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News:
November 2, 2003
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Religion in the News
ETS Leadership
Issues Recommendations on Kicking Out Open Theists
Evangelical Theological Society's Executive Committee unanimously recommends
Clark Pinnock stay; majority says John Sanders should go. By Ted Olsen.
Mike Yaconelli
Dies in Truck Accident
The cofounder of Youth Specialties and The Door embodied Messy Spirituality.
Interview by Rob Moll.
Books
& Culture's Book of the Week: The Troubled Conscience of a Founding
Father
An Imperfect God examines George Washington and slavery. Reviewed by Preston
Jones.
Ancient
Christian Commentary on Current Events: What Is War Good For?
What early church leaders thought of Christians and the military. By Joel
Elowsky.
Discovering
Magdalene the apostle, not the fallen woman
Karen L. King and several other scholars, maintain that the church made
Mary Magdalene into a sinner in an attempt to denigrate women and to solidify
male leadership (The New York Times).
Combing
through lost articles of faith
Lost Scriptures and Lost Christianities discuss what didn't make it into
the canon (The Boston Globe).
Science in the News
ASA Meeteing: You are cordially invited to join ASA members and friends for the 7th meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania Section of the American Scientific Affiliation. Topic: Days of Creation: Why Christians disagree over the meanings of Genesis and modern science. We will be meeting at Eastern College in Saint Davids, PA on Saturday November 8, 2003 starting at 1:30 PM until 4:45 PM. Cost: $10.00 (students and spouses free) RSVP by November 6th Alan McCarrick admeam@aol.com. Pannelists are Paul Humber, David Wilcox, Robert Newman, Stephen Meyers, and Frank Roberts. Campus directions and map: www.eastern.edu
The Elegant Universe
This is an excellent program about the universe and string theory. It airs
on PBS Tuesday at 8 PM (EST) See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/.
Watch the Program.
View the first two hours online now (hour 3 available Nov. 5). Watch
a Preview
Creation/Evolution
Zillions
of universes? Or did ours get lucky?
A controversial notion known as the anthropic principle holds forth that
the universe can only be understood by including ourselves in the equation
(The New York Times).
Scientists Find
Evolution Of Life Helped Keep Earth Habitable.
In a paper titled "Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and Neoproterozoic
Ice Ages" in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC Riverside researchers
Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL climate scientist Ken Caldeira,
discovered that the increased stability in modern climate may be due in
part to the evolution of marine plankton living in the open ocean with shells
and skeletal material made out of calcium carbonate.
Archaeology/Anthropology
Archaeology's
great hoax
In a storeroom of the Michigan Historical Museum, state archaeologist John
Halsey examined the newly acquired artifacts purported to be the remnants
of an ancient Middle Eastern civilization that settled in Michigan thousands
of years ago (The Grand Rapids Press, Mich.).
Theme
park investigates mysteries of the world.
Best-selling author Erich von Däniken has opened a theme park in Interlaken,
enabling mere mortals to have close encounters with his fantastic theories.
Human
Ancestors: Out of Asia? Oct. 28, 2003
An extinct, ape-like animal that researchers believe was a distant cousin
of humans probably evolved in Asia, instead of Africa, according to a recent
study. The finding suggests that anthropoid primates — a suborder including
apes, monkeys and humans — evolved in Asia before radiating to Africa,
where the earliest humans have been identified.
Astronomy
Gravity Probe
B To Test Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Washington - Oct 23, 2003
NASA's spacecraft, Gravity Probe B is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg
AFB aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket December 6, 2003. The GP-B mission is
expected to be approximately 16 months long and its objective is to test
Einstein's unverified theory of relativity that states space and time are
very slightly distorted by the presence of massive objects.
Sunlight makes
asteroids spin in strange ways. Boulder - Oct 27, 2003
A new study by researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles
University (Prague) has found that sunlight can have surprisingly important
effects on the spins of small asteroids. The study indicates that sunlight
may play a more important role in determining asteroid spin rates than collisions,
which were previously thought to control asteroid spin rates. Results will
be published in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature.
Sun more
active than for a millennium
A study of ice cores reconstructs sunspot intensity for the last 1150 years
- "we are living with a very unusual Sun", say researchers.
Biggest
map of Universe clinches dark energy
The largest, most detailed map to date shows beyond doubt that most of the
cosmos is composed of mysterious energy.
Universe Began
Not With A Bang, But A Hum. Paris (AFP) Oct 30, 2003
The explosion that gave birth to the Universe sounded not so much like a
Big Bang than a Deep Hum, it was reported.
Chandra Looks
Into Black Box Of Cosmic Hell. Boston - Oct 29, 2003
A series of Chandra observations of the spiral galaxy NGC 1637 has provided
a dramatic view of a violent, restless nature that belies its serene optical
image. Over a span of 21 months, intense neutron star and black hole X-ray
sources flashed on and off, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic
Christmas tree.
Biology
New Genomic Data
Helps Resolve Biology's Tree Of Life. Madison - Oct 23, 2003
For more than a century, biologists have been working to assign plants,
animals and microbes their respective places on the tree of life. More recently,
by comparing DNA sequences from a few genes per species, scientists have
been trying to construct a grand tree of life that accurately portrays the
course of life on Earth, and shows how all organisms are related, one to
another.
Nature
Web Focus: Human Chromosomes
Papers presented here serve as the definitive historical record for the
sequences and analyses of human chromosomes - the ultimate results of the
Human Genome Project.
Artificial
Proteins Assembled from Scratch Proteins are vital components of every cell.
They activate genes, enable motion, catalyze biochemical reactions--the
list goes on. Biotechnologists are thus understandably eager to unravel
their every secret: only with a thorough comprehension of natural proteins
can they engineer novel ones with special properties. New findings represent
intriguing progress on that front.
Surgeons
Offer New Treatment For Degenerative Eye Disease (October 28, 2003)
Researchers at Duke Eye Center believe a surgical procedure they have refined
for over a decade can offer hope to more people suffering from end-stage
age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is an eye disease that may lead
to central vision loss and afflicts an estimated 500,000 people worldwide
each year.
More
Evidence Shows That Children's Brains With Dyslexia Respond Abnormally To
Language Stimuli (October 27, 2003)
Researchers have additional evidence that reading problems are linked to
abnormal sound processing, thanks to high-precision pictures of the brain
at work. In a recent study, when children without reading problems tried
to distinguish between similar spoken syllables, speech areas in the left
brain worked much harder than corresponding areas in the right brain, whose
function is still unknown.
Earth Science
Ninety Eight
Tons Of Primordial Plant Matter Per Gallon. Salt Lake City - Oct
27, 2003
A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material – that's
196,000 pounds – is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we
burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles, according to a study
conducted at the University of Utah.
Dinosaurs got
cancer
Bone scans reveal tumours only in duck-billed species.
Smart-winged
pterosaurs
Why did ancient flying reptiles have so much processing power in the back
of their brain? To provide highly responsive flight control, is an answer
to emerge from an innovative analysis of pterosaur skulls.
Ancient wings
unfurled
Computer simulation reconstructs extinct butterfly patterns.
Palaeontology:
Preserved Organs of Devonian Harvestmen Nature 10/30/03 p.916
JASON A. DUNLOP, LYALL I. ANDERSON, HANS KERP &
HAGEN HASS.
Ultra-low
Oxygen Could Have Triggered Die-offs, Spurred Bird Breathing System
Recent evidence suggests that oxygen levels were suppressed worldwide 175
million to 275 million years ago and fell to precipitously low levels compared
with today's atmosphere, low enough to make breathing the air at sea level
feel like respiration at high altitude. Now, a University of Washington
paleontologist theorizes that low oxygen and repeated short but substantial
temperature increases because of greenhouse warming sparked two major mass-extinction
events, one of which eradicated 90 percent of all species on Earth.
Physics
The
Future of String Theory
A Conversation with Brian Greene String theory used to get everyone all
tied up in knots. Even its practitioners fretted about how complicated it
was, while other physicists mocked its lack of experimental predictions.
Scientists could scarcely communicate just why string theory was so exciting--why
it could fulfill Einstein's dream of the ultimate unified theory, how it
could give insight into such deep questions as why the universe exists at
all. But in the mid-1990s the theory started to click together conceptually.
It made some testable, if qualified, predictions. Few people can take more
credit for demystifying string theory than Brian Greene, a Columbia University
physics professor and a major contributor to the theory.
The Elegant
Universe Of Brian Greene. Moffett Field - Oct 29, 2003
Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University,
is one of the world's leading string theorists. String theories are considered
by many as the natural successor to Einstein's cosmological quest for a
Unified Field Theory, or what has become known as the 'theory of everything',
providing a united framework for combining all the known natural forces
(weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity).
Physicists
Stop Polarized Light, Create Bit Of Quantum Memory Rubidium (October
30, 2003)
In a University of Nebraska-Lincoln laboratory earlier this year a team
led by UNL physicist Herman Batelaan captured polarized light in a cell
containing a vapor of atoms of the metal rubidium.
Psychology
Online, out of control addiction.
Could
You Suffer From Psychosis? The Nose Knows (October 29, 2003)
Your nose could provide the first reliable diagnostic tool for predicting
a person's likelihood of developing psychosis, new research has found.