Origin of Life – Page 24

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Gap Between Origin-of-Life Research and Simplest Life Grows

November 27, 2009

Evolutionists are celebrating experiments that allegedly showed RNA chains can assemble in water – given nucleotides to start with (see Science Daily). The suggestive steps over the gap from nonlife to life should be tempered with other discoveries that life is anything but simple. New Scientist reported today that a “‘Simple’ bacterium shows […]

Astronomy

Is the Universe Evolving Upward?

November 13, 2009

It’s intuitively obvious that to get from a big bang to intelligent astronomers looking for evidence of the bang through telescopes, the amount of organization in the universe must increase over time dramatically. Lately, astronomy has uncovered much more dynamism in space than previously recognized – but much of it seems destructive, not creative. Orion […]

Dumb Ideas

Can SETI Be Quantified?

October 31, 2009

What is the probability of finding intelligent life on other planets? In 1960, Frank Drake attempted to quantify that question with his famous Drake Equation (see MSNBC and NOVA, which allows you to estimate the probability with an interactive meter). Trouble is, Stanley Miller and Leslie Orgel of primordial soup fame thought it was meaningless. […]

Cosmology

Materialists: What Do You Know?

October 28, 2009

For people who brag about their work, scientists are an odd lot. At one moment they are touting science as the surest path to knowledge and understanding. The next moment it seems like they are at square one. This is particularly true of materialist cosmologies and Darwinian theories for the origin and development of life. […]

Cosmology

Science News or Tabloid Journalism?

October 19, 2009

Science news outlets have put out some bizarre headlines recently. Readers can judge whether they should be blessed with the label “science” or belong instead at supermarket checkouts. Women are evolving fatter: New Scientist and PhysOrg said that natural selection is making women shorter, plumper and more fertile. “The take-home message is that humans are […]

Dumb Ideas

Crusty Salt Incubates Raw Ingredients for Life

September 21, 2009

Science Daily asked, “Could salt crusts be key ingredient in cooking up prebiotic molecules?” What if the answer is “No”? Just asking the question must be newsworthy. It invokes the power of suggestion. Stefan Fox told members of the European Planetary Science Congress last week that his team cooked up a new idea […]

Dumb Ideas

New Recipe for Life: Zinc & Zap

September 5, 2009

Two scientists are overturning the Miller icon of the origin of life – you know, the illustration in almost every textbook showing sparks zapping gases and amino acids emerging from the goo. That doesn’t wash any more, claim Armen Mulkidjanian (University of Osnabrueck) and Michael Galperin (U.S. National Institutes of Health). Instead, Astrobiology Magazine reported, […]

Dumb Ideas

Milking the Martian Meteorite

September 1, 2009

One would think everything has been told about ALH 84001, the Martian meteorite that made a splash in 1996 with claims it contained fossils of living organisms. That claim was essentially discarded in subsequent years. Its major contribution was giving life to a new science called astrobiology and energizing NASA’s Mars program. Now, a new […]

Dumb Ideas

Emergence of Genetic Code Touted

August 31, 2009

Most origin-of-life researchers have acknowledged the extreme improbability of the genetic code arising by chance. Their approaches to get around this problem have varied considerably since the Miller experiment succeeded in generating a few amino acids. Despite the celebrations that 1953 experiment generated (05/02/2003), it did not even begin to approach the problem of solving […]

Dumb Ideas

Twitter the ET Bandwidth Wagon

August 16, 2009

If you have nothing better to do, send a message to an alien. Leonard David reported on Space.com that a website in Australia is collecting messages to beam up to a planet named Gliese 581d that is 20.3 light-years away. Even a Senator who is Australia’s Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research got involved. […]

Origin of Life

Comet-Ocean Theory Gets Another Splash

August 13, 2009

National Geographic News gave some halfway-enthusiastic press to another recurrence of a theory that circulates from time to time – that earth got its ocean water from comets. They gave air time to work by Uffe Jorgensen and a team from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark that concludes “comets were the culprits” in the […]

Origin of Life

Mars Looks More Hostile to Life

August 6, 2009

The methane Mars produces gets destroyed rapidly. This is leading some planetary scientists to get depressed about the possibility of finding life there. The BBC News, Space.com and New Scientist all reported on the paper in Nature,1 saying this represents bad news for life. In models by Franck Lefevre and Francois Forget, patterns […]

Dumb Ideas

Lightning Cooks Up Weird Science

July 13, 2009

Get a charge out of this headline from New Scientist. A couple of scientists from University of Arizona studied fulgurites, the structures formed in sand by lightning strikes. They found that they contain phosphites (oxidized phosphate molecules). They theorized that lightning strikes could have provided phosphites which the primordial soup used to build RNA and […]

Dumb Ideas

Origin-of-Life Researchers Caught Playing With Toys

July 7, 2009

A “virtual primordial soup” cooks up life in a computer program in a “toy universe,” according to reporter Leslie Mullen at Space.com. She wrote, “The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life’s origin.” EvoGrid is “a computer creation concept that would be a digital version of the primordial […]

Media

Salting News with the L Word Life

June 25, 2009

Small amounts of sodium were detected in ice particles erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Deduction: this might lower the melting point of underground ice, forming subsurface pockets of liquid water – perhaps an ocean. Conclusion: Life! It doesn’t matter that Enceladus has no other factors conducive to life than water, or that salt is generally […]

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