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Bible and Theology

Stupid Evolution Quote Prizes
April 27, 2007
The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week goes to Mark Gladwin (04/25/2007) who said something the gentler sex will probably wince at: “Study the pregnant women, because that’s where you’ll see evolution in action.” No offense intended, we hope.  A runner-up goes to Deborah Charlesworth, who in Current Biology April 17 named Darwin as a […]
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Amazing Facts

Update on Plant Communication
April 26, 2007
Plants have both an intranet and an extranet.  Some recent papers investigated further about how plants, though rooted in the ground, keep in touch with the inside and outside economy. Intranet:  In 2001 (07/13/2001), and periodically since (10/04/2004, 11/09/2004) we reported the current thinking about how a plant knows when to flower, and described a […]
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Amazing Facts

Scientists Track Homing Pigeons with GPS
April 24, 2007
How do homing pigeons find their way?  Scientists are still not sure.  They know that the birds use a sun compass and magnetic fields, but what other cues guide them back to the specific roost they know as home?  A new study shows they are smarter than we thought.  They use multiple cues and weigh […]
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Amazing Facts

Fatty Acid Synthesis: A Machine with “High Degree of Architectural Complexity”
April 19, 2007
As Bruce Alberts said in 1998, the biology of the future was going to be the study of molecular machines: “the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”1  One of those machines is […]
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Amazing Facts

Spider Silk Admired, Not Duplicated
April 18, 2007
Spiders still maintain the edge in a technology humans want: a material that absorbs huge amounts of energy without breaking.  The dragline silk spun by spiders is extremely robust – ounce for ounce stronger than steel, yet more flexible than Kevlar.  If a web the size of a football field could be erected in the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Cave Chimps Suggest Cave Men
April 11, 2007
Some chimpanzees have been found in Senegal using caves for shelter from the heat.  Jill Pruetz (Iowa State) took note of this and is publishing a paper about it in Primates.  National Geographic speculated that this sheds light on human origins: The adaptations of savanna chimpanzees are particularly interesting to researchers because early humans are […]
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Amazing Facts

Preprocessed Sound Produces Tone Map in the Brain
April 6, 2007
Most of us know that our ears involve three domains: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.  We learned in school how the eardrum transmits the sound to tiny bones that transmit it to fluid in the cochlea, which stimulates hair cells that send the impulses down the auditory nerve to the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  The Evolution of Shopper’s Arm
March 31, 2007
This week’s prize goes to the Society for Experimental Biology, which, according to EurekAlert, said this in a press release: The next time you are struggling to carry your bags home from the supermarket just remember that this could, in fact, be the reason you are able to walk upright on two legs at all!  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can the Interior Design Itself?
March 26, 2007
Calling all interior designers: has Darwinism rendered you superfluous?  J. Scott Turner thinks so.  He wrote a book called The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself (Harvard, 2007).  It was reviewed by Claus Wedekind in last week’s Nature with the title, “The interior designer.”  This does not imply that interiors need an exterior […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Monkeys Bang Rocks, Invent Culture
March 23, 2007
The venerable University of Cambridge earns this week’s prize for the following statements in a press release today: New evidence of “human” culture among primates 23 March 2007 Research suggests that stone-banging by South American monkeys could be a socially-learned skill Fresh evidence that suggests monkeys can learn skills from each other, in the same […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Calcium Channel: Meet Me at the Gate
March 16, 2007
All cells use calcium ions for signalling.  The ions flow through specialized gates in the plasma membrane.  Inside the cell, receptors line the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a kind of subway system where finishing work on proteins is done.  How do the two get together?  They arrange a meeting.     Richard Lewis, writing in Nature,1 […]
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Dumb Ideas

An Extinction’s Long Fuse
March 15, 2007
Some scientists are claiming that when the Isthmus of Panama was formed, an extinction event occurred two million years later.  The story is reported on EurekAlert:  “We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what […]
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Amazing Facts

Why Our Voices Are Unique
March 15, 2007
We can usually recognize friends and acquaintances by their voices.  If we all have the same hardware, though, how is this possible?  The answer is in the vortex.  Sounds sci-fi, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati used knowledge of jet engines to explore the possibility that vortices may help solve the mysteries of the […]
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Amazing Facts

The Amazing Pigeon Techno-Beak
March 15, 2007
How do homing pigeons find home?  Scientists at University of Frankfurt may have found the answer: magnetic minerals in their beaks.  A press release from Springer Publications describes the amazing pigeon techno-beak: In histological and physicochemical examinations in collaboration with HASYLAB, the synchrotron laboratories based in Hamburg, Germany, iron-containing subcellular particles of maghemite and magnetite […]
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Dumb Ideas

Immature Kid?  Blame Evolution
March 14, 2007
Why do older children linger at home longer than they should?  Evolution, says Ker Than for Live Science.  This insight of his is based on growth patterns of teeth from an alleged 160,000-year-old juvenile skeleton in Africa.  Tanya Smith [Max Planck Institute] said of the bones, “These early fossils show a mix of primitive and […]
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