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Cosmology

Tailpipe Soot: Can It Live?
July 28, 2005
Better stay clear of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).  They come out of your tailpipe and furnace, line your chimney, and generally are products of unhealthy processes like industrial waste and cigarette smoke.  According to Environment Canada, “PAHs are a concern because some of them can cause cancers in humans and are harmful to fish and […]
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Dumb Ideas

Life on Mars – and Titan?
July 26, 2005
Life has not been found on Mars, but some scientists, according to National Geographic News, are worried that we are contaminating the planet with Earth germs that will make the search for Martians more difficult.  Speaking of Mars, a report in Science Now claims that Mars rarely got above freezing in its entire history.   […]
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Dumb Ideas

Do Butterflies Evolve Via Team Stripes?
July 25, 2005
A BBC News story is claiming that butterflies split into competing teams when differences in their wing patterns emerge.  Based on a paper in Nature,1 this is supposed to be an example of a rarely-observed mechanism for speciation, called reinforcement: in this case, “These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of ‘team strip’, allowing […]
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Dumb Ideas

Has Anti-Semitism Been Good for Jewish Evolution?
July 19, 2005
National Geographic News gave favorable coverage to a controversial theory by anthropologists at University of Utah that anti-semitism was a form of natural selection.  The racism against Jews in Europe, while selecting for higher intelligence, also selected for certain types of diseases.  Reporter James Owen did point out that not all anthropologists agree with the […]
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Dumb Ideas

Something from Nothing Dept.
June 2, 2005
How do you get optimization by chance?  In a Concepts piece in Nature this week,1 William J. Sutherland (U. of East Anglia, UK) suggested that the constraints of the environment will drive living systems toward optimal solutions.  He thinks that’s how “selective forces” shaped your teeth and jaw, for instance.  Economists and engineers use optimization […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Fossilized in the Act of Laying Eggs
April 15, 2005
Two eggs, with shell material still attached, were found inside the oviducts of a theropod dinosaur, a Chinese team reported in Science.1  This first-time discovery of intact eggs in the body of the female “suggests that theropod dinosaurs had two functional oviducts (like crocodiles) but that each oviduct produced only one egg at a time […]
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Cosmology

State of the Cosmos Address Offered
February 21, 2005
On the occasion of the centennial of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Alan Guth, the father of inflationary cosmology, with colleague David I. Kaiser of MIT, took stock of cosmological theories in the Feb. 11 issue of Science.1 How has inflation fared since its controversial but hopeful proposal in 1981? “Inflation was invented a quarter of […]
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Origin of Life

Astrobiology: Follow the Money
January 7, 2005
To date, astrobiology remains, as George Gaylord Simpson once quipped, “an area of study without a known subject.” Yet it is one of the hottest research areas within NASA. A renowned origin-of-life researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Dr. Jeffrey Bada, found out why when he read the new book The Living Universe: NASA and […]
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Amazing Facts

Cellular UPS Gets Right Packages to Chloroplasts
January 1, 2005
If all your packages were sent correctly over the holidays, consider the job a plant cell has getting 3000 proteins into a chloroplast.  Mistakes are not just inconvenient.  They can be deadly, or at least bring photosynthesis to a halt.  To guarantee proper delivery of components, plant cells have a remarkable shipping system, described in […]
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Dumb Ideas

Paleoanthropologists Fight Tooth and Nail
December 21, 2004
Ann Gibbons, reporter for Science, seems to enjoy watching the fights about human ancestry.  At Science Now, she began a news item about an alleged fossil human ancestor with a joke: How many paleoanthropologists does it take to locate a molar on the correct side of a fossil jawbone?  The short answer to this joke, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Did Martians Win the War of the Worlds?
December 14, 2004
In the H.G. Wells version, the Martian invaders with their tripod machines and death rays, wreaking havoc on Earth, were defeated by Earth bacteria.  The new scientific plot envisioned by scientists, reported on Space.com, is that the Martians had the bacteria, and invaded Earth with it to either conquer Earth life or spread it onto […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Introducing the Stretch & Squish Theory of Evolution
December 14, 2004
How do you squish an arm into a wing, or stretch a fin into a leg? This sounds like the silly putty theory of evolution.
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Amazing Facts

Now We Know How Birds Fly
December 9, 2004
Elementary physical science students know how airplane wings generate lift, but bird flight poses special challenges.  The aptly-named swifts, for instance, can practically turn on a dime, dive steeply, and halt in mid-air to catch insects in ways that make a stunt pilot stall.  It’s not just flapping, and it’s not just leading-edge feather shape, […]
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Birds

Crows and Apes Related by Convergent Evolution
December 9, 2004
Scientists have noticed that crows have some of the same tool-making skills as apes, and in fact, are even better tool makers.  How could such vastly different animals show such similar mental skills?  Science1 explains this as another example of convergent evolution: Discussions of the evolution of intelligence have focused on monkeys and apes because […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Irresponsibility
December 7, 2004
Evolutionists at the University of Minnesota have developed a theory for the evolution of impulsive behavior, reports EurekAlert.  They say that because our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, they had to grab what they could without thought of future reward or punishment: When psychologists study kids who are good at waiting for a reward, they find those […]
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