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Orchids: Epitome of Plant Evolution

April 28, 2008

“Orchids might be considered the epitome of plant evolution,” said David Roberts [Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew] and Kingsley Dixon [Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Australia] in a primer on orchids in Current Biology.1 Yet some of the facts they shared about these amazingly diverse and well-adapted plants are puzzling for evolutionary theory. First, […]

Amazing Facts

Complex Ankle Puts Bounce in Your Step

April 25, 2008

“The ankle is incredibly efficient at working so the amount of energy you burn with the ankle is much lower than what would be predicted with just isolated muscle studies.” That’s what kinesiologist Daniel Ferris (U of Michigan) said in an article on Science Daily. His team measured the efficiency of the muscles and tendons […]

Amazing Facts

Moths Navigate in the Dark Against the Wind

April 12, 2008

A moth weighs little more than a piece of paper, but it does things no paper blowing in the wind can do: it can navigate with and against the wind to get where it needs to go. Science Daily reported on work by UK scientists who used “entomological radar” to monitor where the […]

Cell Biology

Watch for Falling Amino Acids

April 8, 2008

A long-standing problem of origin-of-life theories is how proteins became left-handed. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, come in right-handed and left-handed forms, yet life uses only the left-handed form. The two isoforms are otherwise identical—yet one amino acid of the wrong hand in a protein spells doom for its function. Wherever […]

Darwin and Evolution

Darwin and Complexity: Another Genetic Solution?

April 2, 2008

It remains one of the biggest obstacles to belief in evolution that a random, unguided process could build an eye, a wing or any of thousands of complex structures.

Dumb Ideas

Fooling Oneself About Aliens

April 1, 2008

Would you give a Bible to a Neanderthal, or invite a porpoise to your church? Who would ask such questions? Seth Shostak would – director of the SETI Institute. On Space.com, he speculated about “alien sociology.” Shostak wrote the weekly SETI column for Space.com to answer critics who think that broadcasting our presence […]

Amazing Facts

Seeing Vision in a New Light

March 31, 2008

The eye is like a camera, right? That picture is way too simplistic. The eye-brain visual system does image processing and gleans information from photons in diverse and remarkable ways. Here are some recent findings by scientists: Upward mobility: A team of Harvard scientists found some retinal ganglion cells that sense upward motion. Writing in […]

Dumb Ideas

Explaining Two Billion Years Without Evolution

March 28, 2008

How does an evolutionist explain the perception that (within their timeline), no multicellular animals emerged for two billion years after the origin of life? Jonathan Wells has compared this to walking down a football field and encountering nothing but single cells till the 60 yard line, then boom! – all the animal phyla with their […]

Amazing Facts

Scientist Harnesses ATP Synthase

March 27, 2008

How would you like shorter waits at airports? fast screening for disease? the ability to detect biological warfare agents quickly? That may be possible soon – thanks to an amazing man-and-nature cooperative technology reported by Science Daily. A team led by Wayne Frasch at Arizona State is on the verge of an invention that can […]

Bible and Theology

How to Address an Alien

March 17, 2008

How would you like this job: your assignment is to be the speechwriter for planet earth. You are to figure out what our first message is to the aliens – to give them a good first impression as we introduce the human species to the galactic community. “No kidding? What does it pay?” […]

Amazing Facts

The Gecko in the Flight Simulator

March 17, 2008

It’s a lizard! It’s a plane! It’s Supergecko! Researchers at UC Berkeley (where else) put a gecko into a wind tunnel to watch it fly. News about gecko’s magic feet that allow it to run vertically up glass is almost old hat now (08/27/2002, 01/04/2005). Even a gecko can lose its footing, though, and thereon […]

Dumb Ideas

Humans as Lab Rats, or, Can an Evolved Brain Reason?

March 12, 2008

Evolutionary biologists and neurologists use their fellow humans as guinea pigs, performing experiments and drawing conclusions about their evolutionary past. One question rarely asked is how reliable are conclusions drawn from the biologist’s brain that is presumably just as evolved as that of its lab subject. Everyone does philosophy, but some do it […]

Amazing Facts

The Root Route

March 4, 2008

Why don’t roots push a plant right out of the ground? It’s a question only a scientist or an 8-year-old kid would ask. The answer is more amazing than either would have realized. Root hairs feel their way around obstacles and find the openings, in the dark, by means of a complex interplay of proteins […]

Amazing Facts

Cool Bat Tricks

March 1, 2008

Bats put on a dazzling air show. Science Daily revealed that the acrobatic mammals have magnetic instruments. Somehow, they are able to use the magnetite in their cells as navigational aids. Scientists from Leeds University and Princeton conducted experiments on large brown bats. They were able to steer the bats off course by issuing magnetic […]

Astronomy

Is Cosmology Getting Wimp-y?

February 28, 2008

Physics and astronomy are usually thought of as the “hard” sciences, where empiricism is king. Read the following excerpts from a story on the BBC News science page with that in mind (suggestion: replace “dark matter” with “mysterious unknown stuff”). The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, […]

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