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Origin of Life

Time for Mars Life Again
January 16, 2009
Methane detection around Mars is giving new life to claims there is life on Mars.  Space.com #1 and Space.com #2 explain why NASA scientists are looking to see if the methane can be explained geologically or biologically.  Some news sites, like The Sun, go over the top with claims life has been discovered.  Only the […]
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Bible and Theology

Darwinists Cannot Deny “Disturbing” Implications
January 15, 2009
A common attitude among scientists is that they are not responsible for what people do with their discoveries.  Facts are facts, after all, and nuclear energy can be used to power a city as well as destroy it.  Is this a truism or a half-truth?  Are there cases where a scientist is responsible for what […]
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Origin of Life

Darwin Blogs on Origin of Life
January 14, 2009
He may not blog himself, but Darwin has disciples who blog for him.  There’s bound to be a lot of blogging this year with Darwin’s 200th birthday next month and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species this November.  Science began a blog called Origins with some entries from their Jan 8 issue.  Two […]
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Amazing Facts

Biology Now Includes Fluid Dynamic Construction
January 13, 2009
There’s an old legend that Tibetan monks built a wall by levitating heavy stones with sound by beating their drums and gongs.  Something not quite so fantastic but still amazing is done by cells in the embryo.  Scientists have filmed zebrafish embryos using beating cilia to build little stone structures that they use for balance. […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Darwin in the Air
January 11, 2009
Darwin Day euphoria must be in the air.  There have been several news stories with Darwin or Evolution in the title, but little to his credit in the substance of the article. Evolution inaction:  The human immune system is, by any account, Science Daily, however not only called it a case of “Evolution in Action,” […]
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Intelligent Design

Comparing Geological and Biological Patterns
December 26, 2008
Beehives have hexagons.  So do lava flows.  Is there any difference in how they form?  Science Daily shows a picture of polygon-shaped tops of basalt columns at the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.  Similar formations are found in the Grand Canyon, at Devil’s Postpile in California, and in many places around the world.     Researchers […]
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Cosmology

Dream On, Astrobiology
December 22, 2008
An astrobiologist at Open University (UK) has classified habitable worlds into four types, even though only one of them is known to have life.  Astrobiology Magazine reported the list by Jan Hendrik Bredeh?ft: earth-like, Mars-like, Venus-like and water-worlds.  After considering all the facts, Bredeh?ft says our best bet to find extraterrestrial ecosystems is to hunt […]
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Education

Which Evolution Should Be Taught?
December 19, 2008
Two articles in Scientific American’s cover feature on evolution in preparation for Darwin Day (12/15/2008, 12/16/2008) quoted a favorite line by Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  Assuming a teacher or textbook writer wants to illustrate how true this proverb is, which evolutionary proposal should be presented?  Recent articles […]
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Bible and Theology

Darwin’s New Terror: Islamic Creationism
December 13, 2008
The Darwinists must be feel like victims of a pincer strategy.  After years of hassling with American creationists and the Intelligent Design movement in the west, here come the Muslims on the east.  A couple of recent reports express the uneasiness evolutionists feel over the rise of anti-Darwin sentiments in Turkey and other parts of […]
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Cell Biology

Nature Plagiarizes Behe’s Mousetrap
December 9, 2008
The prevention of genomic instability – and cancer – can be attributed to a “complex mousetrap” mechanism, said Robert M. Brosh, Jr (Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology, NIH) in Nature.1  This not-so-subtle reference to Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex system described in Darwin’s Black Box even has a mousetrap illustration with the following caption: The BLM protein […]
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Amazing Facts

Thanks to Clam Design, Stronger Materials Are Coming
December 6, 2008
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs have produced a lightweight composite material 300 times stronger than its constituents.  How?  By taking inspiration from clams.     The team, writing in Science,1 described nacre, the shiny mother-of-pearl found inside clam shells.  Because of the way it sandwiches crystalline aragonite with layers of protein (07/26/2004), nacre resists […]
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Cosmology

Cosmologists Taste the Forbidden Fruit
December 5, 2008
Everyone agrees: our universe appears fine-tuned for human existence.  You have two choices: it was designed by God, or there is a multiverse (other universes we cannot detect).  Amanda Gefter is unhappy with that choice.  In New Scientist, she asked, why can’t we have more options?     Calling the God-vs-multiverse choice a false dichotomy, […]
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Origin of Life

Another Attempt to Explain Life’s Handedness
December 3, 2008
Life uses only single-handed (homochiral) molecules for proteins and DNA.  How that came about when mixtures of life’s building blocks contain equal amounts of both hands is a puzzle that confounds origin-of-life research.  Science Daily reported on new studies at the Argonne National Laboratory that show that molecules in space on a magnetic substrate exposed […]
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Amazing Facts

Go to the Ant, Thou Farmer
November 30, 2008
We humans boast too much.  Agribusiness?  Ants have it down to a science.  “One of the most important developments in human civilisation was the practice of sustainable agriculture,” stated Science Daily.  “But we were not the first – ants have been doing it for over 50 million years.  Just as farming helped humans become a […]
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Biomimetics

Knowledge of Light Is Power
November 28, 2008
Now that engineers are becoming adept at manipulating materials at the scale of billionths of a meter, they are taking first steps toward using a power source familiar to plants: light.  Science Daily described the first humble attempts to get light photons to drive nano-sized machines.     The article did not mention whether photosynthesis […]
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