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Dumb Ideas

Walking Tall: Earth Pushed Hominids Out of Africa
December 19, 2007
Why did humans evolve from stoop-shouldered apemen into tall, proud, big-brained Europeans?  Africa pushed them out.  That seems to be the idea behind a story spreading throughout the popular science media, such as on Science Daily, entitled, “Geologists Say ‘Wall Of Africa’ Allowed Humanity To Emerge.”  The idea is based on circumstantial evidence that, according […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Translation Has Codes Upon Codes
December 17, 2007
The DNA code is protected by another code, and is read with a machine that reads a third code.  This is an emerging picture from ongoing research into DNA transcription, as reported in Science.1     In the 1950s, scientists were astonished to find a code at the genetic basis of life.  DNA’s four-letter alphabet, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Blast Your Way to Evolutionary Progress
December 15, 2007
The cartoony slogan “Evolve or perish” garnered support from a new story about evolution.  Dave Mosher on Live Science shamelessly titled his article “Catastrophic impacts made life flourish,” describing the theory by Birger Schmitz [U of Lund, Sweden] that the Ordovician extinction was caused by a meteor impact.  Out of the wreckage, a plethora of […]
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Amazing Facts

Geology Sinks in the Mud
December 14, 2007
Question: what is the most abundant sedimentary rock in the world?  Follow-up question: what would happen to the science of geology if the consensus theory of how this most abundant sedimentary rock was deposited turns out to be wrong?  Prepare for a paradigm shift: experiments have shown mistakes in long-held assumptions about mudstone formation. Here’s […]
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Dumb Ideas

Walking Upright Is Not Just for Pregnant Females
December 13, 2007
Pregnant women have enhanced curvature of the lower spine, which helps them support their babies during pregnancy.  Obviously, this must have evolved that way because emerging apes rising to their feet had different physiological needs.  Most science news reports are echoing this theme from a paper in Nature1 without any qualms about the Lamarckism or […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwin Fish Pokes ID in the Eye
December 13, 2007
Some science news outlets are having an eye-poking battle against intelligent design with the latest eye-popping claim about eye evolution.  It seems to have started in Australia on Science Alert, where some exceptionally-preserved placoderm fossils were found: The palaeobiologist discovered that unlike all living vertebrate animals – which includes everything from the jawless lamprey fish […]
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Amazing Facts

What Keeps Skin Strong? Velcro!
December 8, 2007
Skin would fall to pieces were it not for velcro-like molecules that bind its cells together.  These molecules, called cadherins, make skin strong but also supple.  Their secret was explained by Ashraf Al-Amoudi of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, quoted in Live Science.  “The trick is that each cadherin binds twice: once to a molecule […]
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Dumb Ideas

Origin of Life: Food for Queazy Thought
December 6, 2007
New theories of the origin of life seem to come and go like fashion trends.  A biochemist at University of California at Santa Barbara (Helen Hansma) put out a new plot line about biomolecules forming between the protective flakes of mica.  This was all Dave Mosher at Live Science (see reprint on MSNBC) needed to […]
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Solar System

Active Moons Challenge Old-Age Beliefs
December 3, 2007
The best planetary scientists in the world, constrained within their chosen billions-of-years mindset, have many questions and few answers.
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Amazing Facts

Cell Gatekeepers: Diverse, Complex, Accurate
December 2, 2007
Cargo moves around rapidly and ceaselessly in every cell.  Some moves in and out of the external membrane, and some moves in and out of organelles and the nucleus.  In a system of protected domains surrounded by impermeable membranes, how does the cell control what should pass?  Details of the amazing gatekeeping mechanisms embedded in […]
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Dumb Ideas

Magicians through the Looking Glass
November 29, 2007
A leading origin-of-life researcher passed away last month: Leslie Orgel.  Gerald Joyce paid him tribute in Nature.1  Orgel worked closely with other famous origin-of-life people like Stanley Miller, and was a leader in the “RNA world” scenario for the origin of life.  Joyce appreciated his rigid empiricism: Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded […]
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Amazing Facts

Dealing with Light at the Extremes
November 28, 2007
“Light is the most important variable in our environment,” wrote Edith Widder, a marine biologist.  The inhabitants of two different ecosystems have to deal with either too little or too much.  Let your light so shine:  A thousand meters below the sea surface, all sunlight is extinguished.  Yet for thousands of meters more, creatures live […]
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Dumb Ideas

SETI Researcher Writes Children’s Poem
November 22, 2007
For a feature called “SETI Thursday” at Space.com, Dr. Laurence Doyle has written a childish poem about how life brought itself up from nothing to galactic explorers.  It begins, “When the Earth was young, and the Moon nearby, in a cometary sea, prokaryotic thoughts arose, what fun it is to be!”  The idea of evolving […]
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Dumb Ideas

Males on “Evolutionary Overdrive”
November 17, 2007
A press release from University of Florida claims males evolve faster than females, and suggests a reason.  It’s because males are simpler.  Some quotes: The observation that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin noted the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with the plainness […]
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Amazing Facts

Nature Inspires Useful Products
November 16, 2007
Some day soon you may be able to extract water out of thin air, decorate your walls with detachable wallpaper, read street signs clearly in fog, and employ reusable tape underwater.  These are some of the innovations coming from biomimetics – science inspired by nature’s designs. Venus flytrap:  Alex Crosby at University of Massachusetts was […]
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