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Contrary to popular belief, polar dinosaurs may not have traveled nearly as far as originally thought when making their bi-annual migration. University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively have suggested that while some dinosaurs may have migrated during the winter season, their range was significantly less than previously thought, which means their treks were shorter. Bell and Snively's findings were recently published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology. The idea that these animals may have travelled distances nine times further than mule deer or four times those of wildebeest would have made them the greatest migrators in...

Dembski was introduced to the audience by an officer of the aspiring chapter of the American Scientific Affiliation, junior Sam Chen, who said Dembski's research as "absolutely phenomenal." Although, after Dembski's lecture, some audience members seemed in disagreement with his intelligent design theory. But Dembski is no stranger to confrontation. The mainstream science community rejects Dembski's work and research based upon his ideas of intelligent design. "The idea of gathering information explaining the conventional evolutionary mechanisms are at both ends of the spectrum," said Dembski. "It's either real science or magic, both create confrontational context." According to the U.S. National...

Francisco J. Ayala pulls open the top drawer of a black cabinet and flips through nearly a dozen files, all neatly titled by publication and due date. These are the essays on evolution he has been churning out over the past six to eight weeks for popular books and magazines. “Hack jobs,” he calls them with a smile, bragging that each one takes only a day or two to complete. After some 30 years of proselytizing about evolution to Christian believers, the esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, has honed his arguments to a fine point. He...

University of Utah geologists identified an amazing concentration of dinosaur footprints that they call "a dinosaur dance floor," located in a wilderness on the Arizona-Utah border where there was a sandy desert oasis 190 million years ago. Located within the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, the "trample surface" (or "trampled surface") has more than 1,000 and perhaps thousands of dinosaur tracks, averaging a dozen per square yard in places. The tracks once were thought to be potholes formed by erosion. The site is so dense with dinosaur tracks that it reminds geologists of a popular arcade game in which participants dance...

Rocks beneath a coal mine in Colombia have yielded fossils of what could be the world’s largest snake, a relative of today’s boa constrictor that was12.8 meters long and weighed more than a ton. Few of today’s snakes exceed 9 meters in length, says Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Some of the snakes that lived about 60 million years ago, however, would have dwarfed their modern kin, he reported Wednesday in Cleveland at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. At a site in...

Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, have systematically analysed the time of emergence for a large number of genes - genes which can also initiate diseases. Their studies show for the first time that the majority of these genes were already in existence at the origin of the first cells. The search for further genes, particularly those which are involved in diseases caused by several genetic causes, is thus facilitated. Furthermore, the research results confirm that the basic interconnections are to be found in the function of genes - causing...

WASHINGTON COUNTY — Jan Kochansky of Keedysville and his wife both are scientists and believe schools should not integrate creationism or intelligent design concepts into science education in Washington County Public Schools. With grandchildren attending local schools, Kochansky said the couple has a personal interest in science curriculum. “Evolution should be taught,” he said. “It’s the basic unifying framework for all of biology.” Kochansky responded to a request by The Herald-Mail to pose a question to the eight candidates running for four open seats on the seven-member Washington County Board of Education. Candidates discuss their thoughts on whether intelligent design...

“If one sees the world and the universe with eyes of faith, one can see and appreciate God’s handiwork. If one sees the universe though the lens of scientific reductionism, one can just as easily attribute everything that exists to solely materialistic causes,” Samuel said. “There are many biologists and scientists who believe in God and in evolution. The two do not need to be seen as opposing,” says Kevin Geedey, an associate professor of biology at Augustana College, Rock Island. “We make changes in the world all the time that cause natural selection on other species.” He teaches ecology,...

"Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade," wrote the brilliant paleontologist and Harvard professor, Stephen Jay Gould, "a secular religion masquerading as science." Signaling that those charges are still part of a contentious discussion about the origins of life, and how faith and science can coexist, even rabbis have come forward to lend their support to a continuation of the teaching of evolution and a resistance to pressure for public schools to question the validity of Darwinian theory and open the door to teaching alternate explanations of biological development—most specifically, the concept of "intelligent design."

A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all. A new study reveals that some bonobos—one of humankind's closest genetic relatives—hunt and eat other primates. Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed. /* snip */ "The second I read this, I thought: Oh good, finally!" said primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. "Bonobos being so peaceful never sat well with me," said Lonsdorf, who was not involved with the study. "We see...

Three antievolutionists have been appointed to a six-member committee to review the draft set of Texas state science standards, and defenders of the integrity of science education in the Lone Star state are livid. "The committee was chosen by 12 of the 15 members of the board of education, with each panel member receiving the support of two board members," as the Dallas Morning News (October 16, 2008) explains. Six members of the board "aligned with social conservative groups" chose Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, Ralph Seelke, a biology professor at...

A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has, more than a half-century later, yielded new results. The original samples used by Stanley Miller to study the origins of life. In 1953, Stanley L. Miller, then a graduate student of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, put ammonia, methane and hydrogen — the gases believed to be in early Earth’s atmosphere — along with water in a sealed flask and applied electrical sparks to simulate the effects of lightning. A week later, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were generated out of the simple molecules. Enshrined in...

Call it the political revenge of the nerds. For nearly eight years, many mainstream scientists have been frustrated with the Bush administration. They've claimed that science has been censored, ignored and politicized on issues from global warming to stem cells to evolution. Even the presidential science adviser was booted from the White House, forced to set up office down the street. Both presidential candidates - Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama - offer policies farther from the president than they are from each other. They advocate mandatory caps on the main global warming gas and favor federal funding for...

<p>In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.</p> <p>Get Science News From The New York Times » There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.</p>

paleontologists may scour remote, exotic places in search of prehistoric specimens, Tufts researchers have found what they believe to be the world's oldest whole-body fossil impression of a flying insect in a wooded field behind a strip mall in North Attleboro, Mass. During a recent exploration as part of his senior project, Richard J. Knecht, a Tufts geology major, and Jake Benner, a paleontologist and senior lecturer in the Geology Department, set out to hunt for fossils at a location they learned of while reading a master's thesis that had been written in 1929. With chisels and hammers, the team...

Darwin called him, ‘My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel—i.e. the devil’s gospel.’2 ‘Out of his provocations came … the West’s new faith—agnosticism (he coined the word).’3 Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ‘I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ,...

The museum exhibits are taken from the Old Testament, but the special effects are pure Hollywood: a state-of-the-art planetarium, animatronics and a massive model of Noah's Ark, all intended to explain the origins of the universe from a biblical viewpoint. The Creation Museum, which teaches life's beginnings through a literal interpretation of the Bible, is claiming attendance figures that would make it an unexpectedly strong draw less than a year and a half after it debuted. More than a half-million people have toured the attraction, in northern Kentucky just outside of Cincinnati, since its May 2007 opening "We're depressed, I...

This is just a short note to get this poll going in the direction it should be moved in Question"Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution?",/P> Right now the poll has had 26224 responsesYes ---- 35.08% No ---- 64.43% Undecided ---- 00.48%

A FEARSOME mutant fish has started killing people after feeding on human corpses, scientists fear. They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals. Locals have believed for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to snatching unwary bathers who venture into the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border. The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV documentary to be shown on Five....

It’s Fun Seeing Evolution Falsified Oct 8, 2008 — “Mysterious Snippets Of DNA Withstand Eons Of Evolution” is the strange title of an article on Science Daily. Gill Bejerano and Cory McLean from Stanford are wondering why large non-coding sections of DNA are very similar, or “ultraconserved,” from mice to man. Evolutionary theory would expect that non-functional genetic material would mutate more rapidly than genes. Yet for unknown reasons, the ultraconserved segments stay the same throughout the mammal order. Experiments have shown that mice with these sections deleted do just fine. Why would natural selection purify these regions if they...