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A very Merry Christmas to NewsBusters readers everywhere! Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the Google doodle for this Christmas Day. See below: it's bland, boring and above all, void of any reference at all to the holiday itself. I decided to have a look at the ways Google observed other days with its doodles. And sure enough, exactly one month to the day before Christmas Eve, Google celebrated "the 41st anniversary of the discovery of Lucy," she being the skeleton of a hominin found in Ethiopia. Google's animated gif doodle shows a monkey walking on all...

A 14,000-year-old thigh bone may upend human history. Unearthed in southwest China, this femur resembles those of an ancient species of humans thought to be long extinct by the Late Pleistocene, scientists say. The scientists compare the leg bone to ancient and modern human femurs in a paper published Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE, arguing that this specimen represents a population of ancient humans that lived surprisingly recently. If they're right, this could dramatically change the way we see human history. Today, our species, Homo sapiens, are the only humans to walk the Earth. But it hasn't always been...

New research led by the American Museum of Natural History reveals that the evolution of modern birds was greatly shaped by the history of our planet's geography and climate. The DNA-based work, published today in the journal Science Advances, finds that birds arose in what is now South America around 90 million years ago, and radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. The new research suggests that birds in South America survived this event and then started moving to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during...

'Truly amazing' scientific discovery on adaptation of Yakutian horses to cold By The Siberian Times reporter 28 November 2015 Fast track evolution as great Siberian symbol is surprisingly unmasked as an immigrant breed. Researchers say these horses, which seem so well attuned to the harsh cold with thick, dense winter coats, their armour against temperatures of minus 70C (minus 94F), are incomers that only arrived in these parts within the last 800 years. Picture: Maria Vasilyeva The resilient Yakutian horses are one of the great native sights of the Sakha Republic - or Yakutia. In their way as much a part of...

Periods of high extinction on Earth, rather than evolutionary adaptations, may have been a key driver in the diversification of amniotes (today's dominant land vertebrates, including reptiles, birds, and mammals), according to new research published in Scientific Reports. The new study reveals that mass extinctions among some groups of amniotes coincide with numerous and large diversifications in other closely related groups. Conducted by scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Lincoln, UK, the research challenges commonly held views that support a relationship between the evolution of "key innovations" in a group and the rapid...

Earlier this week Google's logo mutated (if you will) from its usual form into a Google Doodle adorned with a series of images depicting an ape evolving into a human. Clicking the Doodle led to information about "AL 288-1," less esoterically known as "Lucy the Australopithecus," or simply "Lucy." Many scientists regard the fossil as an intermediary link between apes and humans.The same day, Googling "lucy australopithecus controversy" turned up a different interpretation of the fossil, including several from Answers in Genesis. The apologetics ministry, which focuses primarily on whether evolution or biblical creation provides the most accurate interpretation...

Where do we come from? There are many right answers to this question, and the one you get depends on who you ask. For example, an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the nuclear fires of stars. On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates' and conclude we evolved from apes. Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has a different, and novel answer, which she describes in her latest book, "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs." Randall has written...

He continued, “Darwin said his whole theory depended on the fossil remains. He said we should be able to line up from a single-cell organism to man, several miles long and just walk right down the fossil trail and see how everything evolved.” “He [Darwin] said the only reason they didn’t have the fossils was because they were not geologically sophisticated enough, but that we would be in 50 to 100 years,” said Dr. Carson. Well, that was 150 years ago. We still haven’t found them. Where are they? Where are the fossil remains?” Carson continued, “When you ask the...

Can science prove Adam and Eve were real? Spirited Debate: Dr. Fazal Rana and Dr. Hugh Ross believe religion and science can prove how life began

What a piece of work is man! Everyone agrees on that much. But what exactly is it about Homo sapiens that makes us unique among animals, let alone apes, and when and how did our ancestors acquire that certain something? The past century has seen a profusion of theories. Some reveal as much about the time their proponents lived in as they do about human evolution. 1. We Make Tools: "It is in making tools that man is unique," anthropologist Kenneth Oakley wrote in a 1944 article. Apes use found objects as tools, he explained, "but the shaping of sticks...

Scientists discover the birds have developed two mutations in just 50 years Genes of White Plymouth Rock chickens mutated twice in 50 years Scientists previously thought rate of change in mitochondrial genomes was never faster than about two per cent per million years Mutations suggest rate of evolution in the chickens is 15 times faster Study goes against theory evolution can only be seen over long periods

NASA researchers say that future Earths are more likely to appear inside giant galaxy clusters and also in dwarf galaxies, which have yet to use up all their gas for building stars and accompanying planetary systems. By contrast, our Milky Way galaxy has used up much more of the gas available for future star formation. A big advantage to our civilization arising early in the evolution of the universe is our being able to use powerful telescopes like Hubble to trace our lineage from the big bang through the early evolution of galaxies. The observational evidence for the big bang...

UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago -- 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The graphite is older than the zircon containing it, the researchers said. They know the zircon is 4.1 billion years old, based on its ratio of uranium to lead; they don't know how much older the graphite is.The carbon contained in the zircon has a characteristic signature -- a specific ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 -- that...

Ben Carson on Creationism, Evolution, and Intelligent Design David Klinghoffer October 13, 2015 4:20 PM | Permalink Whether Dr. Ben Carson has adequate experience and background knowledge to be President of the United States is a fair question, but there's certainly a lot to like about him as a man. He displays an admirable fearlessness in stating in his views. That combined with his calm, soft-spoken manner and undoubted intelligence makes him an appealing personality to many voters. We're not in the business of expressing preferences for one aspirant to higher office over another, but evaluating candidates' views on relevant...

On February 24, 1988, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski began an ingenious ongoing experiment to test and demonstrate evolution. He and his coworkers have nursed thousands of generations of the common gut bacterium Escherichia coli, feeding them broth with limited nutrients. The team watched for decades to see if the germs might evolve a solution to this low-nutrient challenge. After about 31,500 generations, some finally cracked the code and changed. Evolution promoter Richard Dawkins wrote that this was “a beautiful example of evolution in action,” and that “creationists hate it.”1 The Harvard Gazette recently wrote, “Though the bacteria were originally genetically...

“Cold dinosaur” fossils have paleontologists questioning everything they thought they knew about dinosaur physiology. What else is up for grabs?How did dinosaurs survive far north in Alaska? That’s what researchers are asking about dinosaur bones excavated along the Colville River. The 30-foot hadrosaur is the northernmost dinosaur skeleton discovered so far. Science Daily quotes one of the researchers:“The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology,” said FSU Professor of Biological Science Greg Erickson. “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?” The Prince Creek Formation is said to be...

This spring, the world learned of a newly discovered missing link between microbes and humans called Lokiarchaeota. The actual story is that the microbe Lokiarchaeota, discovered on the deep sea floor by a hydrothermal vent called Loki’s Castle, shares features with both bacteria and us. The spin is that this makes it a missing link between the two. Microbiologists have been discreetly quiet about this narrative fiction; although the microbe is fascinating, and so deserves the spotlight, it is no more a missing link than the platypus is a missing link between ducks and humans. This missing link imagery,...

A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released. A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life -- some containing upwards of 100,000 species -- but this is the first...

Deep inside a cave 30 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, a tight crevasse guards the passageway to what was, until recently, the grave of at least 15 human-like individuals. Their bones and teeth—more than 1,500 fragments in all—lay in a heap in the bottom of a pitch-black chamber for ages, until two skinny spelunkers with flashlights squeezed into the earth deep enough to find them. Now those bones are in the hands of scientists who say they belong to a new species of prehumans, with a mix of features typically associated with modern man or fossils belonging to Australopithecina, a...

Alabama is updating its decade-old science standards to require that students understand evolution and learn about climate change, topics that can still be controversial in the Bible Belt state. Educators say the new rules — part of a major change that includes more experimentation and hands-on instruction and less lecturing — don't require that students believe in evolution or accept the idea that climate is changing globally. But public school students will be required for the first time to understand the theory of evolution. And teachers will be required to address climate change, which wasn't a focus the last time...