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Researchers have found convincing evidence that using a tool for just a few minutes can have a lasting effect on how someone perceives the size and position of their body. A team led by Alessandro Farnè and Lucilla Cardinali of Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, assessed the effects of using a grabber tool, similar to those used by litter collectors, on volunteers' body schema -- the brain's sense of where different body parts are in space... Farnè points out that the effects are subtle -- a difference of a few millimetres in estimated length -- and not enough to...

The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June 21 in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology.

AP Photo/Daniel Maurer A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. > The ability to store food is essential for the development of farming, the researchers said. >

Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone. But it was a different thing entirely when John Nelson and Scott Elrick, geologists with the Illinois State Geological Survey, examined the Riola and Vermilion Grove coal mines in eastern Illinois. Etched into ceilings of the mine shafts is the largest intact fossil forest ever seen—at least four square miles of tropical wilderness preserved 307 million years ago. That's when an...

Necessity compelled Neanderthals to wear tailored clothing and dry hunks of big game meat, according to a new study on the survival needs of these now-extinct prehistoric humans. > Additional new research by Sorensen determined these sophisticated, rough-and-ready humans probably started to go extinct around 35,000 years ago due to diseases carried by modern humans, with whom they coexisted and may have mated with at the time. >

One can't watch this all the way through, and then say that none of it makes sense.

The reason why those cold spells now come less frequently is still unknown Scientists have peered back in time with a new analytical technique to see atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide more than 2 million years into the past. The findings indicate that a long-term decline in the levels of that greenhouse gas isn’t to blame for a geologically recent shift in the frequency of ice ages, scientists say. The record of ice ages in North America stretches back 2.4 million years (SN: 2/5/05, p. 94). Until about 1.2 million years ago, ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere occurred about...

June 16, 2009 — What kid hasn’t played with maple seeds to watch them spin in the air like helicopters? Scientists watch them, too. A team from the Netherlands and California found out how they stay in the air for so long without engines to drive them. One would think in an era of advanced aeronautical engineering the physics would all be worked out, but the abstract explains that the seeds know more than the engineers do...

June 17, 2009 — If you are a war-mongering beast who likes to burn things, you’re displaying your evolutionary past. That’s what a couple of news reports are claiming. New Scientist has a review...

When does a boy become a man? The answer goes far beyond biology and chronological age...

Get all the following stories plus much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. BBC News: “New Dinosaur Gives Bird Wing Clue” Last week we reported on a solid scientific study that dismissed dinosaur-to-bird evolution. Of course, some researchers have yet to catch on. 2. LiveScience: “Microbe Wakes Up After 120,000 Years” After tens of thousands of years trapped in ice, an ancient species “wakes up.” Is it science news or the plot of a low-budget movie? 3. PhysOrg: “Odd Discovery May Help Refine Theories About How Planets Form” A planet with a “steeply titled” orbit—will it help refine...

The human ear is an amazing device. In a recent press release, an MIT engineer said that the ear is “like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels.”[1] In fact, its design inspired the development of a new space and energy-saving radio receiver chip...

Atheism, for Good Reason, Fears Questions --snip-- That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed. Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology-- Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be...

> "Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the 'Last Glacial Maximum'" said Lister. "Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago." >

Size does matter, at least for the seed shrimp. The tiny creatures' giant sperm are an evolutionary strategy that stretches back at least a hundred million years, scientists discovered in a new study. The giant sperm can be up to ten times the animals' body lengths. By comparison an average sperm from a man is around 0.002 inch (0.05 millimeter) long, less than a thirty-thousandth of his height. To find out whether giant sperm is an ancient adaptation, researchers x-rayed the innards of five well-preserved seed shrimp, or ostracods, from hundred-million-year-old sediment from Brazil. Although the giant sperm had rotted...

A new book from Answers in Genesis, titled "Already Gone," proposes the idea that compromising Christians, who accept long ages for the creation account, have greatly attributed to the decline of the church in today's world.1 Ken Ham is recommending his followers to use this book to educate churches to the dangers of compromise. While obviously written from a young earth perspective, it falsely puts the blame on compromising Christians. In reality, the reason people leave the church is not because of compromise, but because of the teachings of young earth creationists. If Ham wants to see why people are...

June 18, 2009 — A picture of colorfully-plumed dinosaurs graces an article on National Geographic, but were feathers found with the fossil? No; the article said, “Primitive feathers may have covered the dinosaur’s body, but there is no direct evidence for that, noted [James] Clark, whose work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society” (which also owns National Geographic News). The feathers are apparently completely imaginary. National Geographic has been caught doing this before...

"RATE" Leaders Abandon Geologic Fantasies and Admit that Extensive Radioactive Decay has Occurred Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D. The following material may be freely copied and distributed as long as the author is properly acknowledged and the material is not altered, edited or sold. For decades, young-Earth creationists (YECs) have vainly searched the geology and geochemistry literature to find ways of discrediting radiometric dating and protecting their antiquated biblical interpretations. YEC John Woodmorappe (a pseudonym), for example, has been at the forefront in misquoting and misrepresenting radiometric dating results from the geology and geochemistry literature (e.g., Woodmorappe, 1979, 1999).  Woodmorappe's shotgun attacks...

Radiometric dating is often used to “prove” rocks are millions of years old. Once you understand the basic science, however, you can see how wrong assumptions lead to incorrect dates. Most people think that radioactive dating has proven the earth is billions of years old. After all, textbooks, media, and museums glibly present ages of millions of years as fact. Yet few people know how radiometric dating works or bother to ask what assumptions drive the conclusions. So let’s take a closer look and see how reliable this dating method really is...