1. 8/30/20151 Creationism News -- April 2012 创造论新闻 -- 2012 年 4 月 Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to make his excellent websites. The contents of this presentation were taken from various sources. Thank God that David Coppedge came back from the lawsuit after two months of “vacation.” Pray for the results of the lawsuit. I now resume using his website materials. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com

2. 8/30/20152 Adaptation Mechanisms in Biology 生物学中的适应机制 ICR Acts and Facts (April 2012) has an article on the mechanisms of adaptation. Most expressed traits and adaptations are biologically complex responses. A creationist model of adaptation is based on the organism’s innate physiological capabilities and fault tolerance mechanisms that are genetically programmed by the Creator. Scientifically valid descriptions employ recent molecular discoveries in genomics, cell physiology, and phenotypic plasticity to explain an organism’s behavior to their environmental niches.

3. 8/30/20153 The Grand Staircase 大楼梯 ICR Acts and Facts (April 2012) has an article on the Grand Staircase, which describes the landforms of Utah and Arizona, starting from the colored Bryce Canyon, to Grey Cliffs, to White Cliffs, to Vermillion Cliffs, and finally to the Grand Canyon. These cliffs and canyons do form a grand staircase which spans the geologic era from the paleozoic, mesozoic, and the cenozoic. The staircase is best explained by receding flood waters in short duration. The Redwall limestone, in which billions of 2-foot long nautiloid fossils were discovered, prove the deposit could not have been due to gradual processes. The Coconino Sandstone is an underwater sand ripple deposit. The Zion Canyon has vast marine deposits of fossils. Bryce Canyon is a failed lake bed full of Flood waters. It all fits inferences from biblical information.

4. 8/30/20154 Tech Innovations from the Creator 从造物主来科技创新 ICR Acts and Facts (April 2012) has an article on how engineers copied from nature and produced many designs that still fall short of the real thing. Examples include the intricately designed scales of the large Arapaima Brazilian fish gave inspiration for engineers to develop flexible ceramics. Diving watercrafts are designed after the sleek water dynamics of killer whales, dolphins, and sharks. The humpback whale flippers have dome-like bumps called tubercles are now used in wind turbine blades which increased yearly electrical production by 20% with reduced noise! Now this design can be applied to fans, pumps, compressors, and turbines. God had it first. Rough shark skin is designed to smooth the water flow over the shark. 80% of the medals were won by swimmers with these suits.

5. 8/30/20155 Tech Innovations from the Creator 从造物主来科技创新 ICR Acts and Facts (April 2012) further describes how scientists took the wing design of long-distance birds to develop an amazing morphing airplane wing. The wing skin were covered by an outer skin like fish scales. This leads to rapid flights with less fuel consumption. Velcro was invented to imitate the burr structure of plants. Blood-clotting is not copied for use in aircraft composite material. Composites with tiny hollow tubes filled with epoxy resin. When the aircraft is over stressed, a crack would appear and resin leaks out. The scar is sealed. Gecko technology now includes tapes that would improve recovery from surgery and make more robust surgical materials, patches, and bandages. Let us give glory to God.

6. 8/30/20156 Spider Web Design 蜘蛛网设计 ICR Acts and Facts (April 2012) has an article on the masterful design of spider webs. Spider silk is stronger than steel and tougher than Levlar pound-for-pound. A spider silk strand resists stress in a stepwise fashion. After initial stiffening, the thread absorbed stress by stretching. Additional pressure caused the thread to sharply stiffen, thus transferring pressure to the rest of the web. The load capacity increased by 3-10% with the introduction of defects. It’s as if the web was designed to anticipate breaks. Because their webs remain stable after damage, spiders repair them to catch multiple means with the same web. Now scientists use modified bacteria and goats to manufacture silk proteins. Automobile designers can incorporate crumple zones to absorb head-on collisions. Thank God because He optimized the spider web.

7. 8/30/20157 Dead Galaxies Live On 死星系仍然活 Discover (April 2012) reports U of Michigan astronomer Joel Bregman looked into red-and-dead elliptical galaxies and found all of them have some young stars. The reddest and deadest galaxy, Messier 105, harbors dozens of young stars, although these young stars are a fraction of our own Milky Way. This fact will force astronomers to revise their models of galaxy formation. The fact is all galaxies have both “old” and “young” stars. It is a matter of interpretation. Some have more “old” stars, while others have more “young” stars. It is like some families have more elderly and others have more youngsters. Thank God for these families of galaxies.

8. 8/30/20158 A cu. mm of Brain Tissue  10 15 byte 一立方毫米的脑组织 10 15 字节 Discover (April 2012) reports MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung who models the brain’s connectome—the million billion points of contact between neurons in the brain. If successful, we’ll glimpse the anatomy of the mind. He needs bigger and faster computers for modeling. He needs more eyeballs to analyze the results. He is designing a game so that the public can play. It may take years to know what the brain is in store for us all. Thank God for our brains.

9. 8/30/20159 The Clouds Are Alive 云层活着 Discover (April 2012) reports that clouds are teeming with microorganisms so much as that it says the clouds are “alive.” The ecosystem in the sky may influence much of the world’s weather. The amount of microbial life present in the cloud droplets that make up a winter storm is amazing. The skies are full of invisible life. Bacteria, algae, and fungi are swept up by winds and lifted to the altitude of 20 miles into the stratosphere by electric fields during thunderstorms. Some researchers proposed the ice-making bug and others like it might be creating ice crystals in clouds that result in precipitation. Now cloud seeding has more chances. Thank God for that.

10. 8/30/201510 Surprising Scientific Fraud 令人惊讶的科学欺诈 Discover (April 2012) has the last page dedicated to “20 Things You Didn’t Know about Science Fraud.” In 18 surveys of researchers, 2% confessed to falsifying or manipulating data, but 14% said they knew a colleague who had. From retracted biology papers from 2000 to 2010, Americans were more prone to commit fraud than scientists of other nations. Chinese scientists were actually 3 times more likely to commit fraud. If caught stealing other’s ideas, they excused themselves that a memory as an original thought. Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, considered to be the greatest physics text ever written. Others who have altered data include Freud, Darwin, and Pasteur. This says that “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

11. 8/30/201511 Genome Length 基因组长度 Popular Science (April 2012) has an interesting section on the length of genome of various life forms: Bacterium (Escherichia coli): 6.2 million DNA base pairs Foot fungus (Trichophyton rubrum): 22 million DNA pairs Earthworm (A. tuberculata): 655 million DNA pairs Piranha (S. brandtii): 1600 million DNA pairs Human (Homo sapiens): 3000 million DNA pairs Daffodil (N. jonquilla): 16000 million DNA pairs That is why one single leaf of daffodil can grow into a plant. Is daffodil more complex than humans? Not necessarily. The fact is that all cells are very complex. There are hundreds of types of highly complex cells working in harmony in us to make us breathe and think. Thank God!

12. 8/30/201512 Jesus vs. Scientists: Who's Better at Miracles? 耶稣与科学家：谁在神迹更好？ Yahoo Science quotes Live Science (April 7) on Jesus vs. Scientist: Who’s Better at Miracles? The article compares Jesus’ miracles to current successes of science on topics of virgin birth, free wine, healing lameness, feeding the masses, making blind people see, resurrection of Lazarus, and found that science is still lag behind. It might take another 2000 years for science to catch up. The article says.

13. 8/30/201513 Oil Spill Anniversary 石油泄漏周年 Popular Mechanics (April 2012) has a short article on the two year anniversary of the worst oil spill in America. The mishap killed 11 people and dumped 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Federal officials found it is not a catastrophe as predicted. Favorable currents and topology prevented the oil from spreading and allowed bacteria to break it down quickly. A reduction of bluefin population was found to reduce less than 4%. Thank God for the bacteria to avert a catastrophe.

14. 8/30/201514 Vikings’ Crystal Compass 海盗水晶罗盘 Archaeology (March/April 2012) reports Vikings were able to sail from Norway to North America 1000 years ago without magnetic compass. The crystal Iceland spar could be used to ascertain the sun’s position even on a cloudy day. When light passes through the crystal, it is doubly refracted. As a person holds up the crystal to the sun and rotates it, the two beams line up when facing the sun. This is true even on a cloudy day. Thank God for the ingenuity of the Vikings to navigate without compass.

15. 8/30/201515 Heart Disease is Still the No. 1 Killer 心脏疾病仍是头号杀手 Time (April 2, 2012) has an article describing why heart disease is still the number 1 killer in America. Each year more than half a million people die of heart-related causes in the US, but despite increasing awareness of the key contributors to heart disease, we haven’t been getting much better at preventing it. Of the seven major heart risk factors(high cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, high glucose levels, an unhealthy diet, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and being overweight—most of us succeed at keeping only 3 or 4 under control. That is why Paul said that “the flesh is weak. The things that I want to do I did not do.” We need the grace of God and help of the Holy Spirit to help us to walk in His path.

16. 8/30/201516 Man-made Sound Helps Hummingbirds 人做声音帮助蜂鸟 Time (April 2, 2012) has an article describing how man-made sound from natural gas compressors help the hummingbirds to survive. Strange as it may sound. The man-made sound scare away the predator, the bluejay, which eats nesting babies of the hummingbirds. Man-made engine noise is not all that bad. At least in the case of the hummingbirds. It helps the birds to survive. We praise God for that.

17. 8/30/201517 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 The short sentence “Then something happened” appears in a press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, entitled, “Great Unconformity: Evidence for a geologic trigger of the Cambrian explosion” (see it also on PhysOrg). The references to geology, fossils and evidence sure sounds like this is coming from the science lab. Here’s the context:University of Wisconsin-MadisonPhysOrg The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today.

18. 8/30/201518 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 Then something happened. Over several tens of millions of years – a relative blink of an eye in geologic terms – a burst of evolution led to a flurry of diversification and increasing complexity, including the expansion of multicellular organisms and the appearance of the first shells and skeletons. The results of this Cambrian explosion are well documented in the fossil record, but its cause – why and when it happened, and perhaps why nothing similar has happened since – has been a mystery.

19. 8/30/201519 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 Although Darwin and other palaeontologists [sic; Darwin’s only degree was in theology] have regarded the resultant widespread hiatus in the rock record as a failure of preservation, the formation of this prominent gap may have actually been an environmental trigger for biomineralization, thereby promoting the Cambrian explosion of marine animals. Determining the geodynamic causes of extensive Neoproterozoic continental denudation followed by Phanerozoic sedimentation, and linking those dynamics to the timing and spatial distribution of marine transgression and biogeochemical change, is now a challenge for geoscience.

20. 8/30/201520 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 Then something happened. Over several tens of millions of years – a relative blink of an eye in geologic terms – a burst of evolution led to a flurry of diversification and increasing complexity, including the expansion of multicellular organisms and the appearance of the first shells and skeletons. The results of this Cambrian explosion are well documented in the fossil record, but its cause – why and when it happened, and perhaps why nothing similar has happened since – has been a mystery.

21. 8/30/201521 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 This is all part of the gap. They filled the gap with their own imaginations. There’s no evidence that shallow seas repeatedly advanced and retreated, wearing down imaginary sediments to basement rock all over the world. There’s only the gap– igneous basement rock, with flat sediments stacked on top of them a billion Darwin Years later. This is clearly visible in the Grand Canyon, but it represents a global phenomenon. That’s why it’s called the Great Unconformity. Furthermore, there’s only one Great Unconformity, so they have not found a Law of Nature that creates global unconformities from time to time. Peters himself said in the press release, “there’s nothing else like it in the entire rock record.”

22. 8/30/201522 Cambrian Explosion: Sedimentary, My Dear Flotsam 寒武纪大爆发：沉积，我亲爱的漂流 During an imaginary billion-year gap that left no sign of gully erosion on a global flat surface while imaginary seas advanced and retreated. “Then something happened.” New minerals changed the chemistry of seawater. This “triggered” a geologically-sudden explosion of complex body plans with eyes, articulated limbs, digestive systems, muscles and nerves. In science, it’s now permissible to use gaps to fill gaps. You can use silence to fill silence. You can use imagination in lieu of scientific data. Stuff happens: in modern Darwinian thinking, that’s all you need to know. Imagining what may happen in the gaps gives you Understanding — Enlightenment — Nirvana.

23. 8/30/201523 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) would have turned 100 on March 23. His name is almost synonymous with “rocket scientist” to many. Father of the American space program, including the first American satellite, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, the moon landings and Skylab, von Braun left an indelible mark on America and the world.

24. 8/30/201524 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 David Christensen, who worked with von Braun, spoke from his experience with the giant of rocketry: He was very unique. I don’t know of another individual, frankly, that’s had those capabilities, either then or now, that could do the things he did. He was a very warm personality. He was very down to Earth and friendly, never talked down to anyone. But talking to him, working on a project, you learned very quickly he was a genius. He was a very broad-based individual, very culturally capable; he played several musical instruments, wrote music, he was an astronomer and he was certainly a top notch engineer.

25. 8/30/201525 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 Late in the Apollo program, Wernher von Braun became a Christian and supporter of creation and academic freedom – the freedom of students to question Darwinian materialism. He wrote popular articles on the relationship of science and faith. “The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based,” he said in 1972.

26. 8/30/201526 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 In a statement remarkably prescient of arguments used by the subsequent intelligent design movement, he added, “While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion—that everything in the universe happened by chance—would violate the very objectivity of science itself.”

27. 8/30/201527 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 The positive coverage of von Braun’s 100th birthday is a hopeful sign that the misinformed guilt-by- association slurs of this great man are finally dying down, and that history will treat him favorably, as it should. Consider that he made great effort at considerable risk to escape to the Americans as soon as it was possible. Look at his record from the moment he arrived on American shores. Is it believable his character suddenly switched from one pole to another overnight?

28. 8/30/201528 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 The weight of evidence is that his expertise, borne of childhood love of space and rocketry, had been temporarily co-opted during the German war effort by forces beyond his control, and put to uses that repulsed him. As soon as it was possible for him to escape the clutches of his desperate situation, he sought out the Americans and surrendered his whole team to them. As an American, he explained his German situation when asked, without dwelling on it, but a few continued to tar him with guilt by association. No other alleged “Nazi war criminal” led such a stellar, exemplary life afterward.

29. 8/30/201529 Wernher von Braun Remembered 要记得沃纳 · 冯 · 布劳恩 He quickly became an American citizen and dedicated himself to the peaceful exploration of space. Von Braun was never charged with or convicted of any war crimes; on the contrary, he was showered with honors. Even the British Interplanetary Society, in the London that felt the horror of the V2 rockets, honored him. His achievements cannot and should not be smeared with baseless suppositions. The man’s life speaks for itself. Happy Birthday, Dr. von Braun– one of the world’s greatest creation scientists. world’s greatest creation scientists.

30. 8/30/201530 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 1. Butterfly black magic. Science Daily reported, “Butterfly Wings’ ‘Art of Blackness’ Could Boost Production of Green Fuels.” Notice they said art of blackness, not black art. It’s purely physical: the arrangement of cells on some butterfly wings are designed to absorb light to look as black as black can be. This observation portends fuel efficiency, the article says:Science Daily Butterfly wings may rank among the most delicate structures in nature, but they have given researchers powerful inspiration for new technology that doubles production of hydrogen gas — a green fuel of the future — from water and sunlight.

31. 8/30/201531 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 At a meeting of the American Chemical Society, Tongxiang Fang told the audience that the problem in fuel cells is light-gathering efficiency. “We realized that the solution to this problem may have been in existence for millions of years, fluttering right in front of our eyes,” Fan said. “And that was correct. Black butterfly wings turned out to be a natural solar collector worth studying and mimicking,” Fan said.

32. 8/30/201532 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 2. Does this float your boat? Imagine a one-pound boat that could carry 1,000 pounds. Wonders like this are coming into the realm of possibility by studying how water striders do it. Water striders literally walk on water, their specialized footpads creating mere dimples in the skin-like surface of water. By combining the bugs’ technique with one of the world’s lightest solid substances, aerogel, researchers at the University of Helsinki are looking to produce products useful for “cleaning up oil spills to helping create such products as sensors for detecting environmental pollution, miniaturized military robots, and even children’s toys and super-buoyant beach floats.”

33. 8/30/201533 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 Their findings were also presented at the American Chemical Society meeting. Biomimetics was the hot topic there: “The symposium focused on an emerging field called biomimetics, in which scientists literally take inspiration from Mother Nature, probing and adapting biological systems in plants and animals for use in medicine, industry and other fields.” The ACS is the world’s largest scientific society. Even the aerogel itself derives from cellulose in plants. If you wear cotton or use paper, you’re familiar with cellulose, but nano-cellulose is opening up a whole new age, according to one of the symposium organizers that invited a dozen presentations on it:

34. 8/30/201534 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 “We are in the middle of a Golden Age, in which a clearer understanding of the forms and functions of cellulose architectures in biological systems is promoting the evolution of advanced materials,” said Harry Brumer, Ph.D., of Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Ikkala pointed out that cellulose is the most abundant polymer on Earth, a renewable and sustainable raw material that could be used in many new ways. In addition, nanocellulose promises advanced structural materials similar to metals, such as high-tech spun fibers and films.

35. 8/30/201535 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 3. Biological batteries: If your surgeon left an Energizer battery inside you after sewing you back up, you would NOT last long like a toy bunny; you would be at a serious health risk. Some day, though, surgeons may intentionally sew batteries inside your body – batteries made with biological enzymes found in bacteria. “Nature’s billion-year-old battery key to storing energy” reads a headline on PhysOrg, referring to the time in Darwin years that evolutionists believe this enzyme, involved in photosynthesis, has existed. “Light induces a charge separation in the enzyme, causing one end to become negatively charged and the other positively charged, much like in a battery.”PhysOrg

36. 8/30/201536 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 If a team from Concordia University succeeds in controlling this enzyme, inventors may be able to create biological batteries that could internally monitor your vital signs with no ill effects from toxic chemicals, because the ingredients would be all natural. One of the driving forces for the research is that such materials are “carbon neutral and use resources that are in abundance: sun, carbon dioxide and water,” the article explained. “Researchers are using nature’s battery to inspire more sustainable, man-made energy converting systems.”

37. 8/30/201537 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 While on the subject of physics, let’s notice a tribute to James Clerk Maxwell, one of the world’s greatest creation scientists. His famous “Maxwell’s Equations” have yielded a new solution to the question of whether self-bending light is possible — and it is. Does this mean we will some day be able to see around corners? Read PhysOrg for the scoop on what this profound discovery might have in store for everything that acts with wave-like behavior.James Clerk MaxwellPhysOrg

38. 8/30/201538 From Wonders of Nature to Wonders of Technology 要从大自然的奇观到科技奇观 Did you notice the claim that the American Chemical Society is the world’s largest scientific society? and that they are jazzed about biomimetics–an intelligent- design based mode of scientific inquiry? What does that tell you about the future of Darwinism, that useless Victorian myth that produced things no more valuable to society than forced sterilization, genocide and totalitarian regimes? Yes, a Golden Age is coming, if we can extricate ourselves from the clutches of the Victorian myth, and return science to what it used to be: thinking God’s thoughts after him. The words of physicist James Joule are jewels in that regard, worth reading in this new age of biomimetics.James Joule

39. 8/30/201539 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Saturn just passed opposition on April 15, making it a good viewing object from Earth this season. Amateur observers with telescopes may be able to make out the moons Titan, Rhea, Dione, Iapetus, Tethys, and Enceladus. They may look like beautiful little gems from Earth, but from the Cassini spacecraft in orbit at Saturn, they are no less than astonishing. Recent observations of these moons add to the astonishment.

40. 8/30/201540 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Titan, the largest of Saturn’s family of natural satellites (larger even than the planet Mercury), yielded more secrets of its southern “great lake,” named Ontario Lacus (Lake Ontario, due to its resemblance and size to Earth’s counterpart). It turns out the lake is more like a mud flat, shallow and wide. Namibia has similar salt pans that occasionally fill in with liquid from the water table. Cassini scientists now think that liquid methane and ethane seep into the mud flat from below, instead of during downpours. This not only makes the giant “lake” a poor splashdown site for future spaceships, but adds to the mystery of the missing ethane, once thought to have covered Titan with a global ocean several kilometers deep.

41. 8/30/201541 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon, but smaller than Titan by a long shot (Rhea would cover Texas, but Titan would cover the entire United States). Cassini made another flyby of Rhea from 26,000 miles on March 10. The main thing of note in Space.com’s coverage was an impact basin 300 miles across, nearly a third of the moon’s diameter. Rhea also retains a tenuous atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide, apparently replenished by charged particles. “Researchers think the oxygen comes from Rhea’s surface ice, liberated from water molecules that get blasted apart by charged particles streaming from Saturn’s magnetosphere. The source of the carbon dioxide, however, is more mysterious.”Space.com

42. 8/30/201542 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Dione may be active like Enceladus, according to an article on the BBC News by Paul Rincon. “NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spied possible signs of geological activity on Saturn’s icy moon Dione,” he reported. These tentative findings are based on fissures resembling the “tiger stripes” on Enceladus, a possible ice volcano, and areas that appear to have been resurfaced. So far, the suggestion has not been corroborated by observations of jets or heat signatures, although “rampart craters” hint that there may be internal heat in Dione remaining. Perhaps, though, the fissures are “fossil tiger stripes,” indicating past geological activity that ceased. It’s remarkable that little Enceladus, less than half the diameter of Dione, should be the most active moon of Saturn.BBC News

43. 8/30/201543 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Iapetus hasn’t had any flybys as good as the best one in 2007, which led scientists to propose ice-hopping or “runaway migration” to explain the dichotomy between dark and light sides. Observations continue to be made and analyzed, though. Space.com reported how Paul Ries is using Earth radar to infer temperature changes across the dark and light parts of the moon. Unexpectedly, the measurements did not follow a Planck blackbody curve as Ries predicted, but rather showed a fairly flat spectrum across wavelengths, suggesting steep absorption. At this point Ries doesn’t have an explanation. He’s comparing radar on Earth ice to see what the signals can tell about grain size and other factors. “Iapetus certainly has some strange stuff that needs to be explained, so this is potentially very interesting for the future,” he said.Space.com

44. 8/30/201544 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Enceladus remains the prima donna of Saturn, bursting out her fountains at the south pole like a show that never ends. On March 27, Cassini shot the plumes again from 46 miles, hoping to “taste” them and send home pretty pictures, too; dazzling geyser shots were posted. Space.com reported that continued study of the “tiger stripe” cracks show them to be deformed by Saturn’s powerful gravity. On April 14, Cassini made a second pass from 46 miles. Even though the tiger stripes are in the dark now, the infrared spectrometer and cosmic dust analyzer were poised for front-seat observations. A JPL press release showed latest unprocessed images from the encounter and a follow-up flyby of Tethys that provided the highest-resolution images of a side of Tethys not seen by the ultra-close 2005 encounter. A new close-up of Connecticut-sized Janus filled in a productive month by Cassini scientists.Space.comJPL press release

45. 8/30/201545 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 Ringside. All that glitters at Saturn is not moons. Saturn’s sparkling F-ring was the subject of a report on New Scientist about puzzling observations of possible bursting moonlets that have on rare occasions brightened the F-ring significantly. Voyagers 1 and 2 saw sparkles in the 1980s, and Hubble saw one in 1995, but the ring has brightened overall since (implying more dust than before), except for an 84% brightening in December 2006 that took two years to fade. The F-ring is known to be perturbed by the little potato- shaped moon Prometheus, but if the sparkles are due to disruption of moonlets, there aren’t that many more moonlets around, unless Prometheus has ways of continually making and destroying giant snowballs made of ring dust. Reporter Lisa Grossman left it up as an oddity that may send scientists back to the drawing board.New Scientist

46. 8/30/201546 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 The dynamism found at Saturn’s rings and moons raises questions about how long these energetic, entropy-rich processes on small moons and in thin rings can be sustained. Cassini already spectacularly falsified the “global ocean on Titan” hypothesis when its Huygens probe landed on a soggy mud flat in 2005. Are we to believe the geysers on Enceladus have been going on for 4.5 billion years but stopped earlier on larger Dione? Are we incredibly lucky to be seeing the flimsy F-ring running out of moonlets right when Cassini is there to observe it?

47. 8/30/201547 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 We must keep in mind that, in science, there is a vast difference between scientific observation and scientific explanation. Unquestionably, our maps of the surfaces of Enceladus, Iapetus and Titan are vastly superior today than they were after Voyagers 1 and 2. That’s significant progress. The images of the F-ring are also orders of magnitude better than they were in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the explanations for activity on Enceladus and Titan seem strained. Are these anomalies that could lead to a scientific revolution?

48. 8/30/201548 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 It’s notable that this is the 50th anniversary of philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. David Kaiser in Nature took note of that, as did Evolution News & Views in several posts. The book that brought “paradigm shift” into the vernacular started a wave of thought that toppled logical positivism and helped many people realize that science is not necessarily the objective, neutral, truth-seeking, progressive enterprise students are led to believe, but in fact is governed by sociological and cultural factors that often stifle creative thinking by focusing attention on what questions are worth answering, what puzzles are worth solving, and what research is worth funding.Nature Evolution News & Views

49. 8/30/201549 Saturn Moons Continue to Shine 土星月亮继续绽放 The planetary science community tends to be a close-knit thought collective with a web of belief that is tolerant of maverick views only to a point. If enough anomalies continue to pile up at Saturn, though, it will be interesting to watch if several long-held assumptions may have to be jettisoned to account for them. This may be a good time for new minds, uncluttered by tradition and consensus, to look at Cassini’s observations afresh.

50. 8/30/201550 Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn’t Kill Dinosaurs 范式转换 : 陨石没有杀死恐龙 A new study casts doubt on whether asteroid impacts led to extinctions. It’s based on re- interpreting geological evidence used to identify impacts. This finding, if sustained, would undermine the theory that an impact killed off the dinosaurs and a later impact led to the extinction of many large mammals. Even more significant, an overturn of the impact hypothesis would illustrate that scientists are capable of going off on wrong tangents for decades.

51. 8/30/201551 Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn’t Kill Dinosaurs 范式转换 : 陨石没有杀死恐龙 The study by the U.S. Geological Survey, reported by PhysOrg, found that “impact markers,” such as “elevated levels of iridium, magnetic spherules, and titanomagnetite grains,” can form in wetlands and marshes called black mats. The impact markers had been used to support the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction and a more “hotly contested” Younger Dryas Impact theory that led to extinction of the Clovis culture allegedly 12,900 years ago. The new study published by Pigati et al in PNAS 1 casts doubt on the uses of these markers to infer asteroid impacts. PhysOrgPNAS 1

52. 8/30/201552 Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn’t Kill Dinosaurs 范式转换 : 陨石没有杀死恐龙 The abstract states, In this study, we investigated black mats ranging in age from approximately 6 to more than 40 ka in the southwestern United States and the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. At 10 of 13 sites, we found elevated concentrations of iridium in bulk and magnetic sediments, magnetic spherules, and/or titanomagnetite grains within or at the base of black mats, regardless of their age or location, suggesting that elevated concentrations of these markers arise from processes common to wetland systems, and not a catastrophic extraterrestrial impact event.

53. 8/30/201553 Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn’t Kill Dinosaurs 范式转换 : 陨石没有杀死恐龙 The “impact” of this re-interpretation goes beyond extinction theories: “Luis and Walter Alvarez’s proposal that an extraterrestrial impact was responsible for extinctions at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary eventually moved from unlikely hypothesis to accepted theory, and with its acceptance came the temptation to apply this explanation to any rapid change in Earth’s conditions,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “The results of this study demonstrate the importance of maintaining a healthy skepticism and multiple working hypotheses.”

54. 8/30/201554 Paradigm Shift: Impact Didn’t Kill Dinosaurs 范式转换 : 陨石没有杀死恐龙 The impact theory may not be dead yet; undoubtedly critics will have a rebuttal to the USGS study. Even so, the “healthy skepticism and multiple working hypotheses” advice has been sadly lacking in the news media and on science TV as many jumped on the impact-theory bandwagon without considering the impact on science’s credibility should the popular hypothesis be overturned. What do the popular-media producers care? They made their money and some retired. The losers are students who grow up believing whatever scientists tell them and what animators “show” them, but don’t get to hear “the rest of the story” till too late if at all.

55. 8/30/201555 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 Ongoing archaeological finds from Khirbet Qeiyafa in ancient Judah now show conclusively that the site had fortified walls with gates, administrative buildings, bronze and iron objects, and artifacts suggesting extensive trade with foreign powers. These discoveries cast doubt on the “minimalist” chronology of some liberal scholars who claim that King David, even if he existed, was a tribal chief over pastoralists.

56. 8/30/201556 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 Todd Bolen at Bible Places Blog has summarized the major finds. The full report on the Israeli Antiquities Authority website by Yossi Garfinkel et al. tells how the goal of the 4th and 5th excavation seasons last year was to identify Iron Age IIA features of the fortress city south of Jerusalem that has been radiometrically dated to the late 11th and early 10th centuries BC – the time of David and Solomon.Bible Places BlogIsraeli Antiquities Authority

57. 8/30/201557 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 Khirbet Qeiyafa received international press in 2008 with the discovery of a pottery inscription from that period. The findings suggest a complex civilization during the time of David: this settlement, uncovered to date, included two gates, two gate plazas, twenty-eight casemates (twenty complete), ten residential buildings and remains of administrative buildings at the top of the site. Large quantities of artifacts were discovered on the floors of the houses in each area, including hundreds of pottery vessels that can be restored, hundreds of stone objects, dozens of metallic objects and small finds. Much evidence was found of ritual activity, including mazzevot, a cultic chamber, models of temples (two of ceramic and one of stone) and a figurine.

58. 8/30/201558 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 1. A town plan characteristic of the Kingdom of Judah that is also known from other sites, e.g., Bet Shemesh, Tell en-Nasbeh, Tell Beit Mirsim and Be’er Sheva‘. A casemate wall was built at all of these sites and the city’s houses next to it incorporated the casemates as one of the dwelling’s rooms. This model is not known from any Canaanite, Philistine or Kingdom of Israel site. 2. Massive fortification of the site, including the use of stones that weigh up to eight tons apiece. 3. Two gates. To date, no Iron Age cities with two gates were found in either Israel or Judah. 4. An open space for a gate plaza was left near each gate.

59. 8/30/201559 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 5. The city’s houses were contiguous and built very close together. 6. Some 500 jar handles bearing at least one finger print were found. Marking jar handles is characteristic of the Kingdom of Judah and it seems this practice has already begun in the early Iron Age. 7. A profusion of bronze and iron objects were found. The iron objects included three swords, about twenty daggers, arrowheads and two spearheads. The bronze items included an axe, arrowheads, rings and a small bowl. 8. Trade and imported objects. Ashdod ware, which was imported from the coastal plain, was found at the site. Basalt vessels were brought from a distance of more than 100 km and clay juglets from Cyprus and two alabaster vessels from Egypt were discovered.

60. 8/30/201560 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 It should be noted that Khirbet Qeiyafa was a relatively small outlying fortress in Judah. The conclusions of the excavators is that the minimalist chronology has been falsified in light of this evidence: “The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE. It can no longer be argued that the Kingdom of Judah developed only in the late eighth century BCE or at some other later date.” Incidentally, the fortress is within eyesight of the Elah valley, the location of the battle of David and Goliath.

61. 8/30/201561 King David Ruled Cities, Not Shepherds 大卫王统治的城市，不是统治牧羊人 Don’t forget that archaeology is an intelligent design science. A great deal can be inferred about the intelligence and purpose of the creators of these artifacts, even though we have never met the designers, don’t know their names, and cannot describe everything that brought their work into existence. This goes to show that intelligent design is a working scientific principle and method in the sciences. If the same methods are used to infer intelligent causes in other phenomena, such as genetic software and fine-tuning of the laws of physics, then so be it.

62. 8/30/201562 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Planet theorists are putting up a valiant fight against new findings, but in some cases, the evidence seems to be winning. Moon. “New research provokes more questions about the origin of the moon,” blazes a headline on PhysOrg from last month. For some time now, the “favored scenario” for our moon’s origin has been that a Mars-size body impacted the earth, and the moon formed from the debris. Scientists even gave a mythical name to the impactor: Theia. Trouble is, Theia might really be just a myth: PhysOrg

63. 8/30/201563 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Now, new research from geophysical scientist Junjun Zhang and colleagues, suggests that such thinking might be wrong. In their paper published in Nature Geoscience, they find that in comparing titanium isotopes from both the moon and the Earth, that the match is too close to support the theory that the moon could have been made partly of material from another planet.

64. 8/30/201564 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 The match of isotopes between Earth and moon is too close to believe that a distant impactor brought material from elsewhere. But it is even more implausible to imagine Earth spinning so fast to throw off some of its material to form the moon. This leaves mythmakers in an amusing paradox: “Hopefully new research will one day provide us with a definitive answer. Until that day though, it seems we will all have to just keep on musing.”

65. 8/30/201565 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Mars: The dry-Marsers scored more points over the wet-Marsers this month. In Nature News (April 11), Eric Hand wrote an article entitled, “Dreams of water on Mars evaporate: Climate models reveal the red planet was mostly cold and dry.” The pendulum has swung back to the dry-Marsers: Nature News

66. 8/30/201566 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Last month, Jim Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, threw a wet blanket on the idea that Mars was ever very wet at all, in a keynote talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. Head and others are assembling a picture of a Mars that was cold and dry from the beginning, punctuated at most by short bursts of wetness. “The notion of a palm-tree-covered Mars has waned,” says Stephen Clifford, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who is organizing a conference in May on the early climate of Mars.

67. 8/30/201567 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Head’s “revisionism” is driving Mars lifers into hiding: “[Jeff] Andrews-Hanna [Colorado School of Mines] says the shift in thinking doesn’t rule out life on ancient Mars, but instead drives it deeper underground.”

68. 8/30/201568 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 A paper in Science today (27 April 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6080 pp. 449–452, DOI: 10.1126/science.1219437) doesn’t need Martian water, either. Strange-looking polygons and coils in Athabasca Valles were explained by Phil Christensen and Andrew Ryan as artifacts of lava flows. The spiral coils found by Ryan on HiRise photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (see photo on National Geographic News) are like fossil eddies created by shear stress in the flowing pahoehoe lava (see Science Daily). They don’t require water or ice for their formation. Moreover, they formed quickly:Science National Geographic NewsScience Daily

69. 8/30/201569 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Ice-related processes fail to account for our observations. There are no known mechanisms to naturally produce spiral patterns in ice-rich environments on the scale and frequency observed in our study area. If the primary plates were ice rafts, then the water extruded during rafting would not have the correct viscosity to form and preserve the coils. We have also shown that the polygons formed after the fracture and drift of the secondary plates on which they are present. This precludes the notion that the polygons formed over decades or even centuries in an ice-rich regolith, because it seems unlikely that frozen soil could somehow fracture and drift.

70. 8/30/201570 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Late Heavy Bombardment. The notion of a “Late Heavy Bombardment” (LHB) of the inner solar system long after the birth of Earth is taking some bombardment of its own. The “spotty impact record” on the moon is making it difficult to maintain that a stream of high-velocity impactors came in a barrage about 4 million years ago; crater data seem to indicate a mix of high-velocity and low-velocity impactors. Richard A. Kerr in Science reported on the controversy at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference where, at a pre-conference workshop, William Bottke tried to be diplomatic. To keep peace between the catastrophists (who believe in the LHB) and the pacifists (who assert that most cratering tapered off after the birth of the inner planets), Bottke suggested both groups might be partly right.Science

71. 8/30/201571 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 At the conference, Bottke presented a blend of the competing bombardment histories that takes account of the spotty impact record produced by a mix of fast and slow impactors.… Bottke thinks the resulting late bombardment was longer and less intense than many catastrophists have proposed. Kerr did not indicate if everybody is happy with the compromise.

72. 8/30/201572 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Nebular hypothesis: More new troubles are brewing for old ideas that debris disks around stars are nurseries for planets. The old picture was that dust is hot near the star, but frozen at the outer edge of the disk. A “frost line” in the middle segregates rocky from volatile material that presumably remains frozen in its primordial state. Alas, more evidence has come in that complicates the picture. A study reported by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, echoed on PhysOrg, indicates that some of the outermost material of dust disks must have melted. Infrared measurements can differentiate between amorphous and crystalline dust.PhysOrg

73. 8/30/201573 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Primordial dust is assumed to have been amorphous. To have become crystalline, as the data from the Spitzer Space Telescope indicated, the outermost dust must have heated up to the melting point and re-frozen. This echoes observations from comets, once thought to be primordial snowballs from the edges of our solar system, but have been observed to contain high-melting-point ingredients (4/18/2011).4/18/2011

74. 8/30/201574 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Theorists are stuck with two possibilities: the dust migrated from the inner regions outward by some unknown mechanism, or another unknown mechanism (perhaps a shock wave) heated the material in the outer regions. The press release put the best possible spin on this new puzzle: “The new paper answers some questions while refining others, and is a good example of the important progress being made today in understanding how planets and planetary systems form.” Being interpreted, this means, “We haven’t a clue, but science marches on.”

75. 8/30/201575 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 Cosmic rays: Another theory on a cosmic scale took a big hit this month with no replacement paradigm in sight. Astronomers had hoped to explain high-energy cosmic rays as coming from some of the most energetic events known to occur in the universe: gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). New measurements from a large neutrino detector embedded in Antarctic ice (appropriately named IceCube) failed to correlate detector flashes with the short-lived bursts. The report in Nature (484, 19 April 2012, pp. 351–354, doi:10.1038/nature11068) left explanations hanging:Nature

76. 8/30/201576 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 This implies either that GRBs are not the only sources of cosmic rays with energies exceeding 10 18 electronvolts or that the efficiency of neutrino production is much lower than has been predicted. Observations were 3.6 times lower than predicted by theory. Space.com titled its report, “Cosmic Ray Mystery Leaves Scientists in the Dark.” PhysOrg headlined, “Neutrinos put cosmic ray theory on ice.”Space.comPhysOrg

77. 8/30/201577 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 These reports might support scientific progress by falsification: i.e., that science progresses by ruling out theories. It’s helpful to know that some popular theories are no longer supportable by new evidence, but scientific understanding cannot grow by subtraction alone. When what we think we know turns out to be false, can scientists really claim to understand the world? An article on Evolution News & Views questions whether “known knowns” are progressing against “known unknowns,” “unknown unknowns” and “unknowable unknowns” – and whether positivists like Michael Shermer have a clue where the boundary lies between knowledge and ignorance.Evolution News & Views

78. 8/30/201578 Planet Theories vs. the Evidence 行星的理论与证据 We certainly applaud the teams that build, operate and collect data from intelligently-designed instruments like Spitzer, IceCube and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Data from these amazing instruments are a gift bequeathed to us in the information age. We only point out that good data are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for scientific understanding. Time after time, we provide examples in these pages of predictions, expectations and favored theories that are suffering a late heavy bombardment of high-speed data impactors. Maybe it will dawn on some readers that the consensus worldview, the bottom-up, naturalistic evolutionary assumption, is a detriment to scientific understanding.

79. 8/30/201579 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 The scientific consensus has pretty much declared it a fact of natural history that birds evolved from dinosaurs. One evolutionary professor remains a gadfly, though. He contests the evidence on which the hypothesis is based, and also believes his maverick position is growing.

80. 8/30/201580 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Alan Feduccia, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote an essay for New Scientist. His position does not deny an evolutionary origin of birds, but places the “feathered dinosaurs” so often portrayed as ancestors of modern birds on a dead-end branch. He claims his position is more in line with 19th century paleontologist Richard Owen and 20th century evolutionist Gavin de Beer. These men viewed flightless birds as degenerate products of variation, not stages toward flight; for instance, de Beer in 1956 “showed conclusively that flightless birds descended from flying ancestors and have never re-evolved flight.”New Scientist

81. 8/30/201581 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Similarly, Feduccia holds that the “feathered dinosaurs” attracting so much attention in the media were either pure scaly dinosaurs with whose decayed collagen has been misinterpreted as “proto-feathers,” or were degenerate flightless birds. His own view is that the birds evolved from archosaurs, the predecessors in evolutionary history of the true dinosaurs. He thinks some of the archosaurs lived in trees and developed flight as they jumped (the arboreal hypothesis).

82. 8/30/201582 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Critics of Darwinism will, therefore, find Feduccia’s own evolutionary view to be just as implausible as the consensus view. What he says in his essay, however, is illuminating about the habits of a scientific consensus. Here are some salient points:

83. 8/30/201583 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Sinosauropteryx, a fossil with alleged proto- feathers, caused a sensation when it was announced in Nature in 1998. But “no evidence then or now has emerged showing that these structures are anything other than collagen fibres supporting a typical reptilian frill,” Feduccia said. “The fact that the filaments are located within a clearly demarcated body outline — indicating the fibres were not external, as they would be if they were feather-like structures — was completely ignored.”

84. 8/30/201584 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Feduccia continued, aware of the latest claims. “Other fibres have been described in herbivorous ornithischians and pterosaurs, which have no connection with birds, but there is still little evidence to connect any of these structures with feathers.” The tyrannosaurid’s fibers, whatever they were, cannot possibly have been used for flight; see Science Daily: “The large size of Yutyrannus and the downy structure of its feathers would have made flight an impossibility,” the article stated April 5. Science Daily Feduccia described some of the other alleged feathered dinosaurs, like Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx, but considered them secondarily flightless birds.

85. 8/30/201585 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 He sees the consensus view as a dangerous return to dogma over scientific caution: Birds as “living dinosaurs” is now a cornerstone of modern paleontological thought. But a consensus is always in danger of turning into dogma. Indeed, given the cult-like belief in the field’s orthodoxy, it seems that every fossil pulled from the Chinese deposits is accompanied by hyperbolic pronouncements of it having filled a major evolutionary gap. Yet many of these discoveries lack normal scientific stringency, and we see a transition from normal scientific falsification to simply confirming what is already thought to be known.

86. 8/30/201586 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Feduccia described his opinion as “a minority one, but growing in popularity”. He rejects the “fantastical proposals” about “dinosaurs with protofeathers, dinosaurs with bird wings and modern feathers, four- winged gliding dinosaurs, and tiny supposed theropods from the Jurassic period with avian wings.” The birds-from-dinosaurs controversy has a long history, Feduccia explained. Richard Owen in 1875 “set the record straight” when Thomas Huxley first advanced the view that birds evolved from dinosaurs. “Owen predicted that ‘science will accept the view of the Dodo as a degenerate Dove rather than as an advanced Dino,’ thus stating the crux of the current controversy.”

87. 8/30/201587 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Feduccia believes the “feathered dinosaurs” adorning covers of Nature were flightless birds. He calls them “Mesozoic kiwis.” He believes it “biophysically improbable” that birds evolved from the ground up in theropod dinosaurs. “No flightless bird ever gave rise to a flying one; the same is surely true in the dinosaur fossil record.”

88. 8/30/201588 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 It’s even more improbable, he thinks, that dinosaurs gave rise to all the special features of birds. “Most disturbingly, current orthodoxy dictates that the entire suite of sophisticated avian flight architecture, including aerodynamic wings and specialised brain structures, evolved in earthbound dinosaurs in a non-flight context, a proposal that is practically non-Darwinian.”

89. 8/30/201589 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Feduccia’s latest book, Riddle of the Feathered Dragons (Yale University Press, 2012) describes his view in more detail. His essay for New Scientist closes.Riddle of the Feathered DragonsNew Scientist My central idea, that Chinese fossils bearing modern feathers are early birds, seems new and revolutionary yet it is new only as a fresh application of de Beerian thinking to a new set of problematic fossils. Paraphrased, de Beer’s axiom still holds: if it has feathers and avian flight wings, it’s a bird!

90. 8/30/201590 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 So are you better off with Feduccia, de Beer and Owen than you were with Thomas Huxley and Xing Xu? Feduccia still believes that non-flying archosaurs evolved into birds. He just feels it is less biophysically improbable that the “sophisticated avian flight architecture, including aerodynamic wings and specialised brain structures” came from animals jumping in trees rather than running along the ground. Look, Dr. Feduccia, if it is “practically non-Darwinian” to imagine theropods generating these sophisticated structures from the ground up, it is just as “non- Darwinian” and “biophysically improbable” to imagine archosaurs generating them while jumping out of the trees.

91. 8/30/201591 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Actually, both Feduccia’s and Xu’s positions are 100% Darwinian. That’s because the essence of Darwinism is the Stuff Happens Law. If an animal develops flight, it’s because stuff happens. If an animal doesn’t develop flight, it’s because stuff happens. Darwinians don’t need evidence; they need imagination. The play is the thing. The scattered fossils from China, Germany and wherever don’t tell one story; they are scattered pieces of evidence that can be interpreted multiple ways. In Darwinism, data are mere props for imaginary scenarios.

92. 8/30/201592 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Darwinism allows for opposite outcomes from the same laws of nature. Feduccia’s story, for instance, employs gravity (a law of nature) as the creator of flight: “Flight originated from the trees down, with small size and gravity providing the impetus, as is the case for all animals that developed flight.” But the same law (gravity) produced opposite outcomes, according to evolution. Bats developed flight by jumping out of trees, but lemurs didn’t. Pterosaurs developed flight by falling off cliffs, but apatosaurs didn’t. Birds developed powered flight by jumping out of trees, but lizards didn’t. Don’t even ask about insects.

93. 8/30/201593 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 If gravity had such law-like powers of creation, everything would fly, even pigs and humans. (Humans do fly, but that’s using aircraft built by intelligent design.) This should be a testable scientific hypothesis. Shove a billion lizards out of trees, and see which ones become birds under the impetus of gravity (remember, half a wing doesn’t count). Come now. External influences like gravity cannot command unguided variations, including chance mutations, to produce an ordered result. It’s crazy (and non- Darwinian) to expect environmental influences to act as an “impetus” for coordinated design.

94. 8/30/201594 Questioning the Dino-Bird Hypothesis 恐龙 - 鸟假说的质疑 Feduccia’s usefulness for thinking people, therefore, is merely to point out the anti- scientific power of dogmatic paradigms. He is a maverick within the Darwinian camp. Those outside the camp can use him like the hero in the fairy tale Seven at One Blow, a logically thinking tailor, who slew the giants by getting them to finish each other off.Seven at One Blow

95. 8/30/201595 How the Tiger Got Its Stripes: Dunno 老虎的条纹：不知道 A leading hypothesis for morphogenesis (pattern formation, such as tiger stripes) has been shown to be oversimplified. Whatever gave a tiger its stripes is more complicated than developmental biologists thought. Live Science reported that the morphogen theory – the idea that protein gradients control pattern formation – is insufficient to account for the evidence: Live Science

96. 8/30/201596 How the Tiger Got Its Stripes: Dunno 老虎的条纹：不知道 A decades-old explanation for how tigers get their stripes has come into question as researchers challenge what’s called the morphogen theory. The research does not nix the theory, but science may now have a hypothetical tiger by the tail as they try to figure out this aspect of how Nature works. The morphogen theory dates back to the 1950s and 60s from the work of Alan Turing and Lewis Wolpert. Researchers at New York University though, studying pattern development in fruit flies, found that simple protein gradients are not enough. There must be multiple competing gradients involved:

97. 8/30/201597 How the Tiger Got Its Stripes: Dunno 老虎的条纹：不知道 In other words, contrary to Turing’s theory, a single gradient of proteins does not have sufficient power to form the same body plan in each member of a species; however, if there are multiple gradients that work against each other, then the system becomes robust enough for normal development. The team doesn’t believe their work has falsified the morphogen theory, but “suggested it needed some additional refinement.”

98. 8/30/201598 How the Tiger Got Its Stripes: Dunno 老虎的条纹：不知道 Here is a scientific phenomenon that should be easily studied in lab conditions, and they cannot explain it. An old theory taken for granted for some 50 years is not sufficient to explain pattern development in simple fruit flies, easily cultured and genetically altered in thousands of labs around the world. How much less can scientists explain the tiger’s stripes, or the amazingly intricate patterns in birds, butterflies and many mammals? It’s not that it isn’t worth trying to understand genetically and developmentally how patterns form in embryos. The point is that if a phenomenon this accessible to observational science evades their grasp, how much less can they know about the unobservable past, and the origin of complex organs?

99. 8/30/201599 Why You Are Waterproof 为什么你是防水 Can you imagine inflating like a water balloon every time you jumped in a swimming pool? Or what if water leaked out of your skin every time you drank a glass of water? Your skin forms an impermeable barrier to water, a new study found, because of a unique way certain molecules are arranged.

100. 8/30/2015100 Why You Are Waterproof 为什么你是防水 In “Strange Fat Explains Skin’s Waterproof Properties,” Helen Thomson reported for New Scientist about a study from the Karolinska Institute of Sweden. There, Lars Norlén shaved arms of volunteers to obtain microscopically thin layers of the outer skin layers. Studying the waterproof layer at unprecedented resolution, the team was surprised to find alternately-stacked fatty acid molecules.New Scientist Normally, fatty acids in cell membranes have two hydrophobic (water-repelling) “tails” and a water-attracting “head.” In skin, however, the tails are unfolded and point in opposite directions. This creates water-repelling surfaces on both sides of the layer.

101. 8/30/2015101 Why You Are Waterproof 为什么你是防水 This layer is completely robust, Norlén said: This uniquely structured fatty layer prevents any water from getting past in either direction – except where the skin layer is modified to form pores. “There’s no water present within this extracellular space,” says Norlén. “It cannot perturb the barrier so it’s completely robust to hydration, which is necessary for the changing environment that we live in.” Thanks to this unique arrangement, we don’t leak and can swim with confidence. We sweat, of course, but that’s another story; sweat glands are complex pores that emit water as part of our tightly controlled thermoregulatory system. Your skin is the largest organ of your body. Thank God He thought of everything. Enjoy this little-known fact when you take your next swim.

102. 8/30/2015102 Animals Have Biological GPS 动物有生物的 GPS Global Positioning System (GPS): that’s a function. Maintaining a suite of satellites is one method for achieving the function. But there are other ways to figure out where in the world you are, and two very different animals show the way – naturally – using Earth’s global magnetic field.

103. 8/30/2015103 Animals Have Biological GPS 动物有生物的 GPS Pigeon GPS: A team of researchers from Baylor College inserted electrodes into pigeons’ brains, then exposed them to artificial magnetic fields in the absence of visual cues. According to New Scientist, they found that 53 particular neurons associated with the pigeon’s inner ear became particularly active when the magnetic field was altered. They surmise these neurons are part of the bird’s auditory map, “acting as a biological GPS.” The neurons even responded to the polarity of the field. This would allow a pigeon released below the equator to orient itself correctly to fly home.New Scientist

104. 8/30/2015104 Animals Have Biological GPS 动物有生物的 GPS The BBC News focused on how this new finding contradicts earlier studies that located the birds’ magnetic sense in the beak or eye. “Be puzzled, because I am,” remarked David Dickman, one of the authors of the study. Other mysteries to be resolved include how the birds detect the Earth’s magnetic field in the first place, and how they don’t become disoriented when they tilt their heads. “One possibility is that they use a combination of the magnetic GPS and the pull of gravity to triangulate their position,” the article surmised. BBC News

105. 8/30/2015105 Animals Have Biological GPS 动物有生物的 GPS Butterfly GPS: Another article by the BBC News from September 2009 talked about biological GPS – in this case, among Monarch butterflies. That study indicated that the insects’ GPS is located in the antennae. Given that many animals migrate, including fish, reptiles and mammals, in addition to birds and insects, there may be many and varied biological methods for achieving the function of GPS. BBC News No mention of evolution in these articles. A natural wonder? No evolution? No wonder.

106. 8/30/2015106 Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger 行星辐射的日期年轻 1/3 The half-lives of radioactive isotopes may not be as well-known as thought. One decay rate frequently used to date solar system objects had to be adjusted down to 66% of its former assumed value, impacting theories of planet formation.

107. 8/30/2015107 Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger 行星辐射的日期年轻 1/3 PhysOrg headlined, “‘Faster-Ticking Clock’ Indicates Early Solar System May Have Evolved Faster Than We Think.” The old decay rate for samarium-146 (146Sm) was re- evaluated by a team from Argonne National Laboratory, Hebrew University, two Japanese universities and the University of Notre Dame. The old value of 103 million years for its half-life was recalculated at 68 million years, two-thirds of its previously measured value. PhysOrg

108. 8/30/2015108 Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger 行星辐射的日期年轻 1/3 146 Sm has become the main tool for establishing the time evolution of the solar system over its first few hundred million years. This by itself owes to a delicate geochemical property of the element samarium, a rare element in nature. It is a sensitive probe for the separation, or differentiation, of the silicate portion of earth and of other planetary bodies.time evolution The smaller value, “previously adopted as 103 million years, to a much shorter value of 68 million years,” the article continued. It “has the effect of shrinking the assessed chronology of events in the early solar system and in planetary differentiation into a shorter time span,” the article said. The story was reported a month ago by Science Daily.Science Daily

109. 8/30/2015109 Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger 行星辐射的日期年轻 1/3 The article put a positive spin on this adjustment, saying, “The new time scale, interestingly, is now consistent with a recent and precise dating made on a lunar rock and is in better agreement with the dating obtained with other chronometers.” It seems they could just as well have said that the other chronometers are now cast into doubt by the adjustment of 146 Sm, which was also considered a precise chronometer till now.

110. 8/30/2015110 Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger 行星辐射的日期年轻 1/3 In any case, it is disturbing that a physical value that is “out there in the world” could be found to be so far off by human measurement. How many published papers are affected by this change? Papers often quote radiometric dates to 4 or more significant figures. Theorists rely on these values. If values are not discovered but “adopted,” is it possible there was motivation by theorists to “adopt” a different value to create consistency with other chronometers? Does the new value make the “assessed chronology of events in the early system” more or less plausible? What will be the ripple effect from here on for a chronometer that ticks 33% faster than previously thought? Who will go back and correct theories based on the previous value? These are questions the press releases never ask.