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Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac. A picture of the creature and its Latin name was drawn using its ink...

August 18, 2009 — For decades, astronomers and geologists have worried about a paradox. Stellar evolution theory claims sunlight on the early earth would have been 20-30% dimmer than it is today, but geology shows the oceans were liquid in the earliest (Archean) rocks. For that matter, so does the book of Genesis, but that record is not usually allowed in scientific discussions. Anyway, how could the earth remained warm enough under a dim sun to keep the oceans from freezing? This has been called the “faint young sun paradox.” A new answer came from researchers at the Tokyo Institute...

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

IBM said it was looking to DNA "origami" for a powerful new generation of ultra-tiny microchips. The US computer giant collaborated with California Institute of Technology researchers to develop a way to design microchips that mimic how chains of DNA molecules fold, allowing for processors far smaller and denser than any seen today. "This is a way to assemble an electronics device of the future," said Bill Hinsberg, manager of the lithography group at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California, on Monday. "It offers a potential way to construct nano-scale devices. The industry has always gone in the direction of...

For years, many evolutionists have been making statements similar to this: Actually, there is superabundant evidence for animals evolving under our eyes: British moths becoming darker since the Industrial Revolution (industrial melanization), insects evolving DDT resistance since World War II, malaria parasites evolving chloroquine resistance in the last two decades, and new strains of flu virus evolving every few years to infect us.[1] However, after years of withering fire being directed at the foundational structure of their evolutionary castle, it appears that Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents have finally caused enough damage to force some of evolution’s foremost promoters to...

A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday. Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was back, and apparently fighting fit. Members' discussion on the hack can be found in a thread here. Elsewhere on the forum, administrators report that they have bolstered security on the site and reported the attack to the FBI. It's unclear what personal information was...

Supporters of intelligent design are accustomed to fending off charges that ID is a front for creationism, a theocratically inspired ploy to sneak God and religion into the public schools and effectively put an end to real science in our country. Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy in Louisiana, puts it this way:...

Atheist Alliance International, an atheists rights and pro-separation of church and state group, praised former United States president and devout Christian Jimmy Carter for having the courage and integrity to condemn his own church and religious community for their use of scripture to justify and promote the ongoing oppression of women. In an article published in TheAge.com, an Australian newsmagazine, the former president explained how he came to the difficult decision of leaving the U.S. Southern Baptist Convention, severing all ties after 60 years a member, based on its perpetuation of the biblical values of women as subservient and inferior....

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday. Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004. Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth...

Venus flytraps are carnivorous plants. They have delicate, yet precisely engineered, trigger-activated leaves that can snap shut on insects in less than one third of a second. Their origin has baffled evolutionary botanists...

The evolution of the eye has always been a dilemma for evolutionists from Darwin’s time to the present. Although Darwin, Richard Dawkins and other evolutionists have tried to explain how an eye could evolve, their solutions are clearly unsatisfactory. Many kinds of eyes exist, but no progression of eye designs from simple to complex can be produced in the natural or fossil world. Furthermore, the simplest ‘eye’, the eyespot, is not an eye but pigmented cells used for phototaxis; yet even it requires an enormously complex mechanism in order to function as a vision system...

Stumptown Brewery in Guerneville, California, brews its beer according to a unique formula. Although standard ingredients such as malt and hops are used, the yeast that is added is supposedly 45 million years old.[1] The yeast was found in the digestive tract of a bee encased in amber. How could yeast cells survive and still be able to make beer after such a long time?...

Charles Darwin did some good science. Some of his research, such as that on coral growth, marine atolls and the important role of earthworms, stands today. On the other hand he was a creature of his time—a time dominated by deistic ideas that God was remote and the universe ran itself according to laws of nature. Amongst the intelligentsia, “natural theology”—the study of nature to find God—had largely replaced the Bible (revelation from God himself). With the influence of James Hutton and Charles Lyell,[1] ideas of vast ages of slow and gradual change had taken root, overturning the earlier acceptance...

In my seventieth year I find myself in a very peculiar position. Raised a Quaker, I lost my faith in my early twenties and it has never returned. I think of myself as an agnostic on deities and ultimate meanings and that sort of thing. With respect to the main claims of Christianity - loving god, fallen nature, Jesus and atonement and salvation - I am pretty atheistic, although some doctrines like original sin seem to me to be accurate psychologically. I often refer to myself as a very conservative non-believer, meaning that I take seriously my non-belief and I...

Dinosaur blood from a 65-million-year-old mosquito in amber used to clone live dinosaurs? It sounds like rather fanciful science fiction only fit for the movies, but claims reminiscent of Jurassic Park are becoming more common among scientists. We’re not talking about being able to resurrect dinosaurs from mosquitoes. However, claims abound that soft tissue, DNA and even entire bacteria ‘resurrected’ from a dormant state have survived for millions of years...

They have found that a gene in modern humans that makes some people dislike a bitter chemical called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC, was also present in Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago. The scientists made the discovery after recovering and sequencing a fragment of the TAS2R38 gene taken from 48,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found at a site in El Sidron, in northern Spain, they said in a report released Wednesday by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). "This indicates that variation in bitter taste perception predates the divergence of the lineages leading to Neanderthals and modern humans," they said. Substances similar...

Governments today are trying to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the air, because they fear that the greenhouse effect (which traps heat trying to leave the earth) of CO2 will trigger a global climate catastrophe. They point to computer simulations suggesting that result. But the evidence suggests that about 6,000 years ago God created the world with large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This lasted 1,656 years, from Creation until the Genesis Flood. The rocks and fossils laid down by that flood suggest that the result was very beneficial, with no climate catastrophe, as we shall see...

Certain bacteria can detect direction with ultra-tiny magnets that use bits of magnetic metals organized into structures called “magnetosomes.” Magnetosomes automatically orient to the earth’s magnetic field, and the bacteria use this information as a kind of cellular GPS when they’re traveling...

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer’s discoveries of soft blood vessels, proteins, various blood cells, and even DNA inside fossilized dinosaur bones have been met with extreme skepticism from the scientific community. It has been well established that such biological structures and molecules should not last beyond a few tens of thousands of years, and could not possibly survive millions of years. So why are they there? Scientists have made multiple attempts to debunk Schweitzer’s findings...

Did your high school biology teacher tell you that evolution is a fact because, after all, species are observed to adapt and evolve in nature? At the time it may not have occurred to you that moths changing color and the beaks of birds changing shape hardly demonstrate that entirely new forms and designs can appear without a trace of evolutionary history. It also may not have occurred to you that those examples of adaptation, observed in the field, occur suspiciously quickly. Wasn't evolution supposed to take millions of years? But even if those problems did occur to you, what...