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Free today! (From Amazon) On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision [Kindle Edition] This concise guide is filled with illustrations, sidebars, and memorizable steps to help Christians stand their ground and defend their faith with reason and precision. In his engaging style, Dr. Craig offers four arguments for God’s existence, defends the historicity of Jesus’ personal claims and resurrection, addresses the problem of suffering, and shows why religious relativism doesn’t work. Along the way, he shares his story of following God’s call in his own life. This one-stop, how-to-defend-your-faith manual will equip Christians to advance faith conversations deliberately,...

It Takes Great Faith to Be an Astrobiologist Evolution News & Views January 22, 2015 4:28 AM | Permalink NASA's Astrobiology Magazine, funded with taxpayer dollars, illustrates the mystical view -- what else to call it? -- of nature in the astrobiologist community. In Elizabeth Howell's article, "How the Code of Life Passed Through Primitive Kinds of Cells," we see Harold Fellerman of the University of Denmark showing his mystical streak: "I'm very interested in the creative potential of nature," he said. "Nature in general seems to be fertile with creativity that outperforms any human imagination. We find solutions to...

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking Steven Shapin January 20, 2015 Fronstispiece from New Almagest (1651), by the Italian astronomer and Jesuit priest Giovanni Battista Riccioli. Source: History of Science Collections, the University of Oklahoma Libraries Can science make you good?Of course it can’t, some will be quick to say—no more than repairing cars or editing literary journals can. Why should we think that science has any special capacity for moral uplift, or that scientists—by virtue of the particular job they do, or what they know, or the way in which they know it—are morally superior to other sorts of...

Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen the movie "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable." This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in Annals of Physics and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter. "If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the...

Recycled whisky waste has £140m potential • The Scotch whisky industry could generate £140 million through recycling whisky wastes into fish feed for Scotland’s fish farming industry and help build a more circular economy. The possibility was highlighted in the Circular Economy Scotland report, which examines how the certain sectors such as oil and gas and the food industry can use their strengths to generate millions of pounds worth of value from materials used in these areas. It suggested the whisky industry could continue to capture heat and electricity from whisky wastes, but biorefining wastes could produce two more products...

It was a mere two months ago that Israeli cyber-security researchers hacked into a device that plugs into the diagnostic port of a car and determined they could remotely control the vehicle from anywhere in the world. At the time, the simulated attack seemed like the automotive version of a canary in a coal mine. If researchers could breach this one device, perhaps other aftermarket products that plug into diagnostic ports were also vulnerable? In short order, another cyber-security firm now reports finding serious flaws in a device used by more than 2 million motorists. Researchers at Florida-based Digital Bond...

A team of archaeologists are discovering new finds on a tiny island just off the Black Sea coast near Sozopol, Bulgaria -- finds that may shed additional light on the location and features of a lost temple to Apollo erected by Archaic Greeks in the late 6th century BCE. Epigraphic sources document that a temple to Apollo was raised on an island near the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia Pontica, which is located near present-day Sozopol. But there has been no evidence to suggest where the temple was actually located -- until recently, when an archaeological team under the direction...

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

Explanation: What causes the structure in Comet Lovejoy's tail? Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), which is currently at naked-eye brightness and near its brightest, has been showing an exquisitely detailed ion tail. As the name implies, the ion tail is made of ionized gas -- gas energized by ultraviolet light from the Sun and pushed outward by the solar wind. The solar wind is quite structured and sculpted by the Sun's complex and ever changing magnetic field. The effect of the variable solar wind combined with different gas jets venting from the comet's nucleus accounts for the tail's complex structure. Following...

Some simple observations about the universe seem to contradict basic physics. Solving these paradoxes could change the way we think about the cosmos Revolutions in science often come from the study of seemingly unresolvable paradoxes. An intense focus on these paradoxes, and their eventual resolution, is a process that has leads to many important breakthroughs. So an interesting exercise is to list the paradoxes associated with current ideas in science. It’s just possible that these paradoxes will lead to the next generation of ideas about the universe. Today, Yurij Baryshev at St Petersburg State University in Russia does just this...

Signal amplification is ubiquitous to all electronic and optoelectronic systems for communications, imaging and computing - its characteristics directly impact device performance. A new signal amplification process discovered by a team of University of California, San Diego researchers is now poised to fuel new generations of electrical and photonic devices - transforming the fields of communications, imaging and computing. In the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the team describes their work behind this discovery. "For many years, the semiconductor industry has relied on photodetectors for optoelectrical conversion, followed by low-noise electronic amplifiers to convert optical signals into electronic...

For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile. Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans. They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, despite being hobbled by the loss of critical guidance systems, has discovered a star with three planets only slightly larger than Earth. The outermost planet orbits in the "Goldilocks" zone, a region where surface temperatures could be moderate enough for liquid water and perhaps life, to exist. The star, EPIC 201367065, is a cool red M-dwarf about half the size and mass of our own sun. At a distance of 150 light years, the star ranks among the top 10 nearest stars known to have transiting planets. The star's proximity means it's bright enough for astronomers...

A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping to narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them. Figuring out what these fast radio bursts are or where they come from could help answer some of the biggest cosmological questions. They last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as the sun does in a day, all seemingly in a tight band of radio-frequency waves. Their source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years...

Paris (AFP) - The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say. The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost. Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some as the most distant planet from the Sun. In a study published in the latest issue of the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers propose that "at...

Explanation: It is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt -- what secrets does it hold? To find out, NASA has sent the robotic Dawn spacecraft to explore and map this cryptic 1,000-kilometer wide world: Ceres. Orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres is officially categorized as a dwarf planet but has never been imaged in detail. Featured here is a 20-frame video taken a week ago of Dawn's approach that now rivals even the best images of Ceres ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The video shows enough surface definition to discern its 9-hour rotation period. On target to...

In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design? Casey Luskin January 19, 2015 4:36 PM | Permalink A student emails me to ask how long it will be before the "tide turns from Darwinism to ID." He follows the debate over intelligent design and is aware that the Darwin lobby's rhetoric typically fails to address ID's actual arguments (which are scientific in nature), instead focusing on personal attacks or trying to claim ID is religion. This student feels it is obvious that ID has the upper hand in the argument, but wonders when...

The culture ministry said research on the tomb's bones showed the buried woman was over 60 years old and about 1.57 metres tall while the two men were aged 35 to 45 years old. One of the men had cut marks in his left chest that were most likely from mortal injuries inflicted by a knife or small sword, the ministry said. The men had an estimated height of 1.62 to 1.68 metres. The few burned bone remains of the fifth interred person, who was cremated, could not reveal the person's gender and authorities said further testing would be carried...

From eyewitness accounts of “trails of light” streaking across the sky to sightings of flying saucers, now amateur Mulder and Scullys alike can see if the truth really is out there by poring over almost 130,000 pages of declassified UFO documents that are now available online, reports MilitaryTimes.com. After spending decades filing Freedom of Information Act requests, John Greenewald, a UFO enthusiast, posted declassified records from Project Blue Book -- the U.S. Air Force’s records on alleged UFO and extraterrestrial sightings -- on an online database.

The grant will allow the team to archaeologically survey the village using a variety of methods, with particular focus on the group of timber-framed buildings which are present on an estate map of 1631. Many of these buildings probably have their origins within the medieval period. Dr Nash said: "Based on place-name evidence, the village of Tilley probably has its origins during the Early Medieval (Anglo-Saxon) period. The 'ley' element of Tilley translates into 'leah', meaning wood clearing." The project, one of the largest of its kind, will include a dendrochronology survey of 28 buildings that stand within the Tilley...