News to Note, June 21, 2008

1. Louisiana Bill Promotes Objective Discussion of Scientific Theories

Louisiana is poised to be the bane of evolutionists everywhere by promoting “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories.”

2. Astronomers Discover Three “Super Earths”

None of them have been named Krypton, but astronomers have identified three “Super-Earths” in a star system 42 light-years from Earth.

3. Life Created In Outer Space

“The odds are improving that life exists beyond Earth,” begins a ScienceNOW article, crediting the change to a study of a “billions-of-years-old” meteorite.

4. Apes Show Signs of Mentally Planning Ahead

Chimps and orangutans are capable of sophisticated “mental time travel,” reports LiveScience on research at Lund University in Sweden.

5. National Geographic News: “‘Amazing’ Dinosaur Trove Discovered in Utah”

A quarry “crowded” with fossils is a “shocker” to paleontologists, reports National Geographic News.

The Hanksville–Burpee Quarry, near Hanksville, Utah, is the newly discovered home of fossilized dinosaurs, petrified trees, and other gems of natural history. Among the dinosaurs unearthed in just three weeks are at least two meat-eating dinosaurs, a probable Stegosaurus, and four sauropod dinosaurs.

“Nobody anticipated the scale or the scope of what was there. Once they started excavating, they realized that the magnitude was far more than they had expected,” explained Scott Foss, a Bureau of Land Management paleontologist.

Scientists believe the quarry may have once been a bend in a large, ancient river, where dinosaur carcasses were washed downstream into a logjam of now-fossilized bones along with petrified trees and preserved clams. In other words, yet again, the force of moving water is credited for transporting and contributing to the fossilization process. As the waters of the great Flood of Noah’s time fell from above and rose from below, waters would have swept through and carved out channels, carrying animals and sorting them along the way, with many preserved as they were buried in the resulting sediments. The fossils left by the great Flood give us a history of death—not death millions of years before God’s “very good” creation, but death as a result of the pervasive sinfulness of mankind before the Flood.

6. Appendix May Harbor Useful Bacteria

If you’re a creationist, you’ve probably known it for a long time; if you’re an evolutionist, you may be just finding out: the human appendix does have a function.

7. Secularists Discuss Possibility of an Evolution Museum

Though we doubt the idea will go anywhere, one evolutionist has come up with a new way to counter AiG’s Creation Museum: building an Evolution Museum right across the street!

8. Firefighter Reminds Us of the Influence of the Creation-Evolution Debate

An off-hand comment by a firefighter writing in Newsweek reminds us of the immense influence of the creation–evolution debate.

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