Man's future missions to Mars may see humans housed in incredible 3D-printed pod-like structures, according to a futuristic design project that scooped a $500,000 NASA prize.

Proposed by New York-based company AI SpaceFactory, the strange structure is designed to be printed from recycled substances and materials found on-site during deep space explorations to the moon, Mars or beyond, to build sustainable housing for adventuring humans.

Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory. Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview. Accepting the theory as settled truth -no more subject to debate than the earth being round or the sky blue or force being mass times acceleration- certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life. But what if Darwin was wrong?

Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin's theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good.

This is sad. It is no victory of any sort for religion. It is a defeat for human ingenuity. It means one less beautiful idea in our world, and one more hugely difficult and important problem back on mankind's to-do list. But we each need to make our peace with the facts, and not try to make life on earth simpler than it really is.

Charles Darwin explained monumental change by making one basic assumption-all life-forms descend from a common ancestor-and adding two simple processes anyone can understand: random, heritable variation and natural selection. Out of these simple ingredients, conceived to be operating blindly over hundreds of millions of years, he conjured up change that seems like the deliberate unfolding of a grand plan, designed and carried out with superhuman genius. Could nature really have pulled out of its hat the invention of life, of increasingly sophisticated life-forms and, ultimately, the unique-in-the-cosmos (so far as we know) human mind-given no strategy but trial and error? The mindless accumulation of small changes? It is an astounding idea. Yet Darwin's brilliant and lovely theory explains how it could have happened.

A popular GPS tracker - used as a panic alarm for elderly patients, to monitor kids and track vehicles - contains security flaws, which security researchers say are so severe the device should be recalled.

The Chinese-manufactured white-label location tracker, rebranded and sold by more than a dozen companies - including OwnFone Footprint and SureSafeGo - uses a SIM card to connect to the 2G/GPRS cell network. Although none of the devices have internet connectivity and won't be found on exposed device database sites like Shodan, they still can be remotely accessed and controlled by SMS.

Researchers at U.K. cybersecurity firm Fidus Information Security say the device can be tricked into turning over its real-time location simply by anyone sending it a text message with a keyword. Through another command, anyone can call the device and remotely listen in to its in-built microphone without alerting anyone.

Another command can remotely kill the cell signal altogether, rendering the device effectively useless.

Editor's note: The online journal Sapientia recently posed a good question to several participants in a forum: "Is Intelligent Design Detectable by Science?" This is one key issue on which proponents of ID and of theistic evolution differ. Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science and director of Discovery Institute^'s Center for Science & Culture, gave the following reply.

Biologists have long recognized that many organized structures in living organisms - the elegant form and protective covering of the coiled nautilus; the interdependent parts of the vertebrate eye; the interlocking bones, muscles, and feathers of a bird wing - "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."¹

Before Darwin, biologists attributed the beauty, integrated complexity, and adaptation of organisms to their environments to a powerful designing intelligence. Consequently, they also thought the study of life rendered the activity of a designing intelligence detectable in the natural world.

Yet Darwin argued that this appearance of design could be more simply explained as the product of a purely undirected mechanism, namely, natural selection and random variation. Modern neo-Darwinists have similarly asserted that the undirected process of natural selection and random mutation produced the intricate designed-like structures in living systems. They affirm that natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being guided by an intelligent agent. Thus, living organisms may look designed, but on this view, that appearance is illusory and, consequently, the study of life does not render the activity of a designing intelligence detectable in the natural world. As Darwin himself insisted, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course in which the wind blows."² Or as the eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has argued, Darwin accounted for "design without a designer" and showed "that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."³

The shale industry faces an uncertain future as drillers try to outrun the treadmill of precipitous well declines.

For years, companies have deployed an array of drilling techniques to extract more oil and gas out of their wells, steadily intensifying each stage of the operation. Longer laterals, more water, more frac sand, closer spacing of wells - pushing each of these to their limits, for the most part, led to more production. Higher output allowed the industry to outpace the infamous decline rates from shale wells.

In fact, since 2012, average lateral lengths have increased 44 percent to over 7,000 feet and the volume of water used in drilling has surged more than 250 percent, according to a new report for the Post Carbon Institute. Taken together, longer laterals and more prodigious use of water and sand means that a well drilled in 2018 can reach 2.6 times as much reservoir rock as a well drilled in 2012, the report says.

That sounds impressive, but the industry may simply be frontloading production. The suite of drilling techniques "have lowered costs and allowed the resource to be extracted with fewer wells, but have not significantly increased the ultimate recoverable resource," J. David Hughes, an earth scientist, and author of the Post Carbon report, warned. Technological improvements "don't change the fundamental characteristics of shale production, they only speed up the boom-to-bust life cycle," he said.

One of the biggest investment opportunities over the next decade will be in companies working to delay human death, a market expected to be worth at least $600 billion by 2025, according to one of Wall Street's major investment banks.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts Felix Tran and Haim Israel believe that genome sequencers such as Illumina, high-tech players such as Alphabet and biotech companies such as Novartis are on the cusp of "bringing unprecedented increases to the quality and length of human lifespans."

Innovation in genome science, big data and "ammortality," which includes wearable technology and products in the so-called wellness space, could soon prolong healthy human life well beyond 100 years, BofA told clients Wednesday.

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 9 suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.

The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in particular areas in the distant past.

"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," says Lehti Saag of University of Tartu, Estonia.

Is Creationism true? Or is Darwinism true? And why would it have to be one or the other? It seems it hasn't occurred to many people that both might be wrong. Since both of them, despite what they might claim, are more about ideology than science, it shouldn't really be too surprising that science doesn't really support either, at least not in the form they're presented.

Most people who believe in Creationism do so because they were raised Christians, and they believe in the Bible (a bit too literally at that). On the other hand, there seem to be three main reasons why people believe in Darwinism: they've been taught it at school, they only have a vague sense of the underlying science (or the lack thereof, as we'll see), and/or they're convinced Creationism is nonsense and believe their only other option is Darwinism. There are, however, some serious problems with all three of these justifications.

First, the way Darwinism is taught in schools is extremely deceptive and would require an article of its own, but I will outline what's wrong with Darwinism in general and with the way it is presented to us.

Second, the vague knowledge of the science and facts relevant to evolution that most people have actually prevents them from seeing the countless problems of Darwinism. The notion that organisms evolved step by step is easy to swallow when you have no clear idea what exactly these steps would have to be and how exactly the mechanism of evolution is supposed to work. Without a clear sense of what the cell looks like, what it contains, how complex it is, how it works, and what DNA does, you're only left with the talking points that affirm that it all really does work and that science has proved it (and that only ignorant people question it.) You rarely get to hear how flimsy this science actually is, how elusive the proofs are, and how many scientists disagree with the mainstream narrative. Anti-Darwinian ideas are often literally banned from schools, usually on the false premise that they're not scientific. True scientific reasoning is sorely lacking in Darwinism itself however.

Third, Darwinism and Creationism aren't our only choices. This is not an election where you have to choose between two candidates. Just like with a choice between two presidential candidates, if you allow yourself to be convinced that those are your only options, you've already lost. The assumptions that anyone who isn't a Darwinist must be a Creationist and that if you're not a Creationist, you have to be a Darwinist, are false.

There's Creationism, there's Darwinism, and then there's the truth. This rarely noticed third option is what I want to focus on in this article. And to find the truth, we must identify the lies. I won't talk about Creationism, because it's based on a fictional book and it's about trying to fit facts into the book's narrative. Besides, no amount of proof will move Creationists from their beliefs. My point is to show to people who passively believe Darwinism is true but have never done any serious research to confirm or deny this, that Darwinism has massive flaws and identifying them doesn't have to lead us towards Creationism.

My basis for the argument against Darwinism is science, especially scientific discoveries from the last few decades. Darwinism is stuck in the first half of the 20th century. There's no need to invoke God to show that Darwinian evolution doesn't work as described. Science does the job. Believing in the ability of Darwinism to explain evolution is not about how much you know but about how much you're willing to ignore.

It should also be noted that, in general, we're talking about things for which there is often insufficient clear evidence, and much of the evidence we have is subject to interpretation. Different people have different interpretations of the same facts, largely influenced by their particular world views and beliefs. Some things we know for sure, but many things are much less clear. In any theory of evolution we are by definition dealing with events and processes that occurred long ago, and we can study some of them only from scattered pieces of evidence that don't include the complete context required to understand them fully. In many cases, we must simply acknowledge that we don't know and that our differing beliefs are based on theories and speculations.

I will divide this article into three main parts: what exactly the Darwinian process of evolution is and how it's supposed to work, why it doesn't and can't do what it claims to do, and what that means for us.

Contrary to expectations, some deep-water fish species see in colour, researchers have discovered.

The depths of the ocean are unimaginably dark. Any remaining light from the surface is mostly blue and thus, it has long been assumed, for the denizens of the deep the world is dim, drab and monochromatic.

But now an international team of scientists have found the assumption to be wrong, after discovering that many deep-sea fish species come equipped with a range of previously unknown vision-related proteins.

Vertebrates use sight for just about everything: from foraging and avoiding being eaten by passing predators, to navigation and choosing a mate. This vision is based on two types of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. The cells contain light-sensitive proteins called opsins, which come in several varieties.

Cones deal with bright light situations and have four kinds of opsins, while rods are more specialised for low light conditions and in 99% of vertebrates contain only one opsin type. This means that most vertebrates are near colour-blind in dim light.

It had been long thought that deep sea fish, living between 200 and 1500 metres below the surface, were in the same situation.

Research published in the journal Science reveals some remarkable exceptions.

Statistical analysis of fossil data shows that it is unlikely that Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old, apelike fossil from South Africa, is the direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong.

The research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago, published this week in Science Advances, concludes by suggesting that Australopithecus afarensis, of the famous "Lucy" skeleton, is still the most likely ancestor to the genus Homo.

The first A. sediba fossils were unearthed near Johannesburg in 2008. Hundreds of fragments of the species have since been discovered, all dating to roughly two million years ago. The oldest known Homofossil, the jawbone of an as yet unnamed species found in Ethiopia, is 2.8 million years old, predating A. sediba by 800,000 years.