Dating Methods – Page 22

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

More Evidence the Molecular Clock is Broken

July 15, 2005

“We live in interesting times,” grinned David Penny in Nature,1 reporting on how estimates of evolutionary past based on comparative genomics (the molecular clock) is producing confusing results. Apparently, evolutionary geneticists are going to have to make use of the theory of relativity – i.e., that how fast the clock ticks depends on the viewpoint […]

Uncategorized

Mountain-Building Time Cut by Two Thirds

July 13, 2005

How long does it take to build mountains? The conventional wisdom is that mountain building (orogeny) is a slow, gradual process that takes many millions of years. A story on Live Science doesn’t deny some millions, but reduces the estimated age of a range in Norway from 40 million to 13 million, and claims the […]

Uncategorized

Rock Formation Built in Millions of Years, Lost in Seconds?

July 5, 2005

To the surprise of tourists, one of Australia’s seacoast rock formations called the “Twelve Apostles” collapsed into a pile of rubble before their eyes, reported CNN, ABC and other news sources. The fall of the 150-foot high sedimentary formation was caught in before-and-after snapshots by a teenager. Even though standard geology claims the rocks began […]

Uncategorized

Did Old Metamorphic Rocks Form in Just 10 Years?

June 30, 2005

A discovery in Norway may collapse a geological process by five or six orders of magnitude. A paper by Camacho et al. announced in Nature,1 yielded this comment by Simon Kelley (Open University, UK) in the same issue,2 “Conventional wisdom says that changes to crustal rocks pushed down deep when continents collide develop over millions […]

Birds

Soft T-Rex Tissue Claimed Bird-Like; Age Ignored

June 3, 2005

More details about the soft tissue found in a T. rex thigh bone (see 03/24/2005 story) were published in Science this week.1 Mary Schweitzer’s team claims to have found evidence of medullary bone [MB], a type of mineralized and vascularized bony tissue found only in certain birds during ovulation as a buffer against calcium loss. […]

Early Man

Neanderthals and Modern Humans May Have Interbred

May 19, 2005

They lived together, they morphed into one another, so were members of Homo neanderthalensis really a separate species from Homo sapiens? Findings announced in Nature1 show a mixture of Neanderthal-like characteristics in modern human skeletons from Romania that led Science Now to state, “Oldest Europeans were swingers.” Because new radiocarbon dates of these skeletons put […]

Solar System

How to Get Asteroid Dust Ponds in Mere Millennia

April 19, 2005

A team of U. of Colorado and MIT scientists modeled the formation of the smooth dust ponds found in some of the craters on the asteroid Eros by the NEAR spacecraft (see 02/13/2001 entry). They calculated that micrometeoroid settling from impacts was too slow a process, and instead ran experiments with electrostatic levitation of fine […]

Solar System

Titan May Have Erupted Ice Recently

April 8, 2005

Large features on Titan resemble volcanic calderas. The fact that no impact craters appear on the flows indicate that they are young. But these are no ordinary volcanoes. If the findings are confirmed, they erupted ice. Richard Kerr reported the scuttlebutt from last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. Titan may […]

Dinosaurs

Soft Tissue from Dinosaurs Found: Intact Cells and Blood Vessels

March 24, 2005

The news media are abuzz with exciting reports about the discovery of soft tissues recovered from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone; see CNN, National Geographic, BBC News, MSNBC and News@Nature for examples. The soft tissue, analyzed from a thighbone unearthed in Montana, was reported by a North Carolina team led by Mary Higby Schweizer and was […]

Uncategorized

Mars Crater-Count Dating Is All Wrong

March 22, 2005

Planetary scientists have long relied on crater counts to estimate the ages of surfaces in the solar system. The more craters, the older the surface, has been the assumption. Now, according to a report in New Scientist, the method is flawed, at least on Mars. Data from the 2001 Mars Odyssey have shown rays around […]

Solar System

Titan: Case of the Missing Methane (and Ethane)

March 11, 2005

In Astrobiology Magazine this week, an article explained why the lack of methane and ethane oceans on Titan is so mysterious. Jonathan Lunine, a chemist and astrobiologist who has been studying Titan for over two decades, explained why these hydrocarbons ought to be there. Methane (CH4) is split by ultraviolet light from the sun. The […]

Solar System

What Is Melting the Ice on Enceladus?

March 4, 2005

When Cassini flew by Enceladus from 730 miles up on Feb. 15, scientists were hoping it would reveal the secret of its active surface. As is common in planetary science, the mystery only deepened (click here for photo gallery). The surface showed a complex mix of canyons, ridges and spots that suggest a taffy pulling […]

Uncategorized

Biblical Archaeology Address

March 3, 2005

Baptist Press posted a report about an address by noted archaeologist William Dever (see 02/18/2005 entry) at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary last month. Dever provided several examples from his own digs of archaeological finds that corroborate the Biblical record and chronology. He hit hard against the revisionists who try to deny the historicity of […]

Uncategorized

Mars Life in Embalming Fluid?

March 1, 2005

A researcher with the Mars Express project claims to have found formaldehyde along with methane in exceptional amounts, reports News@Nature. Since methane is destroyed by radiation in hundreds of days, and formaldehyde in several days, there is either a geological source for it, or it comes from living organisms in the soil, Vittorio Formisano claims. […]

Early Man

Dating Disaster: Is Neanderthal the New Piltdown?

February 25, 2005

We all know it by heart: Neanderthal Man was a big-boned, hairy cave-dweller that got pushed out of northern Europe 40,000 years ago by the smarter modern humans. Could this all be wrong? Did some bones actually belong to real people living in recorded history? The man who dated some of these bones, […]

All Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly" cat_id="1526"]