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Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers
March 5, 2004
One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.”  This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life.  Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]
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Health

Sugar-Dried Blood: Just Add Water
March 4, 2004
A sugar found in shrimp and yeast might save human lives on the battlefield.
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Cell Biology

Cellular Cowboys: How the Cell Rounds Up Chromosomes Before Dividing
March 4, 2004
Cell division is like cowboys lassoing cattle and pulling ones that match into two identical corrals.
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Amazing Facts

Fiber-Optic Sponge Makes Deep-Sea Lamps
March 1, 2004
Last year, it was announced that a deep-sea sponge named the Venus Flower Basket possessed glass strands similar to fiber optic cables (see 08/20/2003 headline).  Now, a five-member team from Bell Labs has performed the first detailed optical analysis of the fibers.  They indeed found these structures to be “remarkably similar to commercial silica optical […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolution Is Like the Matrix Revolutions
February 27, 2004
Matthew L. Albert enjoyed the Matrix movies.  In his review in the Feb. 20 issue of Science,1 he thought the movies were parallels of evolutionary biology.  The machines keeping the rebels alive are like retroviruses, he thinks: “These retroviruses are responsible in part for our evolution, while other retroviruses are attacking us.  So, who is […]
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Dumb Ideas

Learn to Speak: Toss a Spear
February 25, 2004
Human language evolved after our ancestors learned to throw a spear, according to William H. Calvin, in his new book A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford, 2003).  Robin Dunbar is not too sure about this, in a book review in the Feb. 26 issue of Nature.1  Although he […]
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Amazing Facts

Respect the Conch Shell
February 19, 2004
Engineers and materials scientists seem to never run out of examples in nature that should fill us with awe.  In the Feb. 19 issue of Nature,1 Rosamund Daw brings our attention to the construction ability of the conch shell: Giant conches are seldom treated with the respect they deserve.  Their impressive shells are prized as […]
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Amazing Facts

Birds Are Memory Champs
February 17, 2004
We humans lose our keys and often can’t remember the location of half a dozen identical items.  “Maybe it takes a bird brain to find the car keys,” teases Susan Milius in the cover story of the Feb. 14 issue of Science News.1  Ornithologists have been intrigued with how birds remember where they stash their […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Is a Code Operated by Another Code
February 17, 2004
The discovery in the 1950s that DNA stored a coded language was amazing, but recently a new level of complexity has come to the awareness of biochemists.  Apparently, another code determines which DNA genes will be opened for expression and which should be suppressed.     The Feb. 14 issue of Science News1 describes the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Happy Darwin Day?
February 13, 2004
Humanists hope to have a new international holiday by 2009: Darwin Day.  (Feb. 12 was Darwin’s birthday as well as Abe Lincoln’s, so it’s already set aside as a holiday in America, but promoters want this to be an international event.)  According to Robert Evans’ story in Reuters, the British Humanist Association believes such a […]
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Amazing Facts

Your Internal Motors Can Run Nanotech
February 13, 2004
In each cell in your body, and in that of every living thing, there exists a tiny motor named ATP synthase that Science News1 calls “the ultimate molecular machine.”  It converts electrical to chemical energy, writes Alexandra Goho, “with amazing efficiency.”  Now, Japanese have harnessed some of these motors (only 12 millionths of a millimeter […]
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Amazing Facts

“Utmost Precision” Found in DNA Repair Enzyme
February 13, 2004
The cell has many helper enzymes that can repair DNA damage.  One such enzyme, named MutY, has been described in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature.1  Reviewer Tomas Lindahl sets the stage: “Damaged DNA must be removed with the utmost precision, as mistakes are costly.  The structure of a repair enzyme bound to its substrate […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinians Excel at Games
February 10, 2004
Martin Nowak (Harvard) sure got good press for his evolutionary game theories last week.  In Nature,1 he retold the glorious story of how he and Karl Sigmund met in an Austrian mountain cottage and applied the “prisoner’s dilemma” game to a new theory for social evolution.  The same week, in Science,2 as part of a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Comets as Cosmic Storks
February 10, 2004
Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at Cardiff University have raised the bar on tale-telling ability.  They believe that comets splatting on earth can carry away germs of life that gradually spread farther and farther out, eventually escaping the sun’s pull.  Over time, they might spread life to other worlds.  They estimate that since the origin of […]
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Dinosaurs

How Snakes Lost Their Limbs
February 2, 2004
Penn State scientists have a story for how snakes, which presumably evolved from lizards, lost their legs.  They had to burrow through tight places.     Part of their story involved disproving that snakes evolved from sea-going reptiles, like mosasaurs, explains the press release from Penn State’s Eberly College of Science.  They compared genes from […]
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