Yesterday’s WH budget proposal for NASA, with deep cuts to future planetary science to the whopping tune of $300 million , didn’t exactly come as a shock. That’s the news reporters have been hearing and writing about for weeks. But if those changes are implemented it comes at a price. In this case, the price could be postponing the single greatest scientific discovery ever made. [Read more…]
A few hundred years ago a new fad was sweeping through the ranks of European privilege. It was a substance refined from an enigmatic plant brought back from the New World. While it was hailed as a ‘miracle’ by some, more recent experience has shown that it can produce erratic behavior, serious weight fluctuations, and systemic organ failure. Even first time users can fall victim. But it’s not all bad! On my very first date with Mrs. DS, at the close of the go-go nineties, she and I both indulged. Soon the mysterious extract worked its neurotransmitter magic, we gazed into each other’s now fluttering, blazing eyes, and fell madly in love. [Read more…]
The earth’s north pole won’t always be an iced over ocean and I don’t mean (just) because of climate change. We’re talking Pangea II here and in geological time, it’s not even that far off. At least that’s what some secular scientists at an elite east coast university claim: [Read more…]
Here we are, more than 200 years after Darwin’s birth, and in four US states the religiously motivated battle against scientific reality continues unabated: [Read more…]
It seems a Dr Howard Lang was in the archives of the British Geological Survey when he found some drawers marked Unregistered Fossil Plants. Inside were hundreds of fossils that have not seen the light of day for a smuch as 165 years. Museum curators soon realized that some of the material was actually collected or analyzed by Charles Darwin himself and during his most scientically formative time; see the piece of fossil wood below found by Darwin in 1834 while sailing on the HMS Beagle, and thinking about how biological diversity could arise over time, an idea he would later call evolution. [Read more…]
Well, maybe not evolution per se, but the stuff of evolution, i.e., genetic diversity manifested as morphological variance, and this is a pretty cute example if indeed it’s a product of heritable genotype. Click image for the skinny on this adorable little guy from Nat’l Geo.
If a princess were to kiss this tiny amphibian and turn it into a person, she would have a pygmy for a prince. [Read more…]
It is not pretty. According to a poll of pastors released a few days ago, the vast majority of them question evolution and then some: [Read more…]
Scientists working in high security labs in the US and the Netherlands managed to create a deadly strain of flu virus. The artificial bug has traits that would make it a real weapon of mass destruction if it were released: [Read more…]
Evolution is all about sex, baby, at least for us big hulking heterotrophs. When it comes to sex, sex organs play a central role in that evolution, regardless of what cultists invested in mythical invisible sky wizards would have you believe. And new research shows size does matter — it’s just that bigger doesn’t mean better:
(MSNBC) — Using data from scarab beetle populations separated by anywhere from 50 years to millions of years, research led by scientists at Indiana University reveals that both male and female genitalia evolve rapidly and in parallel with one another. But between newly evolving species, genitals diverged faster in shape than they did in size.
If a beetle’s wee-wee doesn’t fit in Mrs Beetle’s nu-nu, evolution pronounces a harsh sentence for life and beyond. Remember that the next time you’re staring in a mirror.