A model of ATPase. The rotor portion (purple) turns as H+ ions pass through, and the synthesis portion (green) uses that energy to force two molecules (ADP and P) to join together to make ATP. (click for credit)When you eat food, your body digests it, sending chemicals from the food to your cells. When your cells receive simple sugars like glucose, they are burned for energy. However, that energy is mostly produced in one part of the cell: a small organelle called the mitochondrion. The cell needs energy in many different locations, however, so the energy that comes from burning simple sugars is “packaged” into smaller units that can be distributed throughout the cell. The units are stored in molecules called ATP. When the cell needs energy, it breaks down the ATP, releasing the energy that has been stored there.
So a cell takes the energy that comes from burning simple sugars and stores it in small units that are held in a molecule called ATP. The ATP is then shipped to where the cell needs it, and when that part of the cell requires energy, ATP is broken down so that the energy is released. The two molecules into which it is broken down (ADP and P) eventually make their way back to the mitochondrion, so that they can be put back together to store another unit of energy. The process by which all this is done is mind-bogglingly complex. Ask any biochemistry student who is required to memorize all the chemical reactions that take place in order for this to happen in a cell!
Now we know that this process is not only mind-bogglingly complex, but part of it is nearly 100% efficient!
Since 1979, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been producing a study entitled Science and Engineering Indicators. It is a quantitative review of science and engineering progress in the United States and the rest of the world. One chapter from that report is called “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding,” and it attempts to assess how the people of the United States view and understand science compared to the people in the rest of the world. The way they try to gauge the public’s understanding of science is to produce a survey that asks questions such as, “How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun?” and “True or False: The center of the earth is very hot.”
For 20 years now, two of the True/False questions on that survey have been:
Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
The universe began with a huge explosion.
According to the journal Science, two expert panels formed by the NSF’s governing body, the National Science Board, have suggested changing these two true/false questions to:1
According to evolutionary theory, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
According to astronomers, the universe began with a huge explosion
The National Science Board has decided to ask the NSF to make that change on half of the surveys given out next time to see what effect it has on the results. This suggestion has infuriated some, but I see it as a very positive step for the NSF.
This mangrove snapper (Lutjanus griseus) is a member of one of the species whose population has increased since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (Click for credit)
I have posted three separate articles (here, here, and here) about how the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) has recovered remarkably well from the Deepwater Horizon disaster that dumped about 140,000 tons of oil into it. The bacteria that have been designed to remove oil from the ocean have done an amazing job at cleaning up the mess we made. Of course, just because the oil is mostly gone, that doesn’t mean there won’t be serious, long-term consequences to the gulf. Thus, there is still a lot of scientific evaluation to be done on the matter. As a result, some scientists are hard at work trying to discover what they can about the current ecological health of the GOM.
Marine scientists F. Joel Fodrie and Kenneth L. Heck Jr. decided to see if there were any consequences to the populations of important fish in the area where the oil was spilled. To do this, they tallied the numbers of juvenile fish retrieved from that area by marine research ships between mid July and late October for the years 2006-2010. Since the oil spill occurred in April of 2010, many of the juvenile fish retrieved in 2010 would have been hatched from eggs that were laid in the oil-polluted waters. In addition, once those eggs hatched, the fish larvae would be swimming around in oil-polluted waters. As a result, the scientists thought that there would be a noticeable drop in the number of juvenile fish retrieved in 2010. As they note:1
We hypothesized that the strength of juvenile cohorts spawned on the northern GOM continental shelf during May–September 2010 in the northern GOM would be negatively affected by egg/larval-oil interactions. Oiled seawater contains toxic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which, even after weathering, can result in genetic damage, physical deformities and altered developmental timing for fish eggs/larvae…Additionally, emulsified oil droplets could mechanically damage the feeding and breathing apparatus of relatively fragile larvae and further decrease individual fitness.
The Eurasian diving bell spider (Argyroneta aquatica) is a truly fascinating animal. It lives almost its entire life underwater, but it breathes air. Of course, that’s not very unusual. There are aquatic species of reptiles (like sea turtles and sea snakes) and mammals (like dolphins and manatees) that must breathe air as well. There are even some species of fish (like the Betta – a favorite among aquarium owners) that must breathe air in order to live.1 These reptiles, mammals, and fish regularly rise to the surface to breathe the air that exists above the water. If they are unable to do so, they will drown. The Eurasian diving bell spider does something different, however. As you can see in the video, it brings the air underwater and stores it in a large bubble, which is usually called its “diving bell.”
How does it accomplish this feat? It spins a silken web underwater that holds the air. That way, the spider doesn’t have to return to the surface to breathe. It just has to return to its diving bell. As you can see in the video, once the spider has caught prey, it expands the bell and crawls inside so it can eat its prey in the comfort of an oxygen-rich environment.
While this is all quite amazing, it is not new. The habits of Eurasian diving bell spiders and other, similar species have been known for quite some time. However, up until now, many scientists have thought of a spider’s diving bell as the equivalent of a scuba tank: a one-time supply of air that must be continually replaced. Not surprisingly, new research has shown that it’s significantly more complex than that!
As important functions are found for more and more junk DNA, some evolutionists are trying to claim it is not all that important to evolution.Once Susumu Ohno coined the term “junk DNA” and called it the remains of extinct genes1, junk DNA started to become the darling of the evolutionary community. First, it was seen as an effective argument against creationism or intelligent design. After all, why would the Creator put so much useless DNA into His creation? More importantly, however, it was considered an integral component of evolution. After all, evolution requires that genetic mutations acted on by natural selection produced genes with novel functions. However, it is difficult to expect that to work when the mutations occur in genes that the organism needs. Thus, one of the major mechanisms of genetic evolution involves gene duplication. In this view, a gene is duplicated, and one copy continues to produce the protein it always produced, while the other is free to mutate wildly. Waving the magic wand of time, the evolutionist then says that a large number of these mutating copies will become useless junk, but a small number of them will develop into novel genes. As you can see, then, junk DNA is integral to evolution, and according to evolution, most organisms should have a lot of it.
This, of course, is why Dr. Jerry Coyne says the following in his book, Why Evolution Is True:2,
When a trait is no longer used, or becomes reduced, the genes that make it don’t instantly disappear from the genome: evolution stops their action by inactivating them, not snipping them out of the DNA. From this we can make a prediction. We expect to find, in the genomes of many species, silenced, or ‘dead,’ genes: genes that once were useful but are no longer intact or expressed. In other words, there should be vestigial genes…Our genome—and that of other species—are truly well populated graveyards of dead genes.
Unfortunately for evolutionists, function is routinely being found for this supposed “junk DNA.” As a result, some evolutionists have realized that they need to back away from the claim that junk DNA is integral to the process of evolution.
I recently received this video via E-MAIL. The subject line of the message was “What you won’t be taught in school.” That intrigued me, so I watched the video. It is of a man named David Barton who is leading a tour of the U.S. Capitol. According to his company’s website:
David Barton is the Founder and President of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization that presents America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage….His exhaustive research has rendered him an expert in historical and constitutional issues and he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, has participated in several cases at the Supreme Court, was involved in the development of the History/Social Studies standards for states such as Texas and California, and has helped produce history textbooks now used in schools across the nation.
As I listened to just the first part of the video, however, something seemed off…way off. So I decided to do a little fact-checking. Now I am not a historian, but I am able to do some investigative research. When I checked the facts on just one segment of the video, I was rather disappointed.
I don’t normally do this, but I ask that you watch the video before you read the rest of this piece. You needn’t watch the entire thing. Just watch from 0:40 to 1:26. It’s only 46 seconds of video, but it allows you to see just how wrong he is, at least in that section of the video.
Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever (click for credit)Dr. Ivar Giaever has a PhD in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a biophysics scholar at Cambridge, and is professor at both his alma mater and the University of Oslo. Although he has an impressive list of accomplishments, he is best remembered for sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with Dr. Leo Esaki and Dr. Brian Josephson in 1973. The trio won the award for investigating a quantum mechanical effect called “tunneling” and how it relates to solids. When a particle (like an electron) passes through a barrier that Newtonian physics says it should not be able to pass through, we say that it has “tunneled” through the barrier. Specifically, Dr. Giaever showed how this quantum-mechanical phenomenon applies to superconductors, which are materials that conduct electricity without resistance.
Of course, that was almost fourty years ago. Since then, he made a name in the field of biophysics, shedding light on how large biological molecules as well as cells interact with thin metal films. While he still has academic appointments at both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Oslo, he has dedicated most of his recent time to a company called Applied Biophysics, which specializes in scientific instrumentation used in biological research and drug discovery.
Why am I telling you about this world-renowned physicist? Because he has joined another famous physicist in protesting the American Physical Society’s stand on global warming by resigning from the society.
I started working with homeschoolers because while I was on the faculty at Ball State University, my best chemistry and physics students were homeschool graduates. At the time, I knew almost nothing about homeschooling, but since it was sending me my best university students, I thought I should investigate it a bit. As I looked through the academic literature that was available at the time, I saw that the few studies which had been done on homeschooling were in accord with my observation: homeschooled students are academically superior to their publicly- and privately-schooled counterparts.
Since then, a wealth of studies have been done on homeschooling, and the results are essentially the same. In 1999, for example, Rudner showed that homeschooled students academically outperform their publicly- and privately-schooled counterparts at every grade level.1 In 2010, a nationwide study of more than 11,000 homeschooled students showed that homeschooled students score, on average, more than 30 percentage points above the national average in all subject areas tested (which included math, science, social studies, reading, and language).2 In general, when you attempt to measure academic performance, the average homeschooled student beats the average privately-schooled student, and the average privately-schooled student beats the average publicly-schooled student.
Well, a recent study of homeschooled elementary students in Canada has produced very similar results, but in a different way. In addition, it actually compared two different homeschooling styles, and the results are very intriguing.
The OPERA detector at CERN (click for credit)The science media is abuzz with claims that scientists at the world’s largest particle physics lab (CERN) have observed subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light. If this observation is confirmed, it could deal a severe blow to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which has an enormous amount of experimental confirmation. However, the first part of that previous statement is really, really important. These results need to be confirmed, and I am rather skeptical that they will be. Even if they are confirmed, however, they don’t necessarily mean that special relativity is incorrect. That’s probably the most overlooked part of the story!
First, you need to know that the particles being studied are called neutrinos, and they are maddeningly hard to detect, because they don’t interact strongly with matter. In this experiment, the neutrinos are detected by an underground system called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), which is made up of about 150,000 bricks of photographic emulsion film stacked in between lead plates. The mass of this system is 1,300 tons. It sits 730 kilometers away from the source of the neutrinos it is detecting, and those neutrinos generally take about three thousandths of a second to travel from the source to the detector.
The scientists have published an initial version of their paper, and it is impressive. Most importantly, they seem to have taken great care in keeping track of time in their experiment. After all, if the scientists are going to measure the velocity of the neutrinos, they need to know when the neutrinos are made and when they reach the detector. The difference between those two times tells them how long it took for the neutrinos to travel from source to detector, which then allows them to determine their speed. Measuring those two times is a bit tricky, however. Even though they took great pains to measure the times as well as they could, I think that’s the weak point of their experiment.
This illustration shows the first few steps of embryonic development. Embryonic stem cells, which are pluripotent, are colored blue. (Click for credit.)
When your mother’s egg cell was fertilized by your father’s sperm cell, the result was a single cell, called a zygote. That cell had all the information necessary to develop into the person you are today. In other words, it could produce everything necessary to build you. So that single cell had the capability of developing into any human cell. We call such cells totipotent cells. Of course, in order to make all those cells, the zygote had to start reproducing, resulting in an embryo.
As this cell (and its progeny) reproduced, the number of cells in the embryo grew. When that reproduction had produced about 12 cells, you were in the morula stage of your development, and on a microscopic level, you resembled a mulberry. As your cells continued to reproduce, they formed a hollow sphere called a blastocyst. At one end of the hollow sphere, there was a bunch of cells called the inner cell mass, which is represented by the blue cells in the illustration above. That inner cell mass developed into all the organs and tissues that make up your body.1
Interestingly enough, however, the cells in that inner cell mass were no longer totipotent. They could not, for example, form the kind of cells that make up the outer layer of the blastocyst, which are shown in yellow in the illustration above. However, they could end up becoming any of the cells in any of the organs or tissues of your body. As a result, they are called pluripotent cells. As they continued to reproduce, they started “choosing” what kind of cell they would become. Some of those pluripotent cells, for example, became skin cells. Once they did that, we say that the cells had differentiated. This means they lost their pluripotency, and would no longer be able to become some other type of cell. As a result, they would end up doing the same job for the rest of their lives.
Pluripotent cells are often called stem cells, and they have a lot of potential in medicine. After all, if someone suffers from severe organ damage, I could theoretically get his or her body to rebuild that damaged organ if I supplied it with enough stem cells. The stem cells could then differentiate into whatever cells are needed to replace those that died when the organ was damaged. While this sounds wonderful, there is a problem. The most ready source of pluripotent cells come from the blastocyst stage of an embryo’s development. If I remove those pluripotent cells from the blastocyst, I have embryonic stem cells, but unfortunately, the embryo dies.
