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The concept of time is self-evident. An hour consists of a certain number of minutes, a day of hours and a year of days. But we rarely think about the fundamental nature of time. Time is passing non-stop, and we follow it with clocks and calendars. Yet we cannot study it with a microscope or experiment with it. And it still keeps passing. We just cannot say what exactly happens when time passes. Time is represented through change, such as the circular motion of the moon around the earth. The passing of time is indeed closely connected to the concept...

WASHINGTON (ABP)—A federal judge has struck down a suburban Atlanta school district’s policy of placing disclaimers about evolution in science textbooks, saying the policy violates the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of religion. United States District Judge Clarence Cooper issued a ruling ordering the immediate removal of textbook stickers that caution evolution is “a theory, not a fact.” The disclaimer is placed in public-school science texts in Cobb County, Ga. The Atlanta-based judge said the school board’s policy ordering the stickers be placed in middle-school and high-school textbooks sends “a message that the school board agrees with the beliefs of...

Last Wednesday, 32 University of Pennsylvania professors and the chairman of the physics department wrote an open letter to the Dover, Pa., Area School Board, condemning its incorporation of a religiously-loaded explanation for biodiversity into science classrooms. Dover recently instituted a policy requiring teachers to preface biology lectures with an alternative to the evolutionary theory of biological diversity. Known as intelligent design, the alternative idea incorporates many tenets of creationism and posits that living organisms are so complex that a divine being must have created them. Paul Sniegowski, an assistant professor of biology at Penn, argued that the Dover District's...

Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same. The scene never fails to give goose bumps: the baby, just seconds old and still dewy from the womb, is lifted into the arms of its exhausted but blissful parents. They gaze adoringly as their new child stretches and squirms, scrunches its mouth and opens its eyes. To anyone watching this tender vignette, the message is unmistakable. Birth is the beginning...

A new mathematical approach for analyzing the complex, subtle patterns of natural mutation in DNA will, according to its developers, help biologists understand how mutation contributes to evolutionary change in mammals. The researchers, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Phil Green and his student Dick Hwang, published a description of their new analytical approach and an initial application August 3, 2004, in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both are at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Understanding naturally occurring mutations has been of great interest because mutations are major drivers of evolution," said...

Two Emory professors went to court last week to testify in a case about the way evolution is taught in Cobb County. At issue in the case that began in a federal district court on Monday is a sticker that Cobb places in all biology textbooks warning students that evolution is only “a theory, not a fact” and should be “approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” Anthropology Professor Benjamin Freed and medical school Professor Carlos Moreno contend that the sticker discourages the teaching of evolution. But because he did not fill out all of the information...

Blacksburg, Va., November 3, 2004 -- In 1998, Shuhai Xiao and colleagues reported finding thousands of 600-million-year-old embryo microfossils in the Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation, a fossil site near Weng''an, South China (Xiao, S., Zhang, Y., and Knoll, A.H., 1998, "Three-dimensional preservation of algae and animal embryos in a Neoproterozoic phosphorite," Nature, v. 391). Within the egg cases they examined at that time, they discovered animals in the first stages of development - from a single cell to only a few dozen cells. "The cellular preservation is amazing," said Xiao, assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia...

An evolutionary expert who says meat-eating made us human has been awarded New Zealand's top science prize, the Rutherford Medal. Professor David Penny, a Massey University biologist, raised vegetarian hackles when he wrote in Nature this year that "an increased proportion of meat in the diet of early humans was important for an increase in brain size". "Apes were mostly vegetarian," he said yesterday. When the early ancestors of humans ventured out of the trees a few hundred thousand years ago and started stalking wild animals, they took in new chemical compounds which enabled brain growth. "The brain is a...