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Dumb Ideas

Liberals Less Skittish than Conservatives, Study Claims
September 19, 2008
A study by scientists at University of Nebraska claims that conservatives are more easily startled than liberals, reported National Geographic News.  The results, partly funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Science,1 referenced a 2006 paper from Evolution and Human Behavior that had claimed “feelings of disgust and fear of disease have been […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Prevolution of Evolution: Life Marches In
September 17, 2008
There’s a new word preceding the E word evolution.  Two Harvard scientists have made up a new word, prevolution, to describe a supposed stage before replication when natural selection was helping evolution evolve.  What does prevolution act on?  Simple, silly: prelife.     Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki titled their paper in PNAS, “Prevolutionary dynamics […]
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Amazing Facts

Turing Test Stands: Your Brain Outperforms Computers
September 14, 2008
What is the speed of thought?  Computer speeds are measured in megahertz and gigahertz, but that’s only part of the story.  The ability to compute an answer to a problem depends on the programming, too.  How does the brain compare with our best computers?  A scientist from UC San Francisco and one from the Salk […]
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Amazing Facts

Star Death Amazing – but Puzzling
September 13, 2008
Twinkle, twinkle, little stBOOM!  The explosions of some dying stars are so powerful yet so rapid, mere measurements seem inadequate to describe them.  Two death-star events were reported in recent articles.  Despite the bravado of textbook orthodoxy, the articles both mentioned that astronomers really don’t understand what’s going on all that well.     Eta […]
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Amazing Facts

Animals Got Rhythm; Scientists Don’t
September 12, 2008
Here’s a biological puzzle with plenty of room for young researchers to solve: the workings of biological rhythms.  All animals respond to rhythms in periods of hours, days, weeks, months, and years, but as George E. Bentley (UC Berkeley) wrote in Current Biology,1 how they do it is only partially understood.  “Sometimes the questions are […]
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Amazing Facts

Butterfly Wings Xeroxed
September 6, 2008
If you can’t build it, copy it.  Scientists have had a hard time reconstructing the photonic crystals that make butterfly wings shimmer with light (01/29/2003), so they made, in effect, a carbon copy.  PhysOrg described how scientists at Penn State made impressions of the regularly-spaced geometric shapes from a butterfly wing and transferred it to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Spore Game: Evolution or ID?
September 4, 2008
Spore is a highly-anticipated computer game that just came out.  Evolutionists are claiming it as a model of how life evolves – but intelligent-design advocates are calling it an ID game, pure and simple.  Who’s right?     Carl Zimmer, a science writer, is among those counting Spore points for Darwin.  His blog entry from […]
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Amazing Facts

Cellular Machines Work Like Cameras, Winches and Turboprops
September 3, 2008
The discovery that cells are filled with molecular motors is one of the major achievements of late 20th-century molecular biology.  Biochemists routinely use the word “motor” when describing cellular processes, because, in fact, machines made of protein actually do use energy to perform work.  Now we have a new hybrid science – biophysics – that […]
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Amazing Facts

Plant Perfume Manipulates Pollinator Behavior
August 31, 2008
You’re a plant, stuck in the ground.  Around you are organisms with wings flitting freely about.  You need to get them to land on your flowers, but not linger too long.  How do you do it?  Attract them with sweet smells, but send them away with a bitter aftertaste.  That’s how the tobacco plant manipulates […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionist Calls Everyone Crazy
August 27, 2008
Last month she called everyone a hypocrite (07/06/2008).  This month, Robin Nixon of Live Science called everyone crazy.  Her latest article is entitled, “Why We Are All Insane.”  But then, how could we trust her explanation?     Attributing everything about humanity to a blind process of evolution, Nixon wove a tale of mythical ancestors […]
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Amazing Facts

Use Your Cow Compass
August 25, 2008
Cattle and deer seem to align themselves to magnetic north.  German and Czech scientists, reporting in PNAS,1 used aerial observations to detect the tendency of grazing herds to line up in north-south directions.  The alignment was to magnetic north, not true north—indicating a sensitivity to earth’s magnetic field, as known to exist in migrating birds, […]
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Amazing Facts

How Chromosomes Pack Without Exploding
August 24, 2008
When preparing to divide, a cell has to copy all its DNA accurately and pack it into chromosomes.  A professor at U Chicago told Science Daily this is “like compacting your entire wardrobe into a shoebox.”  The cell has another difficulty in this compaction process, though: DNA, being negatively charged, resists packing.     Eukaryotes […]
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Amazing Facts

Membrane Switches Keep Your Brain Humming
August 14, 2008
Tunnels with rotating gates and rocker switches – this sounds like mechanical engineering.  It’s the machinery that helps power your brain, reported scientists from UCLA and the Pasteur Institute.     Their paper in Science described the structure of just one of many kinds of membrane channels.1  Cell membranes are lined with elaborate one-way gates.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Does Cancer Illustrate Fitness?
August 13, 2008
Most people think of health and vitality when they hear the word “fitness.”  Why, then, does an article on Science Daily apply the word to one of the biggest scourges of mankind?  “Scientists from The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and the University of California discovered that the underlying process in tumor formation is […]
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Amazing Facts

Cassini Survives Enceladus Geyser Plunge
August 12, 2008
The Cassini spacecraft has done it again – returned some of the most stunning outer planet images ever taken.  Zipping by at just 30 miles over the active surface of Enceladus, Cassini did a “skeet shoot” of high-res images achieving 7 meters per pixel in places – the highest resolution of any shot of a […]
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