VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Dumb Ideas

Photosynthesis Began a Billion Years Earlier Than Thought
December 17, 2003
According to the BBC News, some scientists have pushed back the evolution of photosynthesis a billion years earlier than previously believed, to 3.9 billion years ago.  This is based on uranium-thorium ratios of rocks in Greenland that led Danish researchers to conclude that they were deposited under oxidizing conditions.  Others are not sure the data […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Mars Has Global Warming: Manufacturers At Fault?
December 10, 2003
Mars appears to be coming out of an ice age and into an era of global warming, reports Space.Com.  Whether the Kyoto treaty can be extended to the red planet remains to be seen.  Environmentalists are not sure if human influence is to blame; the closest thing to an SUV on Mars is the leftover […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Antibody Evolution
December 10, 2003
The Dec. 11 issue of Nature1 has an article on antibodies and how scientists are learning to make designer editions of them.  Pete Moore and Julie Clayton write (emphasis added): Antibodies not only protect us from infection, they have been exploited for years in the laboratory � in diagnostic tests, to purify proteins and as […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Intracellular Railroad Has Park-and-Ride System
December 4, 2003
Cells are like miniaturized cities, with elaborate transportation systems ferrying their cargo to and fro (see Feb. 25 headline).  Just like a city may have railroads, busses, cars and monorails, the cell has multiple kinds of transport motors: dyneins, kinesins, and myosins.  Scientists have learned that most of the roadways are like one-way monorails: actin […]
CONTINUE READING
Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered
December 2, 2003
A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News.  It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together.  To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Elaborate Quality Control Governs the Cell’s Protein-Folding Factory
December 20, 2002
If it weren’t for quality control in our cells, we’d be dead.  That’s the gist of an amazing Insight article in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature.1  “Aberrant proteins are extremely harmful to cells,” the authors begin.  How harmful?  Here is a short list of diseases that can result from improperly folded proteins or failures […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?
December 20, 2002
51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories?  “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist.  “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.”  The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence.  […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Future of Computers Lies in Harnessing DNA Circuitry
December 20, 2002
According to EurekAlert, researchers at University of Minnesota are making progress using DNA molecules for information storage and processing.  A DNA scaffolding that is being studied has the potential to hold information “1,000 times as densely as the best information processing circuitry and 100 times the best data storage circuitry now in the pipeline.” This […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Why Workouts Work for Humans, Not Pickups
December 20, 2002
Space Daily began an article on space medicine with a thought-provoking comparison: Most machines don’t improve with use.  Old pickup trucks don’t gradually become Ferraris just by driving them fast, and a pocket calculator won’t change into a supercomputer by crunching lots of numbers.  The human body is different.  As weightlifters know, the more that […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Evolution As Assumption
December 20, 2002
51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted.  Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.”  They used an evolutionary […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Sponges Use Fiber Optics for Interior Lighting
November 20, 2002
51; Sponges are among the simplest of multicellular organisms, but they contain an advanced human technology: fiber optics.  In a case of reverse biomimetics, scientists have determined that one of the products of proud human engineering was already at work in a lowly sponge.     Fiber optical properties of sponge spicules was already known, […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Flight Design Inspires Research
November 20, 2002
There are flying machines hovering over our planet that can turn on a dime, making rapid 90-degree turns.  Their instruments process images ten times faster than we can, and possess precision gyros that tell them how fast they are rotating in space – yet their computers are smaller than the head of a pin.  They’re […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Reduce Human Ideals to Molecules
November 20, 2002
Two recent stories illustrate the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to reduce complex human behaviors to chance events among molecules. You Are What You Get High On:  Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?”  Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Out-of-Africa Theory Becomes More Convoluted
November 20, 2002
The old simple story that early modern humans migrated out of Africa 40,000 years ago and took over Europe from brutish Neanderthals just got more complicated.  A new theory mentioned in National Geographic News now proposes that they took a side trip to India first, 70,000 years ago.  After knocking off Heidelberg Man there, they […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Robot Tadpole Sex Sheds Light on Intelligent Design
November 20, 2002
Scientists studying the evolution of vertebrate physiology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.  have designed swimming robots to demonstrate how evolution might have produced such efficient vertebrate swimmers (see Live Science).  Swimming abilities of each robot were tested by measuring its ability to swim toward and follow a light suspended above the surface of a […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="2"]