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News:
April 4, 2004
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Religion in the News
Kerry's
Catholicism, Bible quoting are now center of campaign
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has cranked up the religion
talk this week, criticizing President Bush on biblical grounds and giving
a lengthy interview with Time
magazine on his Catholic beliefs. See also A Test of Kerry's Faith.
Bush signs Unborn Victims of Violence Act
The president's first bill signing ceremony of the year was for the Unborn
Victims of Violence Act. "Any time an expectant mother is a victim
of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and
each deserving justice," President Bush said (text
| audio
| video).
Backing
Israel for different reasons
Most evangelical Christians support the state of Israel, but not always
for the same reasons (The Washington Post).
Wheaton
College denies it knew of abusive cult.
Wheaton College officials deny knowing about any abuse committed by a former
graduate student against several other former students who say they were
members of a physically abusive cult controlled by the older student, according
to a statement released by the school (Chicago Sun-Times).
'The
Mystery of Jesus'
Liam Neeson narrates new CNN documentary on life of Christ (CNN).
Peter
Jennings Goes Back to the Bible
The ABC news anchor talks about Monday's three-hour special, Jesus and Paul:
The Word and the Witness. Interview by Darrell Bock.
Christian
History Corner: How Will It All End?
Left Behind is neither the first nor the last word on "last things."
By Steven Gertz.
Rock,
roll & religion.
PS150 center brings skateboarding, concerts and Christian beliefs to Iosco
County's youth (The Bay City Times, Mi.).
She hath
made a disturbance.
By daring to preach and teach, Anne Hutchinson posed the first great threat
to Puritan government in the New World (The Christian Science Monitor).
Science in the News
Archaeology/Anthropology
Dating
Water and Tracing Bones.
Dating water and tracing bones to high precision will be more widely available
for geological and biomedical applications thanks to state-of-the-art atom
counting techniques. In a pair of new papers, Zheng-Tian Lu of Argonne National
Laboratory (lu@anl.gov) and his colleagues
have demonstrated two new applications of Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA;
see Update
460), in which researchers trap desired isotopes with lasers and magnetic
fields and then count them with laser techniques.
Artifacts support
evolution of symbolic thinking in Middle Stone Age. Tempe - Apr 01,
2004
New finds from an open-air archaeological site in the Serengeti National
Park in Tanzania have intriguing implications for the evolution of modern
human behavior, including further indications that symbolic thinking developed
in humans earlier than the currently accepted date of about 35,000 years
ago.
First
Frontal Portrait of Pharaoh Found in Egypt
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptologists have pieced together fragments of the first
known ancient portrait of a pharaoh drawn from the front rather than in
profile, a Spanish archaeologist said on Thursday.
Astronomy
Quasar Studies
Keep Fundamental Physical Constant - Constant. Paris - Apr 01,
2004
New studies, conducted using the UVES spectrograph on Kueyen, one of the
8.2-m telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope array at Paranal (Chile),
secured new data with unprecedented quality. These data, combined with a
very careful analysis, have provided the strongest astronomical constraints
to date on the possible variation of the fine structure constant. They show
that, contrary to previous claims, no evidence exist for assuming a time
variation of this fundamental constant.
NASA Goes Hypersonic
In X-43a Test. Dulles - Mar 29, 2004
Orbital Sciences Corporation announced today that its Hyper-X Launch Vehicle
was successfully launched on Saturday, March 27 in a flight test that originated
from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center located at Edwards Air Force Base,
California. The Hyper-X launch vehicle uses a modified first stage rocket
motor, originally designed and flight-proven aboard Orbital's Pegasus space
launch vehicle, to accelerate NASA's X-43A air-breathing scramjet to seven
times the speed of sound.
Methane on
Mars. Moffett Field - Mar 31, 2004
Considered suggestive of life, an atmosphere of methane on another planet
is considered one of the four best candidates for detecting habitable conditions
using remote sensing and telescope spectrographs.
Spirit
Finds Multi-Layer Hints Of Past Water At Mars' Gusev Site. Pasadena
- Apr 02, 2004
Clues from a wind-scalloped volcanic rock on Mars investigated by NASA's
Spirit rover suggest repeated possible exposures to water inside Gusev Crater,
scientists said Thursday.
Hubble's
Successor - UK Takes A Leading Role. London - Mar 29, 2004
The Hubble Space Telescope has brought the wonder and spectacle of the Universe
into every home. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) due
to be launched in 2011, will have a 6.5 metre diameter mirror - 2.5 times
larger than Hubble's - enabling it to produce even sharper and more spectacular
images from the farthest depths of the cosmos.
Titanic waves break on Saturn's sludgy moon.
A New
Moon for Earth? March 26, 2004
Earth has acquired a "quasi-moon" — an asteroid that will
encircle our planet for the next couple of years while it orbits the sun
on a horseshoe-shaped path, according to a report to be published on Saturday
in New Scientist. The asteroid, 2003 YN17, "is probably a chunk of
debris" from an impact between a larger space rock and the surface
of the moon, the British weekly said.
Radio
Astronomers Lift 'Fog' On Milky Way's Dark Heart; Black Hole Fits Inside
Earth's Orbit
Thirty years after astronomers discovered the mysterious object at the exact
center of our Milky Way Galaxy, an international team of scientists has
finally succeeded in directly measuring the size of that object, which surrounds
a black hole nearly four million times more massive than the Sun.
Biology
Self-Assembling
Proteins Could Help Repair Human Tissue. Baltimore - Mar 29, 2004
Protein hydrogels can be genetically engineered to promote the growth of
specific cells Johns Hopkins University researchers have created a new class
of artificial proteins that can assemble themselves into a gel and encourage
the growth of selected cell types. This biomaterial, which can be tailored
to send different biological signals to cells, is expected to help scientists
who are developing new ways to repair injured or diseased body parts.
Mosquitoes
could fight malaria
Researchers identify gene that makes insects attack parasite. 26 March 2004.
HIV discovery
allows targeting of vaccines
Researchers identify virus strains that frequently infect victims. 26 March
2004.
Too
Much Sleep Not a Good Thing SATURDAY, March 27 (HealthDayNews)
Like most everything else, sleep is best done in moderation. Spending too
many hours in bed each night can cause as many problems as getting too few
hours of sack time, according to a University of California, San Diego study
in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. The study found people who
sleep more than eight hours a night (long sleepers) and people who get less
than seven hours of slumber both report more sleep complaints than people
who get just the right amount of shuteye -- between seven and eight hours
per night.
Embryonic
Stem Cells Induced To Develop Into Bone Marrow And Blood Cells.
Researchers at Northwestern University have devised a method to induce embryonic
stem cells to develop into bone marrow and blood cells.
Creation/Evolution
The Dick
Staub Interview: William Dembski's Revolution
The author of Intelligent Design set out to answer the toughest questions
about the movement he helped promote.
Is
Evolution Just Another Religion?
Within the debate surrounding evolution and religion, some say evolution
is just another religion. Taking up this question in the essay below, Michael
Ruse says something to the effect that evolution and religion both split
paths and share some common ground. Ruse takes us through a brief history
of evolution's ascendancy as a biological theory, making claims to its objectivity,
but also showing its frequently imported ideological baggage.
Rat genome
reveals supercharged evolution
Researchers also think the draft genetic code will speed the identification
of key human genes and the creation of disease treatments. See also the rat genome.
Molecular Midwives
Hold Clues To The Origin Of Life. Atlanta - Apr 01, 2004
Adding a small molecule, dubbed a "molecular midwife," researchers
increased the rate of DNA formation in a chemical reaction 1,000 fold over
a similar reaction lacking a midwife.
Study
Clarifies Evolutionary History Of Early Complex Single-Celled Life.
Tysons Corner VA - Mar 27, 2004
A billion years ago (the Neoproterozoic age), complex single-celled organisms,
the acritarchs, began to develop, grow, and thrive. Almost a billion years
later, the study of the evolutionary history of acritarchs began to bog
down amid inconsistencies in the reporting of the diversity of species.
Fin
bone tells of early life on land
Scientists call the fossil a link to fishy ancestors. From a road-cut in
Northern Pennsylvania, researchers dislodged the finlike arm of an ancient
creature - one that is helping reveal how our very early aquatic ancestors
first dragged themselves out of the sea and colonized the land. See also
New Fossil Links Four-legged Land Animals To Ancient Fish.
Jaw-dropping
theory of human evolution
Did mankind trade chewing power for a bigger brain? 25 March 2004. See also
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000126D6-200B-1062-A00B83414B7F0000.
Earth Science
Dino
Prints:
Along the shores of a lake in southern Utah a 20 foot dinosaur sat down
got back up and staggered away.
A Picture Is Worth
A Thousand Miles. Blacksburg - Mar 29, 2004
The body size of ancient creatures, bivalves and brachiopods, could tell
geoscientists a lot about the creatures' life history and about the ecology
of the times in which they lived. However, traveling the world to measure
these creatures' fossils would take several life-times and more travel funds
than scientists usually have.
Physics
Evicting Einstein.
Huntsville - Mar 29, 2004
Sooner or later, the reign of Einstein, like the reign of Newton before
him, will come to an end. An upheaval in the world of physics that will
overthrow our notions of basic reality is inevitable, most scientists believe,
and currently a horse race is underway between a handful of theories competing
to be the successor to the throne.
The
weirdest link
Entanglement - the defining trait of quantum theory - is no longer just
a curiosity of the quantum world. Physicists are now finding that entanglement
between particles exists everywhere all the time, and have recently found
evidence that its effects can even be measured from the everyday world we
inhabit. It is a discovery that might have far-reaching consequences - it
could even be the key to understanding what gives rise to the phenomenon
of life.
Bright Light
Yields Unusual Vibes. Montreal - Mar 29, 2004
By bombarding very thin slices of several copper/oxygen compounds, called
cuprates, with very bright, short-lived pulses of light, Ivan Bozovic, a
physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory,
and his collaborators have discovered an unusual property of the materials:
After absorbing the light energy, they emit it as long-lived sound waves,
as opposed to heat energy.
Psychology
The
Brain in Love
Most people think of romantic love as a feeling. Helen Fisher, however,
views it as a drive so powerful that it can override other drives, such
as hunger and thirst, render the most dignified person a fool, or bring
rapture to an unassuming wallflower.
Banished
Thoughts Resurface in Dreams
"Wishes suppressed during the day assert themselves in dreams,"
Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago. Now new research provides evidence
suggesting that not just wishes but all kinds of thoughts we bar from our
minds while awake reappear when we sleep.
Technology
Sea change
for tidal power
New underwater turbines could be cheap and eco-friendly. 24 March 2004.
Scientists
create fifth form of carbon
Magnetic carbon 'nanofoam' could find medical applications. 23 March 2004.
Ethanol To
Power The Future Of Hydrogen Fuel Cells. Palo Alto - Mar 30, 2004
Hydrogen fuel cell technology's potentially strong future as a fuel for
automobiles and various other applications is likely to be weakened by issues
regarding its availability and the expenses involved in storage. Bio-based
products such as ethanol are expected to open up new areas for research.
Duke Chemists
Describe New Kind Of Nanotube Transistor Anaheim - Mar 30, 2004
Duke University researchers exploring ways to build ultrasmall electronic
devices out of atom-thick carbon cylinders have incorporated one of these
"carbon nanotubes" into a new kind of field effect transistor.