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Amazing Facts

Venter’s Synthetic Plagiarism Deflated by NY Times
June 2, 2010
How significant was Craig Venter’s achievement of a so-called synthetic genome?  Somewhat significant, but it pales in significance to creating life from scratch.  It was only like “peering over a fortress that is the mighty cell,” wrote Natalie Angier for the New York Times Monday, May 31.     The article was accompanied with a […]
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Amazing Facts

Fooling Around with OOL
May 31, 2010
Origin of Life (OOL) research is one of those areas in science where one doesn’t have to make any real progress, as long as he or she looks busy.  Anything the scientist says, no matter how speculative, or even foolish, is likely to be taken seriously, because the alternative – creation – has already been […]
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Cosmology

Science Explains Why the Universe Exists
May 29, 2010
They’ve done it again – those clever scientists have figured out why the universe exists.  What would we ever do without them?  Michael Bolen at Yahoo News had to share the good news, “Scientists discover explanation for why the Universe exists.”  Space.com explained it as a victory in an ancient contest: “Why We Exist: Matter […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwin in Space without a Helmet
May 26, 2010
“Space agencies may one day have Charles Darwin to thank for the longevity of their spacecraft,” began an article in New Scientist.  This seems a strange thing to write about a biologist who knew nothing of space travel.  “The life expectancy of a popular type of ion engine has been almost doubled using software that […]
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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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Biomimetics

Venter Group Plagiarizes Genetic Code
May 22, 2010
Is plagiarism a form of intelligent design?  We think of intelligent design in terms of God and creation, but in generic terms, I.D. only refers to purposeful, designed action by an agent – any agent, large or small, good or evil.  A planned murder, for instance, can be an evil form of intelligent design.  A […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Should Darwin Get a Pass in Science Class?
May 21, 2010
In many public school science classrooms today, Darwinism is taught uncritically as a scientific fact.  Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) defends that practice, and Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (DI) contests it.  This month the two in their own venues argued their points of view, and another educator weighed […]
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Darwin and Evolution

How Science Is Done: Upsetting Applecarts
May 19, 2010
Hardly a week goes by without some scientific finding upsetting an applecart – a long-held belief.  Often, those beliefs are scientific theories taught in textbooks by science professors.  Defenders of science say that this is the way science works.  It’s a self-correcting process, they argue; it’s to be expected that new data will lead to […]
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Origin of Life

Titan Continues to Surprise Saturn Scientists
May 16, 2010
Since reaching Saturn in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has now made 68 flybys of Titan, the large smog-shrouded moon.  Space.com highlighted a recent picture showing the rings appearing to bisect the moon.  What are some of the latest findings of this alien world – the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere? […]
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Biomimetics

If Humans Build DNA Machines, Is It Intelligent Design?
May 15, 2010
Two teams have succeeded in building little robots that work on DNA tracks.  These resemble in many respects the machines that cells use to perform its functions on DNA.  No one denies that humans engineered their nanobots on purpose, but Darwinist scientists claim natural cellular machines evolved without purpose or design.  What’s the difference?   […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Media Continues to Denounce ID, Crown Darwin
May 14, 2010
The news media and journals continue to publish one-sided statements against intelligent design (ID) – even though scientific evidence continues to support design on many fronts (see 05/11/2010, 05/07/2010, 05/06/2010 from just this past week).  Sometimes, in other venues, the kind of rhetoric employed would be characterized as hate speech.  These statements are usually printed […]
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Amazing Facts

Bacteria: Let’s Harness Those “Perfect Machines”
May 11, 2010
Ten Italian scientists have a novel idea.  They want to hitch up their wagons to bacteria and use them to power nanomachines.  It’s too much work to build such “perfect machines” from scratch, they said.  Why not just take advantage of what nature has already provided?     Their paper in PNAS1 is downright dreamy […]
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Human Body

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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Genetics

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” […]
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Cell Biology

Darwin’s 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 […]
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