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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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Fossils

Is This Frog Marrow Really 10 Million Years Old?
July 25, 2006
LiveScience reported finding intact bone marrow from fossils of frogs and salamanders.  Without blinking an eye, reporter Ker Than croaked that the marrow is ten million years old.  He compared it with the intact soft tissue and blood cells found in a T. rex specimen last year (see 02/22/2006, 06/03/2005, 03/24/2005), and said, The discovery […]
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Fossils

Bear Tooth DNA Yields New Date Record: 400,000 Years
July 22, 2006
According to a story posted on Yahoo News, Swedish scientists found intact DNA in a bear tooth claimed to be 400,000 years old.  The team leader remarked, “It is usually hard to find DNA that is older than 100,000 years, and work on fossilized DNA mostly focuses on material that is a few tens of […]
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Fossils

Chinese “Living Fossil” Amphibians Found
July 22, 2006
World Net Daily found a story on People’s Daily Online that 1200 specimens of an amphibian, Hynobiidaes, have been found in southwest China.  The article states, “These are a type of amphibian species around 300 million years old that once used to live in the dinosaur period.” Other news sources have not yet reported this […]
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Birds

Darwinism Confirmed!  How?  Finch Beaks Got Smaller!
July 14, 2006
Randolph E. Schmid of Associated Press (see ABC News) seems hardly able to contain his excitement.  “Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution,” he wrote, “are now helping confirm it by evolving.”  This sounds like big news.  How, exactly, are they evolving?  “A medium sized species of […]
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Intelligent Design

Ant Pedometer Discovered
June 29, 2006
Ants have dumbfounded scientists again.  It appears they count their steps when they walk, and keep track how far they have gone.  Reporting in Science,1 a trio of German and Swiss scientists tested desert ants by making some walk on specially-designed stilts and others walk on stumps of cut-off legs.  The first overshot their target, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Find Pegasus in the Gene Epic
June 26, 2006
When you conjure with genes, you never know what might appear.  Japanese scientists, publishing in PNAS,1 tried to find evolution in mammalian retroposons and found an unexpected relationship.  New Scientist explains: “You could call it a batty idea, but bats seem to be more closely related to horses than cows are.”     “Despite the […]
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Fossils

Science Reporters Spin Spider Web Data Into Evolutionary Program
June 23, 2006
A spider was found perfectly preserved in amber (fossil tree sap), complete with its web and prey.  It is identical to modern spiders.  Isn’t evolution amazing?     If you just experienced a software crash, there must be something wrong with your BIOS.  All the news media ran that program just fine.  A patch is […]
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Cell Biology

Rubisco “Highly Tuned” for Fixing Atmospheric Carbon
June 22, 2006
Rubisco sounds like a brand of cracker or something, but it’s actually an air cleaner your life depends on.  It’s an enzyme that fixes atmospheric carbon for use by photosynthetic microbes and plants.  In doing so, it sweeps the planet of excess carbon dioxide – the greenhouse gas implicated in discussions of global warming – […]
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Birds

How Can They Call This Duck a Missing Link?
June 16, 2006
The news media are abuzz with the phrase “Missing Link” again.  This time, it’s about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1  The article calls it a “nearly modern” bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers.  They said it “possesses advanced anatomical […]
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Birds

More Darwinian Assumptions Shot Down
June 14, 2006
Here are two articles that appear to kick out some once-solid props from evolutionary theory.  Readers are encouraged to get the details from the original papers, listed in the footnotes. Environmental Impotence:  Many evolutionists have claimed that the environment produces strong selection effects.  Indeed, the fitness landscape itself evolves, carrying with it the constraints driving […]
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Amazing Facts

Reach Out and Touch Some Robot
June 13, 2006
The news media were excited to report an advance in materials science last week that could pave the way for touchy-feely robots (see BBC News, News @ Nature, LiveScience and National Geographic News, for instance).  Two scientists produced a thin film with touch resolution comparable to that of a human finger, an order of magnitude […]
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Amazing Facts

Foot Facts: Frogs and Flies Fulfill Feet Feats
June 13, 2006
How do frogs walk on wet leaves without slipping?  Eric Jaffe in Science News1 describes how they have dual-purpose footwear: a mucous film that holds on by wet adhesion, plus microscopic bumps that protrude above the wet layer to make dry contact.  Though a frog foot doesn’t appear as fancy as that of a gecko, […]
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Mammals

Domestic Housecat Trees Wild Bear
June 11, 2006
Donna Dickey has quite a watchcat.  This declawed tabby chased a roaming black bear up a tree and held it at bay for 15 minutes.  When the bear slid down to try to get away, Jack chased it, hissing and snarling, till the bear escaped up a second tree.  That’s when Donna called her cuddly […]
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Amazing Facts

Beavers Achieve Environmental Reprieve
June 8, 2006
In what might be considered an unexpected convergence between geology and zoology, it has been found that beaver dams influence large tracts of land both above and below ground.  “Impact of beaver dams wider than thought” announced a headline on LiveScience summarizing studies by scientists in Rocky Mountain National Park.     The dams take […]
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