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Oct 30, 2009 — “Plant fossils give first real picture of earliest Neotropical rainforests,” announced a press release from University of Florida.  The fossils from Colombia show that “many of the dominant plant families existing in today’s Neotropical rainforests – including legumes, palms, avocado and banana – have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America’s climate and geological structure.” The team found 2,000 megafossil specimens from the Paleocene, said to be 58 million years old.  This is only 5 to 8 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs according to conventional dating.  “The new study provides...

Darwin’s arguments against God How Darwin rejected the doctrines of Christianity by Russell Grigg Charles Darwin Charles Darwin grew up embracing the ‘intelligent design’ thinking of his day—William Paley’s renowned argument that the design of a watch implies there must have been an intelligent watchmaker, and so design in the universe implies there must have been an intelligent Creator.1 Concerning this, Darwin wrote, ‘I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s “Natural Theology”.2 I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’3 Nevertheless, Darwin spent most of the rest of his life attempting to...

REASON * May 2000 Earth Day, Then and Now The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why. By Ronald Bailey Thirty Years ago, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America paused their anti-war protests to rally instead against pollution and population growth. Even Congress recessed, acknowledging that the environment was now on a political par with motherhood. Since that first Earth Day, the celebrations...

WASHINGTON -- Feeling like the day is dragging? Blame global warming.Increased man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a global warming gas, is slowing the Earth's rotation, according to a new study by Belgian scientists published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.It's not much of a slowdown -- about 1.7 microsecond or 1.7 millionth of one second a year, according to co-author Michel Crucifix, a climate researcher at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. The slowdown occurs because extra carbon dioxide expands the mass of the Earth's atmosphere from the Earth's surface. The change slows the Earth's rotation for the ...

Tropical Deforestation Monitored by Satellite COLLEGE PARK, Maryland, October 15, 2002 (ENS) - Satellite surveys show that less tropical forests were lost over the past two decades than previously estimated, but that the rate of loss is increasing. A research team led by the University of Maryland is the first to provide measures of how much tropical deforestation occurred during the past 20 years based on remote sensing data covering all the world's tropical forests. The team, whose research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), evaluated weather satellite data using computer models they developed for...

By October of 1630 the tadpole-shaped peninsula called Boston had 150 English-speaking residents. Led by John Winthrop, the colony's first governor, these Puritan emigrants virtually began the historical process in which large numbers of recent European arrivals settled and subdued Massachusetts Bay and the North American environment during the next three-and-one-half centuries. With each austere-living family constructing a wooden home and fencing an adjacent garden, Bostonians by the 1640s already were traversing the Charles River to gather firewood and building materials as precious timber close at hand virtually had been erased. As early as the winter of 1637-38, Winthrop noted,...