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Amazing Facts

Genetic Toolkit Manages Dangerous Tools with Safety Switch and Lockbox
September 19, 2006
Laymen appreciate scientists who can express complex concepts in everyday terms.  Here’s a good example from the Wistar Institute: Around the home, regularly used tools are generally kept close at hand: a can opener in a kitchen drawer, a broom in the hall closet.  Less frequently used tools are more likely to be stored in […]
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Amazing Facts

What’s Inside a Spore?  Nanotechnology
September 17, 2006
The spores that are emitted from fungi and ferns are so tiny, the appear like dust in the wind.  Who would have ever thought such specks could exhibit nano-technological wonders like scientists have found recently: Evapo-Motors:  Scientists at U of Michigan were intrigued by how ferns turn the power of evaporation into launching pads.  The […]
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Amazing Facts

Another Rotary Machine Found in Bacteria
September 13, 2006
A molecular “garbage disposer” in the cell membrane bearing some resemblance to the rotating motor ATP synthase has been described in Nature.1  This machine, called AcrB, expels toxins from the cytoplasm through the cell membrane to the outside.  Like ATP synthase, it has three active sites at one end where the binding occurs, and it […]
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Amazing Facts

Plant Protection: A Modern Medieval Castle Story
September 13, 2006
Vigilant guards stand at the gates.  In times of peace, they let down the drawbridge, and the townspeople carry on their trade.  Farmers bring in their crops for the marketplace, and local craftsmen and pedlars keep the local economy bustling.  Yet the sentries maintain a watchful eye, aware that numerous interlopers are about.  Aliens constantly […]
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Amazing Facts

Flagellar Swimmers Attain Mechanical Nirvana
September 6, 2006
Those little germs that scientists love, E. coli – you know, the ones with the flagella that intelligent-design folk get all excited about – well, they move through the water pretty efficiently with those high-tech outboard motors of theirs.  Some Pennsylvania physicists reporting in PNAS1 measured the “swimming efficiency of bacterium Escherichia coli” and concluded, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Quote
September 6, 2006
The authors of the paper in the previous entry (09/06/2006) found that bacteria swim with near perfect propulsive efficiency.  They only mentioned evolution one time, but it’s short and to the pointless.  It wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Such measurements can shed light on how this remarkable ability to swim evolves among different […]
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Amazing Facts

Another Flagellum Excites Scientists
September 1, 2006
“The bacterial flagellar motor excites considerable interest because of the ordered expression of its genes, its regulated self-assembly, the complex interactions of its many proteins, and its startling mechanical abilities,” begins a paper in Nature by three Caltech scientists.1  They performed electron cryotomography imaging on the flagella of Triponema primita, a different critter with a […]
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Dumb Ideas

Express Your Inner Alley Oop
September 1, 2006
There’s a little Neanderthal in a lot of us, claims The Telegraph.  This is bad news and good news: People who have large noses, a stocky build and a beetle brow may indeed be a little Neanderthal, according to a genetic study.  But the good news is that other research concludes that Neanderthals were much […]
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Amazing Facts

Birds Excel in Distance, Harmony
August 9, 2006
Bird feats are outstanding.  Two notable cases were announced this week: Air Marathon:  The longest animal migration in the animal kingdom is performed by the sooty shearwater, reported National Geographic News.  They migrate 40,000 miles a year from New Zealand to the North Pacific, in complex figure-eight patterns that touch the coasts of South America, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Can Evolution Run in Reverse?
August 7, 2006
Evolutionists in Utah are claiming to have run the evolutionary tape in reverse, says the BBC News: “US researchers have taken a mouse back in time some 500 million years by reversing the process of evolution.”  How can this be?  By engineering its genetic blueprint, they have rebuilt a gene that was present in primitive […]
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Amazing Facts

Bacteria Rule the World – Benevolently
August 2, 2006
We should love bacteria, not annihilate them.  Bacteria are our friends, according to Dianne K. Newman of Caltech:1 As a microbiologist, I’m appalled when I go to buy soap or dishwashing detergent, because these days it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t say ‘antibacterial’ on it…. It’s a commonly held fallacy that all bacteria are […]
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Amazing Facts

Eye Sends Information at Ethernet Rates
July 27, 2006
Neuroscientists from Pennsylvania and New Jersey calculated the information rate of the eye.  Using guinea pigs (real guinea pigs, not humans as guinea pigs), they came up with a number and interpolated it for humans: In the classic “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain,” Lettvin and colleagues showed that different types of retinal […]
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Amazing Facts

A Second Code Controls the DNA Code
July 26, 2006
More has been discovered about the histone or nucleosome code (see 02/17/2004), a second genetic code independent of the DNA genetic sequence that directs the formation of proteins.  The New York Times (see also Science Daily) reported on work by scientists at Northwestern University who found that the wrapping of DNA around nucleosomes (made of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Genetic Loss Is Evolution’s Gain
July 26, 2006
Three scientists in the University of California system found that “Repression and loss of gene expression outpaces activation and gain” among recently duplicated genes.  Surprisingly, publishing in PNAS,1 they claim the non-intuitive hypothesis that this the mother of evolutionary invention.  From the abstract: Evolutionists widely acknowledge that regulatory genetic changes are of paramount importance for […]
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Amazing Facts

Titan’s Land-o’-Lakes Found
July 24, 2006
The Cassini spacecraft has found features that look like methane lakes in the northern latitudes of Titan (see JPL press release).  The large dark patches, some about 30 miles across with rounded edges, appear to be associated with fluid channels.  Radar echoes cannot determine for sure whether the surface is liquid (dark means smooth, light […]
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