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Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion. George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain...

Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when they inherited genetic flaws from their predecessors. The conclusion by Purdue University molecular biologists contradicts at least some basic rules of plant evolution that were believed to be absolute since the mid-1800s when Austrian monk Gregor Mendel experimented with peas and saw that traits _ good or bad _ are passed on from one generation to the next. Mendelian genetics has been the foundation of both crop hybridization and the understanding of...

The Future of Biology: Reverse Engineering    03/14/2005 Just as an engineer can model the feedback controls required in an autopilot system for an aircraft, the biologist can construct models of cellular networks to try to understand how they work.  “The hallmark of a good feedback control design is a resulting closed loop system that is stable and robust to modeling errors and parameter variation in the plant”, [i.e., the system], “and achieves a desired output value quickly without unduly large actuation signals at the plant input,” explain Claire J. Tomlin and Jeffrey D. Axelrod of Stanford in a...

Combining observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, astronomers have discovered the most distant, very massive structure in the Universe known so far. It is a remote cluster of galaxies that is found to weigh as much as several thousand galaxies like our own Milky Way and is located no less than 9,000 million light-years away. The VLT images reveal that it contains reddish and elliptical, i.e. old, galaxies. Interestingly, the cluster itself appears to be in a very advanced state of development. It must therefore have formed when the Universe was less than one third...

Searching for small targets in large spaces is a common problem in the sciences. Because blind search is inadequate for such searches, it needs to be supplemented with additional information, thereby transforming a blind search into an assisted search. This additional information can be quantified and indicates that assisted searches themselves result from searching higher-level search spaces--by conducting, as it were, a search for a search. Thus, the original search gets displaced to a higher-level search. The key result in this paper is a displacement theorem, which shows that successfully resolving such a higher-level search is exponentially more difficult than...

NEW ORLEANS (BP)--Revisionist scholars in Europe are ignoring a wealth of archaeological evidence in seeking to discount and, ultimately, erase belief in the biblical Israel, noted archaeologist William Dever said at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Dever, professor emeritus of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, shared his research during the Manuel Family Lecture on Archaeology and the Bible in early February. The lecture is designed to present current archaeological research pointing to the reliability of Scripture. Dever described the revisionists’ propositions as: “There is no history in the Hebrew Bible. It’s all written too late...

State of the Cosmos Address Offered    02/21/2005 Alan Guth, the father of inflationary cosmology, with colleague David I. Kaiser of MIT, took stock of cosmological theories in the Feb. 11 issue of Science,1 being that it is the centennial of Einstein’s theory of relativity.  How has inflation fared since its controversial but hopeful proposal in 1981?     “Inflation was invented a quarter of a century ago,” Guth begins (emphasis added in all quotes), “and has become a central ingredient of current cosmological research.”  Advances in particle physics have led to a theory, the standard model, that can...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The crystallized form of a molecular machine that can cut and paste genetic material is revealing possible new paths for treating diseases such as some forms of cancer and opportunistic infections that plague HIV patients. Purdue University researchers froze one of these molecular machines, which are chemical complexes known as a Group I intron, at mid-point in its work cycle. When frozen, crystallized introns reveal their structure and the sites at which they bind with various molecules to cause biochemical reactions. Scientists can use this knowledge to manipulate the intron to splice out malfunctioning genes, said...

Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and thought by many to be the chief proponent in the intelligent design movement, battled Vincent Cassone, department head of biology at Texas A&M University regarding the key points of the controversial intelligent design theory Tuesday evening in Rudder Auditorium. Intelligent design is the theory that certain aspects of the natural world were created by a source of intelligence for a specific purpose, rather than evolving from random patterns. As applied to biology, Behe said the design is not a mystical process, but is deduced from solid physical and empirical findings, whereas...

A former editor of a scientific journal has filed a complaint against the Smithsonian Institution, charging that he was discriminated against on the basis of perceived religious and political beliefs because of an article he published that challenged the Darwinian theory of evolution. "I was singled out for harassment and threats on the basis that they think I'm a creationist," said Richard Sternberg, who filed the complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel. Smithsonian officials deny the accusations. "We at the Smithsonian consider religion a matter of personal faith. The evolutionary theory is a matter of science. The two...

Freeman Dyson is professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His research has focused on the internal physics of stars, subatomic-particle beams, and the origin of life. Carl Woese published a provocative and illuminating article, “A New Biology for a New Century,” in the June 2004 issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules. He also raises another...

Being alive, we tend to think that life is easy to grasp. In the accepted classification of sciences, mathematics is thought to be the queen -- and the most difficult to grasp, followed by physics, chemistry and, finally, biology. But this scientific hierarchy is false and misleading: we now know that biology contains more mathematics than we ever imagined. When molecules entered the scientific understanding of life with the discovery of DNA, biology climbed one step up the scale, to chemistry. Then, with recognition of the abstract schemas dictating how genes are expressed, biology climbed even closer to mathematics. Today's...

Design Paper Published in PNAS    01/26/2005 Can scientific progress be made from a design perspective?  The Intelligent Design movement says so, but critics say ID has no place in science, which by definition must be naturalistic; judges rule that alternatives to Darwinian evolution are forbidden in public schools (see 01/13/2005 entry).  The rationale is that anything else assumes God, and is therefore religiously motivated.  Then how do we interpret a paper in PNAS this week,1 that is chock full of design language?     A team of Japanese and American biologists, from Caltech and University of California and...

SACRAMENTO, JAN. 17 – A California school district has been sued in federal court for violating a parent's civil rights during a controversy over how to teach evolution. For more than a year, Larry Caldwell tried to get the Roseville Joint Union High School District outside of Sacramento to consider changing how it taught the theory of evolution in its biology classes. Caldwell, who has three children, says he wanted the district to correct factual errors in its biology textbooks as well as to introduce students to some scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory. Caldwell did not propose that the...

Single genes have multiple effects Any simple Darwinian notion of natural selection has to be abandoned, and biologists are proposing more highly refined theories. By STEPHEN STRAUSS Saturday, January 15, 2005 - Page F8 Hardly a day passes without the announcement of the discovery of a gene for heart disease or intelligence or eye colour or something else. But the discoverers know that if they are true to the complicated nature of DNA, they should add, "And the gene for a whole lot of other things too." While the notion that each gene does only a single thing remains the...

Where and how did the complex genetic instruction set programmed into DNA come into existence? The genetic set may have arisen elsewhere and was transported to the Earth. If not, it arose on the Earth, and became the genetic code in a previous lifeless, physical-chemical world. Even if RNA or DNA were inserted into a lifeless world, they would not contain any genetic instructions unless each nucleotide selection in the sequence was programmed for function. Even then, a predetermined communication system would have had to be in place for any message to be understood at the destination. Transcription and translation...

NEW YORK -- A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God -- more or less -- based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday. At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Is Darwin winning the battle, but losing the war? As soon as one challenge to the teaching of evolution is beaten in the courts, another emerges to take its place. The current contender is “intelligent design,” a theory that according to advocates at the Discovery Institute “makes no religious claims, but says that the best natural evidence for life’s origins points to design rather than a process of random mutation and natural selection.”

At first glance, Cai Zhuohua's kidnapping and arrest by Chinese security officials were not surprising in a country that routinely harasses Christians. Officials found 200,000 copies of Bibles and Christian literature in a storage room managed by the pastor, who shepherds six Beijing underground churches. But more unusual was how authorities described Mr. Cai's activities: "the most serious case on overseas religious infiltration since the founding of the People's Republic of China."

Of the 12,200 species of plants and animals currently listed as threatened or endangered, a further 6,300 affiliate species should be classified as “co-endangered”. This is the bleak assessment offered by a new study attempting to quantify the phenomenon of co-extinction – the loss of an “affiliate” species when its host goes extinct. Many plants and animals have a diverse selection of insects, fungi, and other organisms associated with them that are uniquely adapted to their host. This specialization makes these affiliate species vulnerable to host extinction. Using estimates of host specificity, Lian Pin Koh, Robert R. Dunn and colleagues...