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People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box. We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users. The humanities-graduate writer of this piece would like to stress that this is...

Fossilization occurs rapidly when the conditions are right. The conditions necessary for lithification of soft tissue give clues to unlock the history of a fossil deposit. Experiments show that microbes are involved in the mineralization of soft tissue. By decaying flesh they affect the acidity of the environment and release ions necessary for its mineralization. Fossilization in apatite seems to require associated death and decay. In the Jurassic Oxford Clay Formation in England, apatite preserved the soft tissue of many squid-like animals, probably after a mass mortality event occurred in a zone of already high phosphate levels from decaying carcasses....

Regular readers of these pages know my little "pet name" for the leadership of the global warming hoaxers is "The Holy Church of Global Warming Moonbats" There is a Judge in the UK who believes just as I do, except he is serious. In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

He [Jesus] is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." -Col. 1:17 REPORTER'S NOTE: Though I'm taking a stab in the dark (excuse the pun) with interpreting this article, one thing is certain: these scientists seem to ascribe cognizant, rational attributes to an invisible "force" that is "ruling over" dark matter in the universe. I'll let you read the article and come to your own conclusions! -Teresa Neumann, BCN. Science Daily reports that an international team of astronomers have found an unexpected link between mysterious 'dark matter' and the visible stars and gas in galaxies that could...

Experimental Data Force Researchers to Admit There’s “No Such Thing As Junk RNA” Originally, proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution lauded “junk” DNA as functionless genetic garbage that showed life is the result of blind and random mutational events. Then “junk” DNA was disproved by the discovery that the vast majority of DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Did the failure of this Darwinian assumption cause evolutionists to terminate their love affair with biological “junk”? Of course not. They just shifted their argument back, claiming that the cell is full of “junk RNA”—DNA that is being transcribed into RNA but still does...

Years ago, National Geographic published a remarkable photograph of a polystrate fossil, a fossilized tree that extended stratigraphically upward through several layers of rock in Tennessee. Its roots were in a coal seam, and the overlying deposits included bedded shale and thin carbon-rich layers. An advocate of any form of uniformitarianism would believe that it took many, many years to deposit this sequence of layers (much longer than it takes for a tree to grow and eventually die and decay), yet one vertical fossil extends through them all. This one fossilized tree offered a direct contradiction to the evolutionary mantra...

What started out as a simple challenge by a college friend, “Bet you can’t prove evolution,” turned into a 30-year journey for Dr. Carl Werner. Like most of the other biology and medical school students, Carl was educated in and committed to an evolutionary belief system. But when his friend challenged those beliefs, his quest for answers began...

On the surface, Intelligent Design seems to be a perfectly reasonable approach to studying complexity. In our everyday experience, there is certainly nothing controversial about attributing the purposeful arrangement of components to an intelligent agent. When observing a monument of neatly stacked stones on a remote beach, who among us would not immediately conclude that an intelligent being had purposefully arranged it? And what rational person, upon seeing an ancient megalith like Stonehenge, would erroneously conclude that the structure spontaneously organized itself slowly over time? So what's the big deal with drawing these same inferences when studying biological complexity? How...

In recent decades, soft, squishy tissues have been discovered inside fossilized dinosaur bones. They seem so fresh that it appears as though the bodies were buried only a few thousand years ago. Since many think of a fossil as having had the original bone material replaced by minerals, the presence of actual bone--let alone pliable blood vessels, red blood cells, and proteins inside the bone--is quite extraordinary. These finds also present a dilemma. Given the fact that organic materials like blood vessels and blood cells rot, and the rates at which certain proteins decay, how could these soft tissues have...

When a conservative group, the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), recently contracted to premiere a new documentary titled “Darwin’s Dilemma” at the Smithsonian-affiliated California Science Center, they couldn’t imagine the brouhaha that would ensue. As soon as word of the screening went public, the Darwinian thought police started complaining about a government-supported science center renting its facilities to a group showing a film that challenges Darwinian evolution. Why the outrage? Isn’t there academic freedom to express scientific viewpoints that dissent from the evolutionary “consensus”? To give some background on the controversy, the fossil record shows that about 530 million years ago,...

Atheist author Richard Dawkins has made it loud and clear that he believes faith has no place in science and that a public debate between him and a creationist – of any type – is out of the question. “The objection to having debates with people like that (creationists) is that it gives them a kind of respectability,” Dawkins said during a recent appearance on the Michael Medved show. “If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives them a respectability, which I do not think your people have earned,” he told Discovery Institute President...

Lynn Margulis.Javier Pedreira A dispute between the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and an academy member has put the fate of three studies in question. In the wake of rows over a controversial paper published by the journal online in August — but not in print — two additional papers linked to the same academy member are now in limbo.Last month, PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman wrote to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asking for "a satisfactory explanation for [her] apparent selective communication of reviews" for...

special thanks to hanna548 for the artworkThere is a disturbing trend that has taken hold of the modern day Christian community, and it is my opinion that this trend is causing a schism as big as the one that was addressed at the Council of Nicea over the Trinity. Now this is not a debate for those who have no faith in Christ, for what accord has Christ with Belial? No, this is strictly a debate for those who profess Christ as their Lord and Savior. Unfortunately, those who attempt to address the problem are usually labeled as rabble-rousers who...

Nature has recently published an interesting paper which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution...

ICR Article Link Dinosaurs are a popular topic of study, whether in the public imagination or in scientific research. The scientific community, however, has a dirty little secret regarding the manner in which that research is handled. Dinosaur DNA Research: Is the tale wagging the evidence? by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D., and Brian Thomas, M.S.* Dinosaurs are a popular topic of study, whether in the public imagination or in scientific research. The scientific community, however, has a dirty little secret regarding the manner in which that research is handled. If dinosaur DNA doesn't "look like chicken"...

I enjoy my subscription to The New Scientist in large part for seeing to what lengths they are willing to go to support global warming orthodoxy. This week's issue, for example, describes a hitherto unobserved and completely unexplained phenomenon involving sudden changes in the temperature of the stratosphere associated with agitation of the wind speed and direction of the ionosphere: No process known to atmospheric physics would allow a specific local phenomenon like the stratwarm to propagate all the way from the stratosphere above the North Pole to the ionosphere above the equator...Some speculate that this trend is a product...

Two years ago, Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilized dinosaur skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo. By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at...

Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2009 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Contemporary astrophysics hold the scientific key to prove the existence of God, but unfortunately very few know the scientific facts, said Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J, PhD, during a conference delivered on Sunday at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver, Colorado. The Honolulu-born Jesuit is the past president of Gonzaga University and is also well-known philosopher and physicist who is involved in bringing science and theology together. Fr. Spitzer is currently engaged in an ambitious project to explain the metaphysical consequences of the latest astrophysical discoveries,...

In a Commentary essay, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld provide an analysis of biological thought that differs profoundly from that presented by those celebrating the Bicentenary of Darwin's birth and, incidentally, the recently published AP Biology Standards. "This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem [ . . ] became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact...

Einstein’s God by Jean F. Drew Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) — reluctant scientific revolutionary and one of the most prolific theoretical physicists who ever lived — continues to fascinate us as a world-class thinker and important public actor to this day. There has been much speculation regarding his religious views in particular over the course of many decades. Some people nowadays maintain that Einstein was an atheist. Others, a pantheist. His great biographer Abraham Pais (in Subtle Is the Lord, 1982) averred that Einstein’s God was simply the God of Baruch Spinoza ((1632–1677), one of the most influential European...

This is where the game of pass-the-parcel winds up in a dead end--as, eventually, it must. A scientific theory is a falsifiable rule that relates cause to effect. If you push Dawkins and company far enough, you find yourself more or less where Aristotle was more than 2,000 years ago in stating his view that any chain of cause-and-effect must ultimately begin with an Uncaused Cause. No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always--by the very definition of the scientific method--remain a non-scientific question.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — Researchers from the Open University are laying the groundwork for a new equation that could mathematically quantify a habitat’s potential for hosting life, in a similar way to how the Drake equation estimates the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way.

Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs. But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier. “The thought was...

The Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project has discovered a planet that orbits backward, against the rotational direction of its star. Methodological naturalists think collisions or near-collisions are the causes of unusual cosmic phenomena like this. But this reverse-orbit observation adds to a growing list of astronomical features that should not exist if collisions and other random physical processes are all that could have caused them.[1]...

For nearly two centuries the debate of how life was formed has raged. Did it occur through evolution or by creation? For many the debate is a theological one. Many Christians reject evolution holding that this theory is contrary to the Bible. Evolutionists often cite their theory as one refuting the existence of God. But can one believe in a creator while simultaneously accepting evolution?

…and its consequences upon sectarian teachings. Folks, OK, so me and my tables. Blame it on a personal idiosyncrasy that favors tabular data organization. But before we go deeper into it, consider this statement: if we were to suddenly lose every single manuscript of the New Testament, we will be able to rebuild it almost word-for-word from the written words of the Fathers of the Church alone. This fact has holds some profound consequences, as we will see further below. But now, the table, the source also being The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict:Early Patristic Quotations of the New...

Let’s question the “common-sense” double-standard. Folks, I was reading this article published today in Time Magazine online, entitled, The Burial Box of Jesus' Brother: A Case Against Fraud, because the controversy has been around for a while and of course, because of the significance of the artifact were the claims to its authenticity be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the introductory paragraph disappointed me, although I am already used to this case of disappointment coming from the so-called mainstream experts. Check it out: The world of biblical archaeology was stirred in 2002 by the unveiling of a limestone burial box...

I came across a news item in the USA Today website, dated August 18, that got my attention. It concerns "Dark Energy", the mysterious force that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, that no one can find or explain. Two scientists say is doesn't exist now because of a "mathematical solution they have produced, that suggests it is a natural result of the Big Bang. Part of the article is reproduced here. "What's the answer? It doesn't exist, suggest mathematicians Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, in a study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National...

August 23, 2009 — An alternative cosmology that doesn’t require dark energy may have the effect of putting the Milky Way near the center of the universe. That’s not the only interpretation, but it is being considered....

Gravity: A Theory in Crisis May 5, 2009 — Note: This is **not** a joke. How could gravity be a theory in crisis? Isn’t gravity one of the best-understood facts of nature? Don’t we all avoid jumping off cliffs because of the law of gravity? Gravity is doing just fine, thank you. It’s our theory of gravity, and the cosmology built on it, that is in crisis – according to a report on PhysOrg today: “Study plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis.”...

"Evolution, a religion? You must be nuts! I shall scoff at thee, mine theist!" I probably would get this type of remark from any evolutionist to whom I might suggest such a thing. Yes, evolution (or, at least, belief in it and Darwinist defense of it) is a religion and its believers are just as religious as their theistic counterparts. This fact can be a stumbling block to most atheists, but it is quite true. I should begin this essay by explaining what it is that constitutes a religion. I have expounded on this point elsewhere and I will do...

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

2. What are the dates of these documents? The crucifixion of Christ took place, it is generally agreed, about AD 30. According to Luke iii. I, the activity of John the Baptist, which immediately preceded the commencement of our Lord's public ministry, is dated in 'the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar'. Now, Tiberius became emperor in August, AD 14, and according to the method of computation current in Syria, which Luke would have followed, his fifteenth year commenced in September or October, AD a7.1 The fourth Gospel mentions three Passovers after this time; the third Passover from that date would...

The Evolutionist is "Shocked, Shocked to Find Religion in Here" --snip-- Evolutionary thought is, and always has been profoundly religious. Of course that is nothing new--religious mandates have always been influential. What is remarkable is the denial of evolutionists about their own arguments and convictions...

(CNSNews.com) - A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters of Americans would like teachers to have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution, with an even higher number reported among Democrats...

THE twin Viking landers that defied the odds to land on Mars in 1976 and 1977 had one primary goal: to find life. To the disappointment of nearly all concerned, the data they sent back was a sharp dash of cold water. The Martian surface was harsh and antibiotic and there was no sign of life. To two NASA scientists, James Lovelock and Dian Hitchcock, this came as no surprise - in fact, they would have been amazed to see any evidence of life on Mars. A decade before Viking, Lovelock and Hitchcock, both atmospheric scientists, had used observations of...

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics "Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the...

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. For some, such as Richard Dawkins, Darwinism has been elevated from a provisional scientific theory to a worldview­an outlook on reality that excludes God, firmly and permanently. Others have reacted strongly against the high priests of secularism. Atheism, they argue, simply uses such scientific theories as weapons in its protracted war against religion. They also fear that biblical interpretation is simply being accommodated to fit contemporary scientific theories. Surely, they argue, the Creation narratives in Genesis are...

Francis Collins, former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and seminal player in sequencing the human genome, has launched a foundation that seeks to reconcile Christian faith with science. The Washington-based foundation, BioLogos, is funded by the John Templeton Foundation and aims to promote "the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives," according to its website. The BioLogos website also lists several questions (eg. "How does the harshness of evolution align with the idea of a loving God?" and "Can scientific and scriptural truth be reconciled?" and "What...

If only William Jennings Bryan had known Francis Collins. Maybe Bryan, who died just five days after leading the prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial, might have lived longer. Although he won the case, his sudden death suggests the proceedings, during which he was savaged by the press, may have taken a toll. And who knows? We might never have argued at all about whether evolution should be taught in public schools had Collins been around. Timing. If Collins is not familiar, he should be. He is the physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of...

"At present, science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited: either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is...

... Unfortunately, many theologians have decided that claims made by the majority of scientists represent scientific “facts.” In turn, these “facts” represent ultimate truth, which must then be used to understand biblical teachings. However, the Bible contains numerous claims and events that are not going to be popularly accepted as “scientific.” Are these claims now unacceptable to Christians? Scripture records the occurrence of numerous miracles performed by God. By definition, a miracle is an event not explainable by natural processes. Otherwise, it would hardly constitute a miracle. Are these miracles going to be accepted as “scientific?” What do these theologians...

As councils ran out of the grit they had failed to stockpile because they fell for the Government line that climate change made it unnecessary, Britain was last week doubly-carpeted, partly by snow, partly by a blizzard of tributes to Charles Darwin. What did these have in common? In contrast to the centenary of Darwin’s death 26 years ago, what has been noticeable about this homage, not least on the BBC, is how relentlessly reverential it has been. One would never have guessed from the adulation heaped on the great man by the likes of Sir David Attenborough that there...

The next skirmish in the long-running dispute about the teaching of evolution in Texas public schools is set for Wednesday. That’s when scores of people, including six appointed curriculum reviewers, are expected to testify before the State Board of Education on a proposal for the next decade’s science curricula...

Lab-'evolved' Molecules Support Creation by Brian Thomas, M.S. Scientists attempting to demonstrate random evolution in the laboratory have found something entirely different: evidence supporting creation. Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute coaxed an RNA-like long chain molecule, called R3C, to copy itself. The journal New Scientist stated that Joyce’s “laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube.” But it “evolved” only after “Joyce's team created” it. “After further lab tinkering,” Joyce’s colleague Tracy Lincoln “redesigned the molecule” so that it would replicate more effectively.1 What Joyce and his team actually discovered was how difficult it is and...

When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens recently, one of the eight arguments I offered for God’s existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing. I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the definite beginning of the space-time continuum. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, the Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, the Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. While I don’t have space to unpack this evidence here (see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to...

Jan 15, 2009 — A common attitude among scientists is that they are not responsible for what people do with their discoveries. Facts are facts, after all, and nuclear energy can be used to power a city as well as destroy it. Is this a truism or a half-truth? Are there cases where a scientist is responsible for what he or she proclaims as a fact about the world? In its continuing celebration of Darwin, Science magazine printed an article about “Darwin’s Originality” by Peter J. Bowler.1 This philosopher from Queen’s University of Belfast described how Darwin’s theory of evolution...