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Physics

Saturn’s Moons Are Bustin’ Out All Over
June 16, 2007
Add Tethys and Dione to the party blowers around Saturn.  Cassini found that these two moons are active, like Enceladus and Titan, though on a lesser scale.  Cassini scientists discovered the effects of outbound particles from these moons by studying the plasma fields with the Cassini plasma spectrometer (CAPS) instrument.  The results suggest surface activity, […]
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Fossils

Huge Forest Fossilized Suddenly
June 14, 2007
Nature1 had some interesting comments about the fossil forest found in a coal mine a few months ago (see 04/23/2007).  Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Natural History said that a vast area (over 3.8 square miles) must have been inundated quickly for this fossil graveyard to be preserved. Rapid burial can result from […]
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Politics and Ethics

The Malthus Effect on Politics and Economics
June 5, 2007
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published an essay that had a profound impact on Charles Darwin and others. But it was flawed.
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Solar System

How Old Are Sand Dunes?
June 4, 2007
The Namib Desert has some of the largest sand dunes in the world.  How old are they?  Three scientists from the University of London decided to find out.  They took cores out of some dunes in Namibia and analyzed the sand, using multiple high-tech methods.  Their conclusion, just published in Geology: the dunes are much […]
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Origin of Life

OOL Study Substitutes Computer for Chemistry
May 15, 2007
Upon reading a recent origin-of-life paper in PNAS,1 you might think the authors ran experiments with real chemicals and real deep-sea rocks.  A more careful look, however, reveals that their model only worked in cyberspace.  This raises interesting questions about the ability of simulations to substitute for empirical evidence.     Their claims were dramatic […]
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Physics

Instant Diamonds?
May 7, 2007
Talk about catastrophism: imagine a geological process creating a dyke 150 miles deep in a few minutes.  This is a new model for how diatremes formed, as described in Nature last week.1  The surprise end of the abstract by Lionel Wilson and James W. Head III states, “No precursor to the eruption is felt at […]
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Fossils

Fossil Forest Found in Coal
April 23, 2007
A Carboniferous forest extending some 4 square miles has been found in the ceiling of a coal mine, reported Science Daily, Live Science and News@Nature.  About 50 species have been identified, including ferns and horsetails over 10 times taller than those alive today.  News@Nature remarked that the forest contained some mangrove-like plants.  The article quoted […]
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Physics

Saturn Still Serving Surprises
March 28, 2007
The Cassini Spacecraft, three-fourths of the way into its 4-year prime mission, is not running out of new things to see.  Some of the latest discoveries are both awesome and strange. A Hex on the Pole:  As if the south pole of Saturn, with its earth-sized hurricane (picture) were not dramatic enough, the north pole […]
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Uncategorized

Geological Truisms Questioned
March 27, 2007
Nothing is a constant in scientific theories.  Popular ideas often wind up historical anecdotes.  What will happen to these two popular concepts? Snowball Earth Melts:  The idea that prior to the emergence of complex life the Earth was frozen over has been given the colorful title, “Snowball Earth.”  Scientists at Imperial College, London, are questioning […]
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Solar System

Did Mars Have a Global Flood?
March 18, 2007
There’s enough ice under Mars’ southern polar cap to flood the entire planet under 36 feet of water, reports Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  The MARSIS radar instrument on the ESA-NASA Mars Express determined that the ice cap is more than 2 miles thick in places.  According to the report on National Geographic News, traces of possible […]
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Dumb Ideas

Sappy Birthday, Plate Tectonics
March 8, 2007
Authors of prose and poetry often use personification to set the imagination and emotions moving.  Such talk is infrequent in science, because it can confuse more than illuminate.  We’ll let the reader decide the effect of a commentary in GSA Today1 by Shoufa Lin (U of Waterloo, Ontario), who asked, “When did the life of […]
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Physics

Theories of the Moon: Looney Tunes?
February 19, 2007
The TV science channels tell it like a matter of fact: our Moon originated from the coalescing debris of a glancing impact with Earth from a Mars-sized object, sometime long ago.  They even have computer animations to show how it all happened.  How reliable is this theory, though?  This month’s Planetary Report from The Planetary […]
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Media

Skeptics Society Apology Illustrates Christian Virtue
January 21, 2007
Some evolutionists leaped onto a press release from a group named PEER last December that claimed national park rangers at Grand Canyon were obeying some new policy under pressure from the Bush administration that did not allow them to claim the canyon was millions of years old (see 01/11/2007, bullet 2).  This was supposedly related […]
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Bible and Theology

Evolutionist Lost Faith Over Flawed Geology Lesson
January 12, 2007
A college student’s Biblical faith could not survive a geology lesson that seemed to offer convincing proof that the earth was older than Genesis indicated.
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Dating Methods

Precambrian Pods Promoted to Pleistocene (!)
January 3, 2007
The bulletin of the Geological Society of America started 2007 with a bang. (Geeks sometimes refer to the exclamation point as a “bang”.) It’s not often one sees an exclamation point in the title of a scientific paper, but the bang in one by Donald R. Lowe (Stanford) and Gary R. Byerly (Louisiana State)1 conveys […]
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