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Explosions In Space May Have Initiated Ancient Extinction On Earth Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a star explosion called a gamma-ray burst. The scientists do not have direct evidence that such a burst activated the ancient extinction. The strength of their work is their atmospheric modeling -- essentially a "what if" scenario. The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's...

Assume that City slickers are dumb and their effects on markets can be reproduced, according to complexity theory. Roger Highfield reportsYou might be forgiven for wondering if the best way to invest in stock markets is to consult a chimpanzee first - it has long been suspected that City hotshots are just lucky, overpaid fools who work in an industry where chance rules. Aping it: buying and selling shares is as much a matter of luck as rational thought Now science is beginning to support the idea that randomness, not rationality, exerts surprising sway over the markets. The insights have...

ROME (Reuters) - A small group of physicists are battling what they see as the cosmological equivalent to the bogeyman: an enormous dark force, that nobody has ever seen, driving galaxies apart. Conventional wisdom holds that the mysterious force, called "dark energy," may make up 70 percent of the universe, and could be the determining factor in whether it is eventually destroyed billions of years from now. But Italian and American cosmologists are offering a controversial alternative to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. They say it's not dark energy, but an overlooked after-effect of the "Big Bang" --...

Ancient earrings discovered at Burnt City disprove ornament theory Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- Archaeologists have found a pair of silver earrings in a grave of a woman in the 5200-year-old Burnt City which disproves the theory that the inhabitants of the city never used earrings, the director of the Iranian archaeological team working in the region said on Tuesday. A skeleton of a woman with one circular silver earring on each side of her skull was unearthed during the last days of the excavations at the cemetery of the Burnt City, Mansur Sajjadi added. The Burnt City is...

Theory: Iceman Oetzi Wore High-Tech Shoes By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Feb. 23, 2005 — Ötzi, the copper ax-wielding iceman found frozen in the Alps where he had trekked over 5,300 years ago, wore high-tech snowshoes, according to a closer look at artifacts found with his remains. If the new theory holds, Ötzi's footwear would become the world's first known snowshoes, and in a landslide victory. The current likely record-holders are not even actual shoes, but rather carvings of what look to be snowshoes found within Iron Age petroglyphs that date to approximately 500 B.C. Ötzi's Moccasin? The Shoe from...

Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong. The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has...

Much has been written recently about the fact that Democrats, arguably with malicious intent, mercilessly attack Republican positions, programs, and political appointees without offering any positive alternatives of their own. This has been ascribed variously to their hatred of George W. Bush (which is certainly a factor), to the fact that a significant percentage of the Democrat base and their elected representatives are unrepentant '60s-style liberals (this, too, plays into the current scenario), even, as Michael Medved has put it, to "an internal contradiction deep within the liberal soul." The bottom line is that, no matter how we might characterize...

A study to be published in the March 2005 issue of the journal Human Genetics, and available online now, actually undermines the commonly held view that homosexual orientation is determined by genetic factors. The study’s lead author Brian Mustanski from University of Illinois at Chicago said in a UIC news release that "There is no one 'gay' gene. Sexual orientation is a complex trait, so it's not surprising that we found several DNA regions involved in its expression." However, a thorough examination of the actual report reveals no statistically significant findings for any of these DNA regions. The authors describe...

Home | Feedback | Links | Books A Theory of Creation A Response to the Pretense that No Creation Theory Exists © 2000 Timothy Wallace.  All Rights Reserved.  [Last Modified:  14 October 2002] A popular practice among many proponents of evolutionism—including the “regulars” at the Talk.Origins newsgroup—is to claim that “no one has ever presented a scientific theory of creation to us,”[1] without which they find it “impossible to objectively evaluate the idea of creation.”  They then hasten to confirm this by “evaluating” the idea of creation—without objectivity!  Such an approach to the topic of origins shall be shown below...

Current theory is that nothing CAN travel faster than light (photons), and it is upon this that the theory of relativity rests. How about we change that definition to "nothing travels faster than light", ie that it is not impossible to exceed light speed, it is just that at the moment nothing does. Suppose a particle of light (photon) has some mass (otherwise it would not exist). Suppose we envisage a photon travelling at light speed. We are travelling in our turbocharged faster than light speed vehicle. We come up behind the photon and give it a little nudge. Does...

ATLANTA (AP) -- A federal judge Thursday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers from its high school biology textbooks that call evolution ``a theory, not a fact,'' saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. ``By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories,'' U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said. The stickers were put inside the books' front covers by public school officials in Cobb County in 2002. They read: ``This textbook contains material on...

ATLANTA (AP) A federal judge on Thursday ordered the removal of stickers placed in high school biology textbooks that call evolution ''a theory, not a fact,'' saying they were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The disclaimers were put in the books by school officials in suburban Cobb County in 2002.

Yes, the election is behind us, but it is not yet time to heal the wounds. We cannot let the Democrats forget the vitriol they spewed during the campaign. Their ugly tactics are part of history. Forget history and we repeat our mistakes. Remember Bob Woodward’s charge that President Bush and the Saudis had a secret “deal” to keep oil prices low in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election? (See also here). There is no documentation showing that such a deal was ever made. Historical oil and gas prices in 2004 provide empirical evidence that no such deal was...

Not long ago, Republicans were trying to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Their worry was that large deficits would hamper growth and prosperity. At the same time, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, preached deficit reduction too. He saw it as the solution not only to the country’s economic downturn, but also to its more long-term economic problems. Meanwhile, Democrats were skeptical. They believed that deficit spending had brought the country out of the Great Depression, and Democratic economists were overwhelming Keynesians. As such, they feared that raising taxes and lowering government expenditures to try to...

The fundamental particles of the universe that physicists have identified—electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on—are the "letters" of all matter. Just like their linguistic counterparts, they appear to have no further internal substructure. String theory proclaims otherwise. According to string theory, if we could examine these particles with even greater precision—a precision many orders of magnitude beyond our present technological capacity—we would find that each is not pointlike but instead consists of a tiny, one-dimensional loop. Like an infinitely thin rubber band, each particle contains a vibrating, oscillating, dancing filament that physicists have named a string. In the figure at...

ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would...

New theory on Stonehenge mystery Experts believe the stones may have been levered into place A fresh theory on how Stonehenge was built has been tested out by a group of experts and enthusiasts. Gordon Pipes, of the Stonehengineers group of scientists and archaeologists, has suggested that levers may have been used to move the giant stones. They have tested his "stone-rowing" theory which involves a 45-tonne stone being levered on a track of logs. "It's akin to rowing a boat, weights can be picked up with levers using body mass and balance," said Mr Pipes. Mr Pipes, from Derby,...

The Center for Reclaiming America is rallying 250,000 citizens to keep Sen. Specter from chairing the Judiciary Committee in the 109th Congress. Specter’s pro-abortion comments have disqualified him from this important position. Read our Fact Sheet. First, we implore Sen. Specter to remove himself from consideration for the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. Second, we call on Republican Leadership to take necessary action.

November 9, 2004 Evolution Sticker on Trial by Terry Phillips, correspondent Warnings about Darwin's theory of man's origin challenged in court. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging a Georgia law that requires science textbooks to have a warning sticker reminding students that the theory of evolution is just that, a theory. The argument presented in court by the ACLU claims the stickerâ€"approved by Atlanta's Cobb County school board at the urging of 2,000 parentsâ€"discriminates against some religions, promotes creationism and restricts the teaching of evolution. Seth Cooper, an attorney who helped to file a friend of the court...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Einstein was right -- again. Satellites that have been pulled slightly off their orbits show that the Earth is indeed twisting the fabric of space-time as it rotates, scientists said on Thursday. They said their findings are the first to directly measure and prove an important aspect of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity -- that a rotating body warps and twists the "fabric" that combines the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. "As the Earth turns, it is actually twisting space-time with it. Near Earth, the twisting is greater," said Michael Salamon,...