Biology – Page 114

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Tiny Life in Extraordinary Motion

July 22, 2010

Don’t despise small things. Miniature plants and animals can pack some amazing punch and technology, as shown in two recent findings. Plant explosion: Peat moss. That’s the filler in our indoor plant soil and Live Science reported that its pots shoot its spores out at 89 miles per hour, producing accelerations of 36,000 G’s. Some […]

Birds

Revising Dinosaurs

July 14, 2010

Reconstructing a lost world from fossils is an inexact science. The realization that two species of dinosaur were different growth stages of the same species is just one example of the difficulty of drawing conclusions about past ecological conditions. It raises additional questions about the mental visions we have of the world of dinosaurs. […]

Cell Biology

Darwinists Get Sexy

July 13, 2010

The origin of sex titillates many evolutionary biologists. On the one hand, animals and plants have such interesting ways of getting together. But on the other hand, sex seems too costly to have originated by natural selection. Some recent articles provide new evolutionary speculations on the origin of sex – but simultaneously undermine previous speculations. […]

Amazing Facts

More to a Fly than Meets the Eye

July 12, 2010

Flies and spiders, members of the arthropod phylum, may seem small and “less evolved” than the larger members of the animal kingdom. One shouldn’t let size alone be the measure of ability. Fly supercomputer: Did you ever think of the brain of a fly as a high-speed computer? That’s what PhysOrg called it: “the minute […]

Amazing Facts

Proteins Fold Who Knows How

July 9, 2010

One of the biggest mysteries remaining in cell biology is how proteins fold. Proteins start out as chains of amino acids (polypeptides) as they exit the ribosome. Most of them spontaneously fold into their “native” three-dimensional structures, where they will go to work as enzymes, structural materials or other key players in cell life. About […]

Biomimetics

Productive Science Imitates Nature

July 7, 2010

Examples continue to accumulate that some of the most interesting and fruitful science projects involve copying design principles found in nature. This “biomimetics” approach not only pleases the consumers who can look forward to greener, cheaper, better products, but leads to deeper understandings of nature’s workings. Gecko adhesives: PhysOrg published a story on the ongoing […]

Darwin and Evolution

Do New Fossils Soften the Cambrian Explosion?

July 5, 2010

Look at the picture of fossils in an article on PhysOrg. The discoverers claim these fossils from Gabon are 2.1 billion years old, and provide evidence that multicellular organisms began evolving long before the Cambrian explosion. “Until now, it has been assumed that organized multicellular life appeared around 0.6 billion years ago and that before […]

Birds

Humans Got Birdbrains by Convergent Evolution

July 2, 2010

Scientists are learning that birds have brains remarkably similar to those of mammals. This is contrary to a century of belief, PhysOrg said. How did such similarities evolve for groups of animals so widely separated? To explain it, evolutionists pulled out one of their common explanations: convergent evolution. “For more than a century,” […]

Amazing Facts

Farm Algae for Energy

June 29, 2010

June 29, 2010 — Why manufacture fuels when microbes can do it faster, better and cheaper? Researchers at the University of Cambridge are wiring electrodes to algae to produce “green energy” – solar-powered fuel that is carbon-neutral, “cheaper to produce, self-repairing, self-replicating, biodegradable and much more sustainable – real green energy.” The team […]

Darwin and Evolution

Fish Feet: Can Evolution Add by Subtraction?

June 26, 2010

How did fish grow feet? One would think that feet require adding a lot of new parts: bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and additional supporting tissues. Each of those would require genetic instructions and changes to embryonic development. One evolutionist, however, feels that switching genes off paved the way to the invasion of land. The […]

Darwin and Evolution

Can the Earth Thwart Darwinism?

June 23, 2010

Microbes were all set to evolve into complex life, but the ocean held them back. That seems to be the thinking of Dr. Simon Poulton of Newcastle University. “Toxic seas may have been responsible for delaying the evolution of life on Earth by 1 billion years,” PhysOrg reported. That seems to imply that it would […]

Birds

Fossils Without Evolution

June 18, 2010

New fossils continue to turn up around the world. Many of them have an amazing characteristic in common: they look almost exactly like their living counterparts, despite being millions of years old, according to the evolutionary timescale. It’s interesting sometimes to hear how the evolutionists explain the remarkable lack of evolution in all that time. […]

Amazing Facts

Butterfly Wing Shimmer Done With 3-D Crystals

June 15, 2010

Those shimmering flashes of light seen on butterfly wings are not done with pigments. They’re done with tiny, geometric crystals called gyroids stacked in 3-D patterns, scientists have found. They are so effective at concentrating color, the scientists want to imitate the trick. “A precise characterization of color-producing biological nanostructures is critical to […]

Darwin and Evolution

Whale Evolution: Hurry Up and Wait

June 3, 2010

Whales evolved really fast, then just swam around with nothing to do for tens of millions of years. “Whales Evolved in the Blink of an Eye” wrote Brett Israel for Live Science about a new study that claims “Whales evolved explosively fast into a spectacular array of shapes and sizes” about 35 million years ago, […]

Biomimetics

Butterfly Wing Veins Are Not in Vain

May 23, 2010

Inventors made an artificial butterfly modeled on the tiger swallowtail. First they made the wing without veins. It didn’t fly as well as when they added veins like the real butterfly, according to a short video clip in an article on New Scientist. The veined wing provided more lift. The inventors at Harvard’s […]

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