Dating Methods

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Early Man IQ: Et Tu, Brute?

May 12, 2009

Anthropologists are receiving a jolt about the intelligence of early man. Long before the cave paintings showed our forebears exercising art appreciation, new findings suggest they were gifted individuals, not brutes. The first report was about manufactured beads dated older than 82,000 years. Science Daily said, “The shells are currently at the centre […]

Solar System

State of the Moon Titan Addressed

May 6, 2009

Each May, a series of articles on major topics of geological interest, written by leading experts in the field, is published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. This year’s issue includes a treatise on Titan, the large moon of Saturn, written by the two titans of Titan science, Jonathan Lunine and Ralph […]

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Blood Protein, Cells Recovered

April 30, 2009

It’s official: soft tissue, including blood vessel proteins and structures resembling cells, have been recovered from dinosaur bone. Mary Schweitzer’s amazing claim in 2005 (03/24/2005) was subsequently disputed as possible contamination from biofilms (07/30/2008). Now, Schweitzer and her team took exceptional precautions to avoid contamination by excavating hadrosaur bone from sandstone said to be 80 […]

Physics

Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?

April 30, 2009

Everyone knows the Bible tells the story of a global flood in Noah’s day. Creation scientists argue that its effects would have left visible evidence today – including most of the sedimentary layers and most of the fossil record. Secular geologists have laughed off this story since the 18th century as nothing but myth, of […]

Fossils

The Long Precambrian Fuse Gets Longer

April 28, 2009

Why did complex multicellular life explode on the scene some 550 million years ago? That’s mystery enough, but finding complex single-celled life a billion years earlier makes it worse. A new paper evaluated claims of Cambrian-like fossils from India dated 1.6 billion years old in the evolutionary timeline. It did not explain the Cambrian explosion, […]

Dumb Ideas

Mooning the Public: Life Sells

April 27, 2009

Advertisers have known for a long time that sex sells. That’s why ads often include a scantily-clad woman standing next to the pickup truck for sale. It seems that in planetary science, life sells. An icy moon can be a pretty dull thing, but announce that there might be life there, and eye appeal jumps. […]

Geology

Geophysical King Dethroned?

April 17, 2009

Geologists have been speaking of a Great Oxygenation Event that may have never happened.

Early Man

Did Early Man Have a Soul?

April 8, 2009

Some recent discoveries are surprising paleoanthropologists by much some early ancestors seem – well, human. We’re talking about ancestors half a million years old in the evolutionary scheme. They were supposed to be prior to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, but they seem to exhibit intelligence and compassion. A report on New Scientist […]

Astronomy

Early Large Galaxies Stun Cosmologists

April 2, 2009

Cosmology has a kind of Cambrian Explosion of its own to grapple with. Contrary to expectations, some of the earliest galaxies appear as large as current ones, if not larger. Astronomers, using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, examined five galaxy clusters with ages estimated at 5 billion years after the Big Bang. Statements in a […]

Early Man

Peking Man Ages 200,000 Years

March 16, 2009

Dates for Chinese fossils of Homo erectus have been pushed back 200,000 years to 780,000 years before the present, reported Live Science. The report is based on a paper in Nature by scientists who used cosmogenic nuclide dating methods for the first time.1 Ciochon and Bettis, in the same issue of Nature,2 said the report […]

Fossils

Permian Extinction: The Origin of Specious Geological Events

March 9, 2009

The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct – lay people assume scientists can back up this story with evidence from geology and fossils, but where is it? Whatever happened at the prime site in South Africa, from […]

Uncategorized

Darwins Wrong Turn in Argentina

February 12, 2009

When the Beagle was sailing the coast of Argentina in 1834, it stopped at the mouth of the Santa Cruz River. 25-year-old Charles Darwin, who had been reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology, got out and explored the area on foot as the crew made camp on the cliffs. Darwin was impressed by the six-mile-wide canyon […]

Solar System

Titan Methane Age Still a Problem

February 2, 2009

“Our new map provides more coverage of Titan’s poles, but even if all of the features we see there were filled with liquid methane, there’s still not enough to sustain the atmosphere for more than 10 million years.” So said Elizabeth Turtle, lead author of a paper in Geophysical Research Letters,1 in an article on […]

Physics

The Moon Has Core Values

January 25, 2009

Did the moon have a molten core? There has been “a long-held consensus that objects in the solar system smaller than than [sic] Mars, can’t sustain magnetic fields,” said National Geographic News based on a paper in Science January 16.1 Apollo rock samples seem to indicate the presence of long-lived magnetism. It suggests a molten […]