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Workers unearth huge fossil cache in California
BBC ^
| September 21, 2010
Posted on 09/22/2010 2:35:51 PM PDT by billorites
Workers building a substation in California have discovered 1,500 bone fragments from about 1.4 million years ago.
The fossil haul includes remains from an ancestor of the sabre-toothed tiger, large ground sloths, deer, horses, camels and numerous small rodents.
Plant matter found at the site in the arid San Timoteo Canyon, 85 miles (137km) south-east of Los Angeles, showed it was once much greener.
The bones will go on display next year.
The find is a million years older than the famous haul from the tar pits at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles, said Rick Greenwood, a microbiologist and also director of corporate environment health and safety for Southern California Edison.
"If you step back, this is just a huge find," he said. "Everyone talks about the La Brea Tar Pits, but I think this is going to be much larger in terms of its scientific value to the research community."
The number of skeletons found at the site may be explained by a marsh or lake bed that trapped animals looking for water, leaving them victim to predators, palaeontologists think.
Tom Demere, a San Diego Museum of Natural History palaeontologist, said the find was not directly comparable to La Brea, as it comprised different species from another era.
But he said it would be valuable.
"We have a fuzzy view of what this time period was like in terms of mammal evolution," Mr Demere said. "A discovery like this - when they're all found together and in a whole range of sizes - could really be an important contribution."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: godsgravesglyphs; paleontology
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To: EternalVigilance
Not provable! LOL!
All the evidence is that light from an object one hundred million light years away is from an event one hundred million years ago.
The silliest and most arrogant assertions about age, those with assumptions of infallibility based upon zero physical evidence (in fact, the total denial of physical evidence in preference for scriptural interpretation) - is that the Earth and Universe are only a few thousand years old.
41
posted on
09/22/2010 3:48:13 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: allmendream
All the evidence is that light from an object one hundred million light years away is from an event one hundred million years ago. So many assume. But again, you have no way to prove that the speed of light has always remained constant. Just like you have no way of proving that decay rates have always been what they are now.
42
posted on
09/22/2010 4:01:31 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: allmendream
Is the Sun Emitting a Mystery Particle?Discovery News
Analysis by Ian O'Neill
Wed Aug 25, 2010
When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.
But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.
This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at, but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.
Many fields of science depend on measuring constant decay rates. For example, to accurately date ancient artifacts, archaeologists measure the quantity of carbon-14 found inside organic samples at dig sites. This is a technique known as carbon dating.
Carbon-14 has a very defined half-life of 5730 years; i.e. it takes 5,730 years for half of a sample of carbon-14 to radioactively decay into stable nitrogen-14. Through spectroscopic analysis of the ancient organic sample, by finding out what proportion of carbon-14 remains, we can accurately calculate how old it is.
But as you can see, carbon dating makes one huge assumption: radioactive decay rates remain constant and always have been constant. If this new finding is proven to be correct, even if the impact is small, it will throw the science community into a spin.
Interestingly, researchers at Purdue first noticed something awry when they were using radioactive samples for random number generation. Each decay event occurs randomly (hence the white noise you'd hear from a Geiger counter), so radioactive samples provide a non-biased random number generator.
However, when they compared their measurements with other scientists' work, the values of the published decay rates were not the same. In fact, after further research they found that not only were they not constant, but they'd vary with the seasons. Decay rates would slightly decrease during the summer and increase during the winter.
SLIDE SHOW: Seeing the Sun in a New Light, The First Solar Dynamics Observatory Images
Experimental error and environmental conditions have all been ruled out -- the decay rates are changing throughout the year in a predictable pattern. And there seems to be only one answer.
As the Earth is closer to the sun during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere (our planet's orbit is slightly eccentric, or elongated), could the sun be influencing decay rates?
In another moment of weirdness, Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed an inexplicable drop in the decay rate of manganese-54 when he was testing it one night in 2006. It so happened that this drop occurred just over a day before a large flare erupted on the sun.
Did the sun somehow communicate with the manganese-54 sample? If it did, something from the sun would have had to travel through the Earth (as the sample was on the far side of our planet from the sun at the time) unhindered.
The sun link was made even stronger when Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics, suggested that the Purdue scientists look for other recurring patterns in decay rates. As an expert of the inner workings of the sun, Sturrock had a hunch that solar neutrinos might hold the key to this mystery.
Sure enough, the researchers noticed the decay rates vary repeatedly every 33 days -- a period of time that matches the rotational period of the core of the sun. The solar core is the source of solar neutrinos.
It may all sound rather circumstantial, but these threads of evidence appear to lead to a common source of the radioactive decay rate variation. But there's a huge problem with speculation that solar neutrinos could impact decay rates on Earth: neutrinos aren't supposed to work like that.
Neutrinos, born from the nuclear processes in the core of the sun, are ghostly particles. They can literally pass through the Earth unhindered as they so weakly interact. How could such a quantum welterweight have any measurable impact on radioactive samples in the lab?
In short, nobody knows.
If neutrinos are the culprits, it means we are falling terribly short of understanding the true nature of these subatomic particles. But if (and this is a big if) neutrinos aren't to blame, is the sun generating an as-yet-to-be- discovered particle?
If either case is true, we'll have to go back and re-write those textbooks.
Source: Stanford University
43
posted on
09/22/2010 4:05:21 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: EternalVigilance
No, but all evidence supports the fact that the speed of light is a universal constant, that the universe is several billion years old, and that the Earth is as well.
There is absolutely no evidence that the Earth and Universe are only a few thousand years old, and tons of data that contradict such a ludicrous suggestion.
But those that believe such are not really basing their opinion on physical evidence, are they?
44
posted on
09/22/2010 4:08:13 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: EternalVigilance; allmendream
There’s been an update:
Research Shows Radiometric Dating Still Reliable (Again)
For Immediate Release: September 14, 2010
Contact: Mark Esser
301-975-8735
http://www.nist.gov/cstl/analytical/14c_091410.cfm
Recent puzzling observations of tiny variations in nuclear decay rates have led some to question the science of using decay rates to determine the relative ages of rocks and organic materials. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with researchers from Purdue University, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Wabash College, tested the hypothesis that solar radiation might affect the rate at which radioactive elements decay and found no detectable effect.
Radioactive elements transmute into more stable materials by shooting off particles at a steady rate. For instance, half the mass of carbon-14, an unstable isotope of carbon, will decay into nitrogen-14 over a period of 5,730 years. Archaeologists routinely use radiometric dating to determine the age of materials such as ancient campfires and mammoth teeth.
©Zoltan Pataki/courtesy Shutterstock
Atoms of radioactive isotopes are unstable and decay over time by shooting off particles at a fixed rate, transmuting the material into a more stable substance. For instance, half the mass of carbon-14, an unstable isotope of carbon, will decay into nitrogen-14 over a period of 5,730 years. The unswerving regularity of this decay allows scientists to determine the age of extremely old organic materialssuch as remains of Paleolithic campfireswith a fair degree of precision. The decay of uranium-238, which has a half-life of nearly 4.5 billion years, enabled geologists to determine the age of the Earth.
Many scientists, including Marie and Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and George de Hevesy, have attempted to influence the rate of radioactive decay by radically changing the pressure, temperature, magnetic field, acceleration, or radiation environment of the source. No experiment to date has detected any change in rates of decay.
Recently, however, researchers at Purdue University observed a small (a fraction of a percent), transitory deviation in radioactive decay at the time of a huge solar flare. Data from laboratories in New York and Germany also have shown similarly tiny deviations over the course of a year. This has led some to suggest that Earths distance from the sun, which varies during the year and affects the planets exposure to solar neutrinos, might be related to these anomalies.
Researchers from NIST and Purdue tested this by comparing radioactive gold-198 in two shapes, spheres and thin foils, with the same mass and activity. Gold-198 releases neutrinos as it decays. The team reasoned that if neutrinos are affecting the decay rate, the atoms in the spheres should decay more slowly than the atoms in the foil because the neutrinos emitted by the atoms in the spheres would have a greater chance of interacting with their neighboring atoms. The maximum neutrino flux in the sample in their experiments was several times greater than the flux of neutrinos from the sun. The researchers followed the gamma-ray emission rate of each source for several weeks and found no difference between the decay rate of the spheres and the corresponding foils.
According to NIST scientist emeritus Richard Lindstrom, the variations observed in other experiments may have been due to environmental conditions interfering with the instruments themselves.
There are always more unknowns in your measurements than you can think of, Lindstrom says.
* R.M. Lindstrom, E. Fischbach, J.B. Buncher, G.L. Greene, J.H. Jenkins, D.E. Krause, J.J. Mattes and A. Yue. Study of the dependence of 198Au half-life on source geometry. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2010.06.270
To: James C. Bennett
I’m always amused when well intentioned fellow Christians reject things like carbon isotope decay aging which testify to the age of the evidence at hand. God made the universe, our intellect, and has no penchant for lying. So why call the clear evidence of extreme age a lie when it would serve better to try and figure out how God’s Word to us is true as well as the extreme age evidence? The answer is of course, man assumes in order to align his gaps in knowledge with his pet beliefs. ... Looking from the big bang event to our present day suing doubling of the universe size as a measurement means, the universe is around seven days old. Looking from our day back to the big bang using photon rate of travel compared to universe ‘size’ and earth orbital days, the whole shebang has been around for about 14+ billion years.
46
posted on
09/22/2010 4:20:55 PM PDT
by
MHGinTN
(Dems, believing they cannot be deceived, it's nye impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
To: allmendream
You can’t observe or measure what occurred thousands of years ago. Therefore, you’re operating from assumptions based on what you can observe or measure now.
So what you’re left with is speculation and surmise, not fact.
Which is why the definitive claims about age that we see in articles like this one are so laughable on their face.
They’re operating on faith in what they’ve been taught, not science.
If they spoke in humility about how little they really know and ever included honest words like “we assume,” their whole humanistic house of cards would begin to fall down.
There are a multitude of things that are not knowable or provable by science. The sooner you realize that the better off we’ll all be.
47
posted on
09/22/2010 4:21:50 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: James C. Bennett
Well, of course they have to respond. Too much riding on their confident but unprovable assertions.
48
posted on
09/22/2010 4:24:26 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: EternalVigilance
The very nature of science is assumptions and extrapolation, yet you seem to think science should be ashamed of such, and that they don't include the assumptions they make?
Nothing could show how little you know, or care to know, about actual science as to say such absolute garbage. Science papers are full of such equivocations as “the data indicate” and “it is probable that”, etc.
Nothing in science is ever “provable”. Proof is for mathematics and distillation. Once again you show how very little you understand science and the scientific method.
Sciences operate on evidence, not faith.
Anyone who thinks the Earth and universe is only a few thousand years old is OBVIOUSLY discarding any and all physical evidence in favor of scriptural interpretation.
The assumptions of science may be right and they may be wrong, further testing of those assumptions will correct and/or refine them. But such assumptions are USEFUL and lead to further data and discovery.
Creationism is an idea with absolutely no use, an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery.
49
posted on
09/22/2010 4:30:27 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: allmendream; EternalVigilance
Attempting to hijack the thread again amd
50
posted on
09/22/2010 4:40:00 PM PDT
by
valkyry1
To: valkyry1
The thread is about fossils that are millions of years old.
The actual age of the fossils, and the science behind it, is under attack by the typical creationist idiocy of saying ‘you weren’t there, how do you know?’.
You think discussing the age of fossils in a thread about fossils is a hijack? Well you were never much known for logical deduction or rationality, but why don't you attempt to dazzle me with your rationale for why this would be an example of hijacking.
I am waiting to be impressed......
51
posted on
09/22/2010 4:46:09 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: allmendream
Creationism is an idea with absolutely no use, an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery. Amazing claim, when you consider that the American Founders' first assertion was a creationist one, and that they afterwards fashioned the most successful and strongest republic in history, and laid the groundwork for the greatest advancements in scientific knowledge the world has ever seen.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."
52
posted on
09/22/2010 4:55:58 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: allmendream
Creationism is an idea with absolutely no use, an intellectual dead end Marx and Lenin would have heartily agreed with you.
53
posted on
09/22/2010 4:57:28 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: allmendream
Creationism is an idea with absolutely no use, an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery. Argue with perhaps the greatest scientist in history:
"The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God... And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be doe.... We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature.... And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy." "...The main busisness of natural Philosophy is to argue from phaenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical.... What is there in places almost empty of Matter, and whence is it that the Sun and Planets gravitate towards one another, without dense Matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World? To what end are the Comets, and whence is it that Planets move all one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, while Commets move all manner of ways in Orbs very excentrick; and what hinders the fix'd Stars from falling upon one another? How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds?.... And these things being rightly dispatch'd, does it not appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself... And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the first Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued."
-- Sir Isaac Newton
54
posted on
09/22/2010 5:06:39 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: EternalVigilance
Saying that we were created by God is not even close to the same thing as being a Creationist, do we need to go over this again?
I believe we were created by God, I am not a Creationist.
Nice guilt by association with the Marx thing! I guess when you don't have anything else.....
Perhaps you are as ignorant of history, as you are of science, otherwise you would know that the Communists rejected Darwinian evolution as too capitalistic and rejected it in favor of Lamarkian evolution.
But way to defend actual Creationism as a productive idea! The notion that the entire Universe and Earth and all species were created nearly simultaneously some few thousand years ago IS a productive idea and not in ANY way an intellectual dead end...... because our founders knew that our rights came from our Creator.
Talk about ludicrous!
So are you conceding that the idea of “special” Creation is an intellectual dead end that lead to no further data or discovery then? Seems so if your only defense is that the concept that the universe was created and obeys rational laws was a productive idea. I agree with the second point completely, being a Christian and a scientist in the long tradition of scientists and Christians who believed the world was understandable because it was created by a logical being.
But really, is that ALL you have?
Creationism is an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery.
‘well the concept that the universe was created.... ‘
LOL!!!!
55
posted on
09/22/2010 5:10:38 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: MHGinTN
Did they find any Cureloms?
56
posted on
09/22/2010 5:15:59 PM PDT
by
greyfoxx39
(We now have confirmation that Barack Obama truly loves poor people. He is creating so many!)
To: allmendream
Creationism is an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery. Evolutionism is a spiritual, intellectual, moral, political, and scientific dead end. It revels arrogantly in ignorance, and leads men and nations down to darkness and destruction.
History backs up my assertion, not yours.
57
posted on
09/22/2010 5:22:07 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: allmendream
Saying that we were created by God is not even close to the same thing as being a Creationist Well, I guess you define words differently than I do. Which isn't surprising.
58
posted on
09/22/2010 5:26:08 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
To: EternalVigilance
Evolution is one of the foundational concepts of modern biology and has led to tons of data and discoveries. It explains data, allows prediction, and is one of the most powerful scientific theories.
The idea that God created via miraculous means, via some “poof”, i.e. “poof-terism”, is an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery.
One cannot measure or predict a miracle. Thus poof-ter Creationism is an intellectual dead end.
Science backs my assertion in spades. History has shown that evolution has become the predominant theory of biology, growing from a few adherents to the vast majority of the scientific world, all over the world.
59
posted on
09/22/2010 5:27:48 PM PDT
by
allmendream
(Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
To: allmendream
Hmmm...funny. Wherever godless humanistic evolutionary thinking has prevailed, all-powerful-statism has been the rule, loss of respect for innocent human life has prevailed, and individual liberty has been trampled into the dust.
But where the initial assertion and rule is that our rights come from our Creator and that they are therefore unalienable, the people have flourished in liberty.
And the godless nations, while they may have laid claim to having a scientific basis, have always had to leech from the God-fearing, God-acknowledging societies to keep from starving to death.
60
posted on
09/22/2010 5:51:20 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -GW)
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