Can Darwin Be Rescued from a New Eye Discovery?
May 7, 2010
Scientists find waveguides and noise receptors built into the retina.
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Breakthrough: Second Genetic Code Revealed
May 6, 2010
It’s sometimes difficult to assess the impact of a scientific paper when it is first published, but one that came out on the cover of Nature today has potential to equal the discovery of the genetic code. The leading science journal reported the discovery of a second genetic code – the “code within the code” […]
Darwins Linux: Did Evolution Produce a Computer?
May 4, 2010
How is a cell like a computer? Some Yale scientists asked that question, and embarked on a project to compare the genome of a lowly bacterium to a computer’s operating system.1. Their work was published in PNAS.2 As with most analogies, some things were found to be similar, and some different – but in the […]
Archer Fish Sees Clearly Up and Down
May 3, 2010
The archer fish, which lives in mangrove swamps and rivers, is able to spit insects off leaves above the water with remarkable accuracy (09/30/2002, 09/07/2004, 10/10/2006). Scientists have been fascinated by this ability because in order for the fish to calculate the trajectory of its missiles, it needs to take into account both chromatic aberration […]
Are There Limits to Scientific Speculation? A Royal Case
May 2, 2010
Question: When does science become like a priesthood? Answer: When its practitioners engage in speculation on big questions impossible to verify with empirical observations. Is this what the chief astronomer in Britain is doing? Sir Martin Rees certainly would not have thought of himself as a priest as he wrote an article for […]
Scientist Sees Evolutionary Sense in Coordinated Complexity
April 30, 2010
An article on PhysOrg tells “A vertebrate story,” and a story it is: the more complex a phenomenon becomes, the more it makes evolutionary sense. Portuguese scientists were studying the interaction of Hox genes with the development of the ribs in vertebrates. You can imagine the control that these genes must have when […]
Southpaw Explanations Out of Left Field
April 30, 2010
All proteins are left handed. Some humans are left handed. Can evolution explain that? Evolutionists are never known to be at a loss for words when asked to explain anything, provided they are allowed liberal use of the word perhaps. A new projection theme for the first left-handed amino acids that comprise proteins […]
Clock Gene Same in Humans and Birds
April 29, 2010
Science Daily, this “not only sheds light on how our internal annual body clocks function but also shows a key link between birds and mammals that has been conserved over 300 million years.” Mammals, including humans, have a hormone released by the pituitary gland that controls melatonin levels – known to affect the […]
Noahs Ark on Mars
April 28, 2010
We apologize for this improbable headline to draw attention to two stories making the rounds: new claims about Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat, and new claims about life on Mars. Headlines on these topics show up periodically in the news. What do the subjects have in common? How do they differ? Do the most recent […]
New Theory on Evolution of Bat Flight
April 27, 2010
How did bats evolve the ability to fly? Evolution helped them out by providing them with higher energy. After all, “Flight is among the most energy-consuming activities” in the animal kingdom, said a team of Chinese and Canadian scientists reporting in PNAS,1 so it’s obvious that evolution must have provided the genes to get the […]
Blood Clotting Fibers May Lead to Better Networks
April 22, 2010
We all know that blood clotting has kept us alive many times. We would never have survived childhood scrapes and cuts had it not been for a cascade of responses in blood that builds a network of fibers quickly upon which a scab of tissue stops the flow of blood and begins repairs. That first […]
What Can Fossil Leaf Measurements Tell About Evolution?
April 21, 2010
Flowering plants burst on the scene in the fossil record 140 million years ago in the geologic timescale, creating an “abominable mystery” for Charles Darwin. What can be learned by measuring the stems and leaves of fossil specimens? Dana Royer and colleagues from Wesleyan University in Connecticut embarked on a project to measure […]
Maxwells Demon Helps Run Your Muscles
April 19, 2010
James Clerk Maxwell once speculated that the second law of thermodynamics could be violated if an agent or “demon” could sort the hot and cold molecules at a barrier, thus overcoming the tendency toward thermal equilibrium. Something like this has been found at work in the molecular machines in our muscles. The actin-myosin motor is […]
Genetic Subcode Discovered
April 18, 2010
Computer programmers know all about subroutines. One master program can easily call other programs, which can return results back to the master program. That’s very 1960s. Today’s modular software responds dynamically from disparate sources and responds to feedback from embedded triggers. They can call routines written in other codes or languages. We’re beginning to find […]
Psychologists Portray I.D. as a Form of Evolution
April 17, 2010
No need to draw a line between design and evolution, say two psychologists at the University of Iowa. Intelligent design is really a lot like evolution. They think we need to “better appreciate the actual forces that unite the processes of change across both evolutionary and developmental timescales.” This strange theory was announced […]