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Cell Biology

More Complexity in Simplicity Found
April 28, 2011
Primitive things aren’t.  That seems to be a common thread in some recent stories that found more complexity in simple living things. Box jellyfish eyes:  Jellyfish are among the simplest of animals, so why do box jellyfish have two dozen eyes but no brain?  Some of these eyes have now been found to detect features […]
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Amazing Facts

Animal Tricks Inspire
April 26, 2011
Here we are in the millennium of science, and we are still trying to figure out how animals do such nifty things.  Some of their nifty tricks we didn’t even know about till researchers took a look.  With high-tech monitoring tools, we might even learn the tricks for our own good. Owl fowl:  The flapping […]
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Cell Biology

Complexity Appears “Earlier than Thought”
April 14, 2011
Widely-separate branches of science seem to converge on a common puzzle: complexity goes farther back than scientists expected – evolutionary scientists, that is. Cosmology:  More evidence has come that galaxies formed very early.  A mature galaxy detected through gravitational lensing was announced by the Hubble Telescope team, with an estimated redshift of 6.027.  In the […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Science Sites Stretch Truth About “Transitional Form”
April 13, 2011
A tiny piece of cartilage-turned-bone has science news sites jumping for joy about an evolutionary transitional form.  But is it one?  A closer look shows a much more complex picture than the simple evolutionary victory being told in the media.     “Long-sought fossil mammal with transitional middle ear found,” trumpeted PhysOrg; in close harmony, […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Is This What Darwin Had in Mind?
April 10, 2011
Evolution is a word loosely used in science these days.  Reporters and scientists talk about “the evolution of” this or that sometimes carelessly, without regard to how the explanation fits old Darwinism or neo-Darwinism.  Has the word evolution become a kind of catch-all hypothesis, for which rigor is no longer necessary? Survival of the discreetist:  […]
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Birds

Does Observing Flight Explain Its Evolution?
April 6, 2011
In various research labs, evolutionists are studying the origin of flight.  Recent articles, though, only show them observing animals or fossils that already fly or flew.  Does this provide any insight into how flight might have originated by a purposeless material process? Birds:  With a quote from Charles Darwin decorating the heading, PhysOrg announced a […]
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Fossils

Science Discovers the Unexpected and the Obvious
March 30, 2011
Young’s Law jokes, “All great discoveries are made by mistake.”  Here are some recent examples. Arch-istan:  Think the world’s natural features are all well known?  “Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society have stumbled upon a geological colossus in a remote corner of Afghanistan: a natural stone arch spanning more than 200 feet across its base,” […]
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Biomimetics

Plagiarizing Nature
March 28, 2011
Copying someone else’s invention is a crime, but researchers in biomimetics are doing it with impunity and getting away with it. Leaf power:  “Why come up with new ways to generate clean energy, when we can copy what plants have been doing for millennia?”  That’s what led Daniel Nocera and colleagues at MIT to develop […]
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Amazing Facts

Neurons Know What to Do
March 27, 2011
Neurons are among the most vital cells in the body: after all, your brain is largely composed of neurons.  Neurons are transmission lines of information that keep a body in touch with itself and the world.  None of the other body organs would work without neurons.  The increasingly powerful tools of microscopy are allowing neuroscientists […]
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Amazing Facts

Plants Spring into Action
March 26, 2011
We shouldn’t take plants for granted.  They seem so slow and stationary, but actually they move and breath and carry on their lives in truly amazing ways.  Plants really show off their glory in the spring.  But how do they know, without eyes, what time it is?     In “The science of spring,” PhysOrg […]
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Amazing Facts

Sensing the World Requires Intelligent Design
March 24, 2011
How do our bodies make sense of the external world?  Through our senses, of course; at least they are the entry points of data into the mind.  Behind those senses are remarkable mechanisms that we use but do not actively operate.  The design in their automatic operations is slowly being revealed with better observing techniques. […]
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Dinosaurs

More Soft Tissue Found in Old Fossils
March 23, 2011
A reptile skin fossilized in rock said to be 50 million years old has been found.  According to Science Daily, scientists at the University of Manchester reported the discovery of amide molecules in “fossilized soft tissue of a beautifully-preserved reptile.”  The original paper, accessible to the public, was published in the Proceedings of the Royal […]
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Birds

Evolution Everyone Can Agree On
March 21, 2011
The controversy over Darwinian evolution concerns one core question: Can an unplanned, undirected process generate new functions and complex organs of irreducible complexity without design?  No one really doubts that organisms vary in horizontal or downward ways – either by modifications of existing genetic information, or by deleterious mutations that somehow allow animals to continue […]
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Biomimetics

Follow the Insects
March 15, 2011
Science has good reason to study insects – not just because they are the most numerous and diverse animals on the planet.  They know some tricks we would do well to emulate.  Robot designers are taking the lead on following insects. Print a fly:  New printers are allowing inventors to print the paper-thin wings they […]
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Amazing Facts

Feather Color Is a Costly “Complex System Design”
March 13, 2011
The brilliant, shimmering colors in the breast feathers of the Bird of Paradise have long fascinated ornithologists.  Alfred Russell Wallace was perhaps the first Englishman to see the magnificent birds in their native Malaysian habitats and wrote, “the richness of their glossy orange colouring, and the exquisite delicacy of the loosely waving feathers, were unsurpassable.”1 […]
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