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With a hopeful message about life's "X factor," episode 5 of secrets of the cell is well timed

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 10:41 UTC
Behe secrets of the cell
Michael Behe is a biochemist, leading proponent of intelligent design, and a wise guide to understanding the wonders of life with its mysterious "purposeful arrangement of parts." The new series from Discovery Institute, Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe, concludes today with a last consideration of the "X Factor" that appears to lie behind the wonderful, irreducible complexity of biology. That "X Factor," he explains, is an intelligence inconceivably beyond our own:


Secrets distills the argument for intelligent design in five-to-eight minute episodes, five in all. I'm sure ID has never been presented more accessibly, in a way anyone can easily understand. Share Secrets of the Cell with your family, friends, and social media network!

Comment: Be sure to check out previous episodes in the the series: See also: Natural Selection - The Jesus of Evolution

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Galaxy

Rare double brown dwarf eclipse spotted in surprise discovery

Chelsea Gohd
Space.com
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 06:57 UTC
This artist's conception shows a Y dwarf.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's conception shows a Y dwarf. Scientists now say they've discovered a rare binary brown dwarf.
Astronomers scouring the cosmos for new planets have made a chance discovery, identifying the rare eclipse of two brown dwarfs.

"This is a great example of scientific serendipity," Adam Burgasser, a co-leading author on this study and a professor of physics at UC San Diego, said in a statement. "While searching for planets, we found an eclipsing brown dwarf binary, a system that is uniquely suited for studying the fundamental physics of these faint celestial objects."

Brown dwarfs, often referred to as "failed stars," are celestial objects that are too big to be considered planets and too small to be stars. Roughly between the size of a giant planet and a small star, scientists think that these strange objects emit mostly infrared radiation. Brown dwarfs seem to form like less massive stars, and because astronomers consider them the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small stars like red dwarfs, they help to provide insights into scientists' understanding of how objects like stars and planets form.
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Butterfly

The bird's-eye view: How birds see the world compared to humans

Hamza Naseem
Sciencephile
Fri, 28 Feb 2020 18:38 UTC
Rockhopper Penguin
© Ian Glover/Flickr
Rockhopper Penguin
How is it that an eagle can snatch a rabbit off the ground from hundreds of feet in the air and we can not even grab a glass off a table without knocking it over? It's because they see the world differently from us.

Thankfully, a recent scientific research has revealed an astonishing world of vision diversity across the animal kingdom.

The dragonfly brain works so fast that it sees movements in slow motion, snakes pick up infrared thermal signals from hot objects, thus detecting their prey, while horses and zebras have their eyes pointed to the side, which allowing them to have a peripheral vision and to avoid the dangers when necessary.
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Info

Is there another fundamental force of nature?

Eric Betz
Astronomy
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:39 UTC
Physicist Attila Krasznahorkay,
© Courtesy of Attila Krasznahorkay,
Physicist Attila Krasznahorkay, right, works with a fellow researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, a group of Hungarian researchers have made headlines with a bold claim. They say they've discovered a new particle — dubbed X17 — that requires the existence of a fifth force of nature.

The researchers weren't looking for the new particle, though. Instead, it popped up as an anomaly in their detector back in 2015 while they were searching for signs of dark matter. The oddity didn't draw much attention at first. But eventually, a group of prominent particle physicists working at the University of California, Irvine, took a closer look and suggested that the Hungarians had stumbled onto a new type of particle — one that implies an entirely new force of nature.

Then, in late 2019, the Hungarian find hit the mainstream — including a story featured prominently on CNN — when they released new results suggesting that their signal hadn't gone away. The anomaly persisted even after they changed the parameters of their experiment. They've now seen it pop up in the same way hundreds of times.
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Microscope 1

The Darwinist mantra: It exists; therefore, it evolved


Evolution News
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 16:48 UTC
dna puzzle evolution
© Arek Socha via Pixabay
The way some evolutionary biologists and some uncritical reporters in the media talk, probabilistic miracles are routine events. Natural selection is omnipotent so it can handle any observation in biology. Since evolution is already a fact, no other explanation or argument is needed. It exists; therefore it evolved.

Genes from Scratch

Take the case of de novo genes. Darwin skeptics argue that the origin of a new gene or protein by chance is so fantastically improbable, it will never happen anywhere in the history of the universe, even under the most favorable circumstances.* No problem, say these evolutionists; since evolution is a fact, it happened. This is a variation on a formulation offered here last year, "To solve a problem, declare it solved." Watch the faith of evolutionists at Trinity College Dublin when they consider the origin of orphan genes. They report, "Genes from scratch — far more common and important than we thought."
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Solar Flares

29 bullet points proving the sun causes global warming, not CO2: By a geologist, for a change (Dr Roger Higgs)

Cap Allon
Electroverse
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 10:29 UTC
Earth and sun
Dr Roger Higgs, Geoclastica Ltd, Technical Note 2019-11, 6th April 2019, amended 7th March 2020 on ResearchGate (LINK HERE).

We urgently need to expose the 'CO2 = pollutant' fallacy being forced upon your children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces by schools, universities, governments and mainstream media worldwide, and to denounce it in scrupulously truthful terms easily understood by the public, including those youngsters themselves.

Here are the 29 bullet points proving CO2's innocence:

1) The IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has no geologists among the hundreds of authors of its last major report (2013-14) and at most 1 geologist in the next report (due 2022; see my Technical Note 2019-10). Thus IPCC focuses on only the last 150 years (since thermometer records began, ~1850), yet Earth is 30 million (sic) times older, 4.5 billion years! Geologists know that Earth has warmed and cooled throughout this time. Climate change is perfectly normal.

2) The IPCC's very existence relies on public belief in man-made- or 'anthropogenic' global warming (AGW) by carbon dioxide (CO2) emission. IPCC authors, mostly government and university researchers, are biased by strong vested interests in AGW (publications; continuance of salaries; research grants). Similarly, universities have sacrificed their impartiality by hosting institutes mandated to confirm and act on AGW, e.g. Grantham Institute (Imperial College), Tyndall Centre.

3) The claimed '97% consensus among scientists' that AGW exists is a deception. It refers in fact to polls of recent publications by 'climate scientists', i.e. atmospheric scientists, lacking deep-time perspective (Bullet 1), whose numbers opportunistically exploded in the post-1990 AGW boom, creating a strong incentive for bias (Bullet 2).

Comment: See also:

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Fish

Ancient shell shows days were half-hour shorter 70 million years ago

American Geophysical Union
Phys.org
Mon, 09 Mar 2020 12:00 UTC
bivalves
© Wikipedia, Wilson44691 – Own work, Public Domain
Fossil rudist bivalves (Vaccinites) from the Al-Hajar Mountains, United Arab Emirates.
Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous. This means a day lasted only 23 and a half hours, according to the new study in AGU's journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.

The ancient mollusk, from an extinct and wildly diverse group known as rudist clams, grew fast, laying down daily growth rings. The new study used lasers to sample minute slices of shell and count the growth rings more accurately than human researchers with microscopes.

The growth rings allowed the researchers to determine the number of days in a year and more accurately calculate the length of a day 70 million years ago. The new measurement informs models of how the Moon formed and how close to Earth it has been over the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth-Moon gravitational dance.

Comment: See also:

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Info

'Primitive' stem cells shown to regenerate blood vessels in the eye


John Hopkins Medicine
Mon, 09 Mar 2020 01:34 UTC
Human vascular progenitor cells (green)
© Elias Zambidis, Johns Hopkins Medicine
Human vascular progenitor cells (green), made from Zambidis’ lab-grown naive stem cells, engraft into blood vessels (red) in a mouse retina.
Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have successfully turned back the biological hands of time, coaxing adult human cells in the laboratory to revert to a primitive state, and unlocking their potential to replace and repair damage to blood vessels in the retina caused by diabetes. The findings from this experimental study, they say, advance regenerative medicine techniques aimed at reversing the course of diabetic retinopathy and other blinding eye diseases.

"Our study results bring us a step closer to using stem cells more widely in regenerative medicine, without the historical problems our field has encountered in getting such cells to differentiate and avoid becoming cancerous," says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and a member of Johns Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering.

Results of experiments using human cells and mice were published online March 5 in Nature Communications.

According to the National Eye Institute, diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness in U.S. adults. By 2050, researchers estimate that some 14.6 million Americans will have the condition, which results in abnormal blood vessel growth in the retina, where light is processed into vision.
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Bulb

'Earthships' might be the most sustainable, livable, economical, fire-resistant buildings ever conceived of

Martin Freney
The Mind Unleashed
Sat, 07 Mar 2020 11:20 UTC
Earthships
© Kari Nousiainen/Flickr Creative Commons
Recent disastrous bushfires have rebooted debate about how to (re)build in the Australian bush. Questions are being asked about building standards, whether a fire-proof home is possible, the value of fire bunkers when it's too late to leave, and if we should even live in the bush any more.

I suggest homes and community buildings in bushfire-prone areas can be made much more fire-resistant, perhaps even fire-proof, by adopting earth-covered, off-grid structures - known as Earthships - as the new standard.

Built for survival

Houses sheltered by earth have a higher chance of survival in a bushfire. This is because earth-based constructions are non-flammable (while topsoil can burn and smoulder, clayey, sandy and gravelly soil does not).

A typical Earthship design has double-glazed windows to the north to let in winter sun, while mounds of earth, pushed up to roof level, protect the south, east and west walls. Taking this a step further, an earth-covered house includes a layer of earth over the roof.
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Moon

Giant-impact hypothesis: Traces of Theia found in the Moon

Michelle Starr
ScienceAlert
Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
representation Theia impact Moon
© Paul Wootton/ /Science Photo Library/Corbis
An artist's rendering of the collision that created the moon
Around 4.5 billion years ago, something the size of Mars collided with a newly formed Earth, to colossal effect. This object is not only thought to have fused with Earth and primed it for life, it also broke off a large chunk that went on to become the Moon.

This story is known as the giant-impact hypothesis; the Mars-sized object is called Theia; and now, for the first time, scientists believe they've found traces of Theia in the Moon.

The giant-impact hypothesis has been the favoured model for explaining the formation of the Moon for years.

"This model was capable of accounting for the then-recent observations from samples returned by the Apollo missions, which included the Moon's low iron content relative to Earth, depletion in volatiles and enrichment in refractory elements, while avoiding most of the pitfalls of previous lunar origin theories," researchers from the University of New Mexico wrote in their paper.

But there was one big spanner stuck in the works.

Comment: Collision rescaled: "Extremely giant impact' now thought to be the making of Earth's moon

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