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Biological Nanomachines Inspire Nanotechnology

Nano, nano; we’re hearing that morkish prefix a lot these days.  It means 10-9 of something: most often, of meters (see powers of ten).  A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.  This gets down into the range of protein molecules and small cellular components.  A DNA molecule, for instance, is about 20 nanometers across; […]

New Media Challenges Darwinism

Websites and resources challenging Darwinian dominance are springing up all over the place.  Uncensored by scientific societies, they may be having more of an effect than evolutionary biologists wish to consider.  Many are aimed at students and young adults. Overwhelming Evidence is an ID website aimed at high school students.  It has blogs, forums and […]

ID Draws Crowds, to Evolutionists’ Dismay

Reactions in the news and evolution-centered scientific societies to the rise of intelligent design is mixed.  Some ignore it, printing Darwinism-as-fact articles as usual.  Others seek harmony and understanding.  Still others rise up in holy horror, demanding organized counter-reformation.  One thing Darwinists cannot do is deny that a widespread, international sea change in thinking about […]

Whiskers Inspire Technology

The latest gadget on robots or Mars rovers could be whiskers.  These tactile sensors provide ways to see in 3D, says a report on National Geographic News.  Information about latitude, longitude and elevation can be gleaned from whiskers.  Rodents continually rotate their whiskers to gather information, but seals and sea lions let the ocean currents […]

Farewell to the “Face on Mars” – A Teachable Moment

ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has just sent back pictures of the Cydonia region on Mars.  Objects seen in early Viking images of this region resembled a face, a skull and pyramids that gave rise to a cult following on late-night talk shows.  NASA always discounted these resemblances as coincidental, and when JPL released higher-resolution photos […]

Flagellar Swimmers Attain Mechanical Nirvana

Those little germs that scientists love, E. coli – you know, the ones with the flagella that intelligent-design folk get all excited about – well, they move through the water pretty efficiently with those high-tech outboard motors of theirs.  Some Pennsylvania physicists reporting in PNAS1 measured the “swimming efficiency of bacterium Escherichia coli” and concluded, […]

Yoke Up Those Bacteria

My, how history repeats itself – often in unexpected ways.  In ancient times, our ancestors got the heavy work done by hitching oxen, horses or slaves (like Samson, see pictures 1 and 2) to a harness and making them turn a grinding wheel.  The same principle is now on the cutting edge of modern applied […]

Another Flagellum Excites Scientists

“The bacterial flagellar motor excites considerable interest because of the ordered expression of its genes, its regulated self-assembly, the complex interactions of its many proteins, and its startling mechanical abilities,” begins a paper in Nature by three Caltech scientists.1  They performed electron cryotomography imaging on the flagella of Triponema primita, a different critter with a […]

Quote: Cell Factory

From CalTech Engineering & Science (LXIX:2, August 2006), “Cellular CAT Scans” by Douglas L. Smith, an article about electron cryotomography imaging of cellular components.  Smith does not mention evolution.  His opening paragraph is reminiscent of Darwin’s Black Box: A cell isn’t merely a bag of enzymes sloshing around in a thick soup of cytoplasm.  According […]

Darwinists Whack I.D. with Reckless Abandon

For professionals assumed to be logical, factual, and devoted to reason, scientists and journalists can get pretty emotional, depending on the subject.  One such subject that really rankles some of them is intelligent design.  Here are some recent salvos from the war of the words: Hotz shots:  From the LA Times, Robert Lee Hotz wrote, […]

Review:  Lehigh Prof Critiques ID Colleague in Science Wars

Dr. Steven Goldman (Lehigh University) has produced a series of lectures for The Teaching Company entitled Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It.  CEH highly recommends this series for its wealth of historical background applied to an intriguing question: what is the nature of truth claims in science?  To what extent do […]

National Crisis: USA Ranks Nearly Last in Evolution Belief!

Eugenie Scott and colleagues at the National Center for Science Education presented findings of a survey on acceptance of evolution, and found that the USA trails far behind European countries – second from last only to Turkey.  In 20 years, acceptance of evolution dropped from 45 to 40 percent, but firm rejection of evolution also […]

Cosmologists Dragged Kicking and Screaming to the Anthropic Principle

Those who view science as a dispassionate, logical pursuit of the truth should savor the emotions in two articles by Tom Siegfried about cosmology in Science this week.1,2  He reported on the passionate rivalry between theoretical physicists who embrace superstring theory as the eventual “theory of everything” and those who oppose it because of its […]

How Useful Is Evolutionary Theory to Biology?

A favorite quote by evolutionists is the line by Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  Why, then, do so many biological papers fail to mention evolution at all?  Indeed, many employ design language, sometimes with a sense of awe.  Here are more recent examples in which the E […]

Team Returns Pseudogene to Junkpile to Counter ID Claim

An earlier claim that a pseudogene has a function (see 05/01/2003 story) has been debunked by a team of scientists reporting in PNAS.1  Their reanalysis of the claim made in 2003 “invalidates the data upon which the pseudogene trans-regulation model is based and therefore strongly supports the view that mammalian pseudogenes are evolutionary relics.”  The […]
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