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Cell Biology

Far-Out Science
November 25, 2008
The following list of bizarre stories coming from science news outlets is jarring on two fronts: it shows how little scientists understand, and calls into question what counts as science these days.  Some stories illustrate one or the other; some both. Roar of the aurora aura:  Both Saturn and Mars turned up auroras that are […]
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Intelligent Design

Raise Money by Accomplishing Nothing
November 24, 2008
Frank Drake is being honored on Space.com by the SETI Institute as the “Father of SETI,”  His reputation is providing an opportunity for a fund raiser.  For a lot of money, you can spend time with a celebrity whose accomplishments are questionable. It’s not often you get the opportunity to hang out with a legend!  […]
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Cosmology

Desperately Fleeing God in Cosmology
November 17, 2008
Does the fine-tuning of the universe require belief in God?  Or will multiverse theory allow for a self-perpetuating, eternal, godless cosmos?  Tim Folger explored this topic in an interview with Andrei Linde, a cosmologist currently at Stanford, in Discovery Magazine.  The opening line sums up the controversy: “Our universe is perfectly tailored for life.  That […]
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Dumb Ideas

Poison Planet Was Life’s Training Ground
November 14, 2008
Navy Seals go through “Hell Week” in their training to become warriors.  The radical hardships they endure help prepare them for missions that will call on their deepest resources of courage and determination.  These men of the elite special forces also become experts in dealing with explosives.  Can molecules do the same, with a little […]
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Solar System

Young Lava Conflicts with Lunar Age
November 12, 2008
The Japanese found what the Americans and Russians didn’t: young lava on the far side of the moon.  “Volcanoes shook up the far side of the moon for far longer than scientists thought,” reported National Geographic News on photos from the Japanese Kaguya (Selene) spacecraft (11/15/2007).     Crater-count dating estimates the lava flows at […]
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Amazing Facts

Solar System Surprises
November 2, 2008
In the last few days and weeks, more amazing discoveries were made about bodies in the solar system. Mercury:  Results from the second flyby of Mercury on Oct. 6 by MESSENGER were announced Oct 29.  This pass covered more “hidden” territory that had never been seen before, bringing the coverage to 95%.  According to Space.com […]
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Cosmology

Antimatter Or Anti-Consensus?
November 1, 2008
Where’s the antimatter?  If the universe began in a big bang, there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter.  Instead, there is only regular matter as far as our telescopes can see.  (If antimatter were present, the annihilation of antimatter and matter would give a characteristic gamma-ray signature.)  This is a big matter; the […]
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Dumb Ideas

FrankenTitan Comes to Life
October 30, 2008
There’s electricity at Titan, the large moon of Saturn.  That can only mean one thing: life!  “Electricity Found on Saturn Moon–Could It Spark Life?” asked a headline on National Geographic News by Rebecca Carroll.  Visions of spark discharge tubes in a mad scientist’s lab arise in the imagination.  “Recently identified electrical activity on Saturn’s largest […]
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Solar System

Habitable Zones Are Not Forever
October 27, 2008
A new realization has broken on the astrobiological community: planetary habitable zones have no fences.  Michael Sherber wrote for Astrobiology Magazine (see Space.com) that planets around low-mass stars tend to be pulled out of the habitable zone toward the star.  They have just a billion years before migration can pull them in and cook them.  […]
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Cosmology

Science Cannot Validate Itself
October 16, 2008
Science is an unbiased, objective, disciplined, cooperative method for progressively uncovering truth about the natural world.  That’s the way most of us were taught to think about it in school.  Further reflection, however, produces a host of questions rarely discussed in science class.  How does science differ from other unbiased, objective, disciplined, cooperative methods of […]
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Astronomy

SETI Could Find Design in Neutrinos
October 12, 2008
Most of the scientists involved in SETI research are very antagonistic to Intelligent Design.  Nevertheless, they find the design inference perfectly “natural” when looking for ways to comb through natural phenomena for intelligently-designed signals.     Two new methods for detecting alien messages were reported by Science News in the Oct. 11 issue.1  Both involve […]
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Cosmology

Dark Energy May Be an Optical Illusion
October 5, 2008
Cosmologists can get rid of the burden of their worst imponderable substance, dark energy, if they are willing to jettison the Copernican Principle.  Science Daily reported thinking by a team of Oxford physicists who make the apparent acceleration of the universe an artifact of our viewing position.  When distant galaxies are viewed without the assumption […]
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Astronomy

Bangin’ Around to Get Something New Under the Sun
October 3, 2008
You’ve heard of the Big Bang, and the Cambrian Explosion.  Now, to get the solar system started, astronomers have added a Little Bang to move things along in the naturalistic path from nothing to everything.  Science Daily, Space.com and PhysOrg all reprinted a press release from the Carnegie Institution claiming that a nearby supernova led […]
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Solar System

Making Earths the Natural Way
September 24, 2008
Creating a solar system is as easy as spinning a dust cloud around a star.  Before long, rocky orbs will emerge from the dust as platforms on which life can evolve.  Is it that simple?  We know now that planets surround a number of other stars – perhaps most of them.  Textbooks and artwork make […]
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Solar System

Short-Term Flings at Saturn’s Rings
September 16, 2008
The Saturn system is assumed to be 4.5 billion years old like the rest of the solar system.  What mean the delicate dances of ring particles that have been observed by Cassini lately?  One would think moons and particles had pretty much settled into a stable old age by now, but no: some things change […]
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