Erie and Cambridge was able to track them with tiny geolocators. They found that the little birds fly farther and faster than previously […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin as Compassionate Buddhist Ape Descendant

February 17, 2009

National Geographic claimed today. “Darwin the Buddhist? Empathy Writings Reveal Parallels,” wrote Christine Dell’Amore about new ideas about Darwin by Paul Ekman, psychologist. What could Darwin possibly have to do with Buddhism? Ekman told an audience at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that Charles […]

Amazing Facts

The Uses of Wood Rot

February 16, 2009

Wood rot fungus doesn’t sound like a useful thing. Most people would rather get rid of it – especially those who have seen their houses decay because of it. Some scientists, however, are intrigued by it. It may have properties that could some day help power your car. Science Daily reported that the […]

Amazing Facts

Modeling Solar Cells on Butterflies

February 7, 2009

Sunlight is free – if we could just learn how to use it better. For decades, engineers have been trying to improve the efficiency of solar cells. Why not look at nature? Science Daily reported on work going on in China and Japan: “The discovery that butterfly wings have scales that act as tiny solar […]

Amazing Facts

Evolution as Efficiency Expert

February 6, 2009

Who would have thought that a lowly bacterium is a “master of industrial efficiency”? That’s what a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science called it. E. coli, the best-studied microbe, “can be thought of as a factory with just one product: itself,” a press release said. “It exists to make copies of itself, and […]

Amazing Facts

Corn Is Fuel in More Ways than One

February 3, 2009

There’s been controversy lately about the diversion of corn crops from food for humans to ethanol for engines. Why not both? A new pilot program announced by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft saves the corn cobs for eating but makes ethanol out of the straw. If so, this would make the whole plant an energy factory for the human […]

Birds

The Early Bird Gets the Just-So Story

February 3, 2009

If a catastrophic world event wiped out the dinosaurs, why did birds survive? They’re smaller and more delicate, it seems. National Geographic published a new hypothesis: they out-thought the doomed dinosaurs. “Birds survived the global catastrophe that wiped out their dinosaur relatives due to superior brainpower, a new study suggests.” A couple of […]

Dumb Ideas

Darwin Praise Service Begins

February 1, 2009

The celebrations in honor of Charles Robert Darwin for his 200th birthday (Feb. 12) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his influential book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (Nov. 29th) are well underway. It is hard to think of any other scientist who gets the kind of gushy adulation heaped […]

Dumb Ideas

Plant Lignin Found in Red Algae

January 29, 2009

Time to rewrite the textbooks again. The story of plant evolution is wrong. Lignin, a chemical that gives wood its stiffness, was thought to be unique to land plants. Now it has been found in red algae, reported Science Daily, with the title, “Billion-year Revision Of Plant Evolution Timeline May Stem From Discovery Of Lignin […]

Darwin and Evolution

Exploring the Malleability of Evolutionary Explanation

January 23, 2009

Is evolutionary theory just a very malleable and ductile idea, able to adapt to changing observations, or should it be described as a strong theory, powerful in its explanatory breadth?

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