News to Know

• News to Note, December 8, 2007

  Dec. 8, 2007

  This week we offer up super smart chimps, a dinosaur “mummy,” a biblical wall, and widespread doubts about Darwin.

• Sunday School Sans God

  Dec. 1, 2007

  For a new generation of children, Sunday school isn’t about Bible stories but encouraging “personal expression, intellectual curiosity and collaboration.”

• Unknown Life: Linnaeus's 300th Birthday

  Nov. 17, 2007

  Despite centuries of scientific effort classifying life, the vast majority of living things remain unknown.

• Toads Voluntarily Hybridize

  Nov. 10, 2007

  Research published in the journal Science details how some female toads violate an “evolutionary rule.” Perhaps no one has told them about it!

• Neanderthals: the New Red-Heads

  Nov. 3, 2007

  It’s a common caricature in textbooks, movies, and—more true than ever today—TV shows: a brow-ridged, (often) club-carrying Neanderthal, covered in thick, messy red hair.

• More Different Than We Thought

  Oct. 27, 2007

  Scientists publishing in the journal Genetics last week have showed that “[m]any more genes separate humans from chimpanzees than scientists believed.”

• Why We Can't Phone the Aliens

  Oct. 27, 2007

  Science fiction author Ben Bova offers a few explanations for why our search for extraterrestrial life (which is growing more robust with time) has turned up nothing so far.

• News to Note, October 13, 2007

  Oct. 13, 2007

  What can we learn from boasts of “artificial” life, a geological rush job, a Jurassic dragon, a not-so-useless organ, and the “fear” of evolution?

• A Vegetarian Dinosaur's Big Mouth

  Oct. 6, 2007

  Researchers are confused as to what a giant, duck-billed, many-toothed dinosaur would eat.

• Lessons from a Beetle

  Oct. 6, 2007

  A team at the University of Leeds in England has engineered a spray nozzle that replicates the bombardier beetle’s (in)famous defense mechanism.

• Chimp Filing for Person-hood

  Sept. 29, 2007

  His name notwithstanding, the current legal case for the personhood of Mr. Matthew Hiasl Pan (a chimp) is in jeopardy, reports the Associated Press from Vienna, Austria.

• Review of New Fossils Found in Georgia

  Sept. 22, 2007

  A team reporting this week in the journal Nature announces the discovery of the remains of four individuals found at the site of a medieval castle at Dmanisi in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

• Troublesome Underwater Volcanoes

  Sept. 1, 2007

  Underwater volcanoes spewing oxygen-devouring gases delay the evolutionary timetable, according to a new study.

• Water-less Geysers

  Aug. 25, 2007

  National Geographic News reports on a new model, published online in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that removes the need for liquid water in explaining the “unusual” geysers on Enceladus’s south pole.

• Too Big for the Big Bang?

  Aug. 18, 2007

  Astronomers looking at galaxies far, far away have found five that don’t quite fit big-bang ideas.

• Shaking Hands with a Shark

  Aug. 18, 2007

  A University of Florida study focusing on genes that control “how and where body parts develop in animals” has resulted in evidence that the genetic “potential” to grow fingers and toes is found in sharks as well as bony fish.

• Megaflood Makes Britain

  July 21, 2007

  Recent research suggests that Great Britain was formed as the result of a megaflood.

• Possible Water Vapor Tantalizes Astronomers

  July 14, 2007

  The exoplanetary-analysis community is buzzing with news this week of the possible discovery of water on HD189733b, an exoplanet 64 light-years from earth.

• Potential Hydrocarbons on Hyperion

  July 7, 2007

  NASA scientists’ recent assert that Saturn’s moon Hyperion is home to “cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.”

• Plane Flies in the Face of Glaciology

  

  June 30, 2007

  Some WW2 planes buried in over 250 feet of ice have been recovered.

• A Tolerantly Fair Discussion of Intolerance

  June 19, 2007

  Sunday’s Cincinnati Enquirer included an insightful and forthright Creation Museum write-up by Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson.

• More Than Meets the Eye: The Human Genome

  June 16, 2007

  “A close-up view of the human genome has revealed its innermost workings to be far more complex than first thought,” reports a BBC NEWS article on a recent Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (Encode) study.

• Mice (Cells) to Men (Cells)

  June 9, 2007

  Japanese and American researchers announced a “reprogramming” technique that has rendered fetal mouse cells “indistinguishable” from embryonic stem cells.

• Treewalking Orangutans

  June 2, 2007

  Primatologist Robin Crompton and graduate student Susannah Thrope are rekindling a “30-year-old hypothesis that upright walking first evolved in the trees.”

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