This Black Angus cow is not happy about a study done by Carnegie Mellon University!
(click for credit)
It always bothers me when people make overly simplistic statements about the issues we are currently facing. It bothers me even more when scientists do it. Nevertheless, I find examples of scientists making overly simplistic statements time and time again, especially when it comes to “global warming,” aka “climate change.” I have discussed at length the overly simplistic way in which some scientists approach climate (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example). Not surprisingly, those same scientists often approach the “solutions” to global warming just as simplistically.
Consider, for example, this story from The Guardian. The headline says it all:
Eating less meat essential to curb climate change, says report
The article’s main discussion point is a report issued by a thinktank known as Chatham House, but it discusses several sources in which scientists and policymakers insist that we must reduce our meat intake in order to curb global warming. Why? It seems simple enough. Keeping livestock requires energy, and the livestock themselves produce greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. It only makes sense that eating food coming from plants (which consume carbon dioxide and produce little methane) would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, right?
Well, a study done by Carnegie Mellon University concludes precisely the opposite!
The box-patterned gecko has an amazing way to stay dry!
(click to see video from which this image was taken)
Studying God’s creation fills me with constant wonder! It is amazing to see how incredibly well-engineered the world and its inhabitants are. Even well-known, well-studied things can surprise us with a new piece of technology that we never imagined. So it is with the gecko. Scientists have marveled at the gecko for years because of the way it can climb almost any surface, and they have studied it so thoroughly that engineers can crudely mimic its climbing ability. The gecko is so well designed that we haven’t completely figured out the details of how it climbs, but we at least have the basics, and they have been known for a while now.
A recent study shows us that at least one species of this amazing group of lizards, the box-patterned gecko, has another marvelous design feature: the ability to repel water in a most ingenious way. The gecko’s skin is covered in microscopic spines called spinules. These spinules force the water to form into droplets, and as the droplets grow in size, they are eventually propelled away from the body! If you click on the picture at the top of this post (and I strongly suggest that you do), you will be able to see a wonderful video of how this happens.
Why would the gecko have such a marvelously-designed system for repelling water? The authors of the study1 suggest that it reduces the ability of bacteria and fungi to grow on the skin, and it may help clean the skin of certain contaminants. Whatever the reason, I love the fact that we are still learning things about this well-studied animal!
REFERENCE
1. Gregory S. Watson, Lin Schwarzkopf, Bronwen W. Cribb, Sverre Myhra, Marty Gellender, and Jolanta A. Watson, “Removal mechanisms of dew via self-propulsion off the gecko skin,” Interface, 11 March 2015, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.1396 Return to Text
Katie Davis and her 13 adopted daughters on her wedding day.
About four years ago I read a book that touched me more deeply than I can describe. It is entitled Kisses from Katie and was written by Katie Davis, who is one of the most amazing people about whom I have ever read (and I have read about a lot of people). At the ripe old age of 16, she decided that God was calling her to be a missionary. During her senior year in high school, she did some part-time missionary work in Uganda, and after she graduated high school, she went back there to do full-time missionary work. I blogged about her book, and I encourage all those who follow Christ to read it. It is a remarkable tale of what can happen when a person listens to God’s still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) and follows His lead.
One of the many reasons I was touched by Katie’s story is that we share something in common; we are both adoptive parents. I wrote an article about how my wife and I adopted our daughter, and it barely compares to Katie’s story. My wife and I had a comfortable home, a good dual income, and the young lady we adopted was a healthy teen who attended our church. Katie had no husband, was doing missionary work (for which there is never enough money), and the 14 daughters she ended up adopting were unhealthy strangers with whom Katie didn’t even share a common culture. However, she has the heart of Christ, and that’s all it really takes. If you are wondering why there are only 13 daughters in the picture at the top of this post, one of them was taken back by the birth parent after Katie had lovingly nursed the little girl back to health.
Because her book touched me so deeply, I read her blog from time to time. She doesn’t write very often (I can’t imagine how she finds any time to write), so I don’t visit it very often. However, I recently went there to catch up, and I read an incredibly touching post that I simply had to share. It is written to the adoptive mother who doesn’t really feel like a mother, and the message of the article resonated with me, because it mirrors my own experience as an adoptive parent.
Most of the people who have observed my daughter and I together for any length of would call me a doting father. I am wrapped around her little finger, and there is simply nothing that can be done about that. Why? The answer is simple: I love her. It’s important to note, however, that such intense, emotional love didn’t happen right away. Katie describes this masterfully:
From the moment I met my children I loved them in the way that a heart feels they must love another human being, especially one in need of care. I felt that God made it clear to me that I was to raise them and this intensified my love into a fierce, protective, sacrificial love, but it didn’t change the fact that it takes some time to make strangers into family.
That’s exactly right. At first, we weren’t even considering adopting Dawn. We just knew that she needed a safe place to heal, and we provided that, because the Lord was leading us to do that. Once we decided to adopt her, that kind of “caring love” intensified into something much more sacrificial, but it still didn’t make me into a doting father. As Katie says, it takes time to make a stranger into a member of your family.
As I have written previously, God molded my heart and my wife’s heart around our little girl so that now, she is an inseparable part of our little family. But that didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t even happen over the course of a few months. As Katie writes:
Love is a thing that grows.
If you have recently adopted a child, give your love the time it needs to grow. I assure you, it is well worth the wait!
One species of coccolithophore
(click for credit)The best way to evaluate a scientific hypothesis is to use it to make predictions, which can then be compared to observations. The more the predictions line up with the observations, the more scientific merit the hypothesis has. Based on this commonly-used evaluation, the hypothesis that increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will result in catastrophic climate change has virtually no scientific merit whatsoever. As I have discussed previously (see here, here, here, here, and here), the predictions made by global warming alarmists have been demonstrated to be wrong time and time again. Recently, I ran across another study that adds to this growing list of falsified predictions.
The picture shown above is of an ocean-dwelling microscopic organism known as a coccolithophore. It makes its own food via photosynthesis, and it also makes the “plates” that you see covering it. It makes them by absorbing bicarbonate (HCO3–) and calcium from ocean and making calcium carbonate (CaCO3). When coccolithophores die, their calcium carbonate plates sink to the bottom of the ocean, making deposits of chalk.
Now it turns out that this process of making plates out of calcium carbonate is influenced by the acidity of the water. The more acidic the water, the harder it is for coccolithophores (and all organisms that do the same chemistry) to make calcium carbonate. Well, increasing levels of carbon dioxide leads to increasing acidity (technically, lowering alkalinity) of ocean water, since carbon dioxide can react with water to form carbonic acid. It is therefore assumed that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will harm coccolithophores. As one book on biodiversity puts it:1
Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, by making oceans more acidic, could reduce coccolithophore populations (by interfering with their skeletal formation), thereby reducing a major CO2 sink and leading to still higher levels of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Fortunately, actual scientific observations demonstrate precisely the opposite.
Blood vessels taken from a dinosaur fossil.
(Image credit: M. Schweitzer, North Carolina State University.)
In 2005, Dr. Mary Schweitzer shocked the paleontology community by reporting that she had found soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus fossil that was thought to be 65 million years old.1 One type of soft tissue structure found appeared to be branching blood vessels like those shown in the picture above. The idea that blood vessels could have remained soft for millions of years is contrary to everything we currently know about biomolecules and their decay, so many in the paleontology community searched for some other explanation of Dr. Schweitzer’s find.
For example, its possible that despite its appearance, the structure isn’t composed of blood vessels at all. Instead, it could be the result of a recent colonization of bacteria or fungi. After all, when the blood vessels in a bone decay away, the “tunnels” in which they were housed remain. What if rather recently, a colony of bacteria took up residence in those same tunnels? These organisms often leave a slime (called a biofilm) behind, and if they left it in those “tunnels,” the biofilm would take the shape of the “tunnels.” That would make the biofilm look and behave a lot like blood vessels.
Such an explanation seemed to get some support back in 2008, when a major article was published in PLoS ONE.2 In that article, researchers reported on a survey they had done of many dinosaur bones. They found several examples of what appeared to be soft tissue in those bones, and they submitted some of those samples for carbon dating. The dating indicated that the samples were of very recent origin. In addition, they compared their samples to modern biofilms and modern collagen (a protein not made by bacteria). Their samples of apparent tissue resembled modern biofilms much more than modern collagen, so they concluded:
When biofilms coat a substrate, and that substrate is subsequently removed, the biofilm will retain much of the original morphology. This can explain the quantity and similarity of structures found in fossil bone and indicates that these structures are unlikely to be preserved dinosaurian tissues but the product of common bacterial activities.
Since then, however, the analysis of a variety of soft tissue found in dinosaur bones has lent a lot of support to the idea that these tissues are not biofilms, but are genuine dinosaur tissue (see here, here, here, and here). It seems that the definitive paper has finally been published, showing, at minimum, that soft blood vessels found in one dinosaur bone do come from the dinosaur itself.
Dr. Sarah Salviander has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is currently a research fellow at the University of Texas Department of Astronomy.As regular readers of this blog know, I collect interesting stories about atheists who have become Christians. This is partly because I was once an atheist myself, and it is partly because I find it fascinating how God reveals Himself to people in so many different ways. Recently, I ran across the testimony of Dr. Sarah Salviander, who holds an earned Ph.D. in astrophysics and is a research fellow at the University of Texas Department of Astronomy. She has a healthy list of publications in the peer-reviewed literature and characterizes herself as a scientist, apologist, and author.
In her testimony, she says that her parents were atheists who preferred the term “agnostic” and that religion played no part in her life as she grew up. Indeed, only three of the people she met by the time she was 25 had identified themselves as Christians. She says:
My view of Christianity was negative from an early age, and by the time I was in my twenties, I was actively hostile toward Christianity. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe; my hostility certainly wasn’t based on actually knowing anything about Christianity. I had come to believe that Christianity made people weak and foolish; I thought it was philosophically trivial.
This is something Dr. Salviander and I had in common. When I was an atheist, I viewed religion as a crutch. It was okay for people who didn’t have the intellectual fortitude to face reality, but for someone who was knowledgeable about science and philosophy, it was absurd. Like Dr. Salviander, I eventually learned how wrong such a position is.
This is one way to visualize the meaning of the irrational number “pi.” If a wheel has a diameter of 1, it will travel a distance of pi when it makes one complete revolution. (click for credit)
Was mathematics discovered or invented? That might seem like an odd question, but it is an important one. I haven’t seen any official poll on the matter, but I suspect that most mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists would say that it must have been invented. After all, math is a tool. We use it for accounting, parceling out land, etc. Surely people invented this tool and then improved on it over time. If that’s really true, however, there is a deep mystery that is awfully hard to explain. Nobel laureate Dr. Eugene Wigner (a theoretical physicist and mathematician) put it this way:
The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.
Think about it. We didn’t invent the natural world. We simply study it. If we invented mathematics, why does it play such an integral role in our understanding of the natural world?
In my opinion, there is no mystery as to why mathematics is so useful in the natural sciences. That’s because I don’t think we invented it; I think we discovered it. Indeed, I think it is the language of creation. As Galileo wrote:
[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.
I was reminded of Galileo’s wise words when I read a short paper by two professors from my alma mater, the University of Rochester.
My dad (Howard Edmund Wile) as a naval aviator.I don’t typically do many holiday posts, and when I do, they are about Christian holidays. However, later on today I am going to attend a Veterans Day ceremony in which my father, Howard Edmund Wile, will be honored for his service. He is 89 years old and was in the Navy during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He was a turret gunner on a PV2 Harpoon and an aviation ordnanceman on four different aircraft carriers. He retired with the rank of Chief Petty Officer. This, of course, has made me think about Veterans Day and how important it is to remember those who have served. In honor of all veterans, I give you “A Nation’s Strength” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What makes a nation’s pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor’s sake
Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…
They build a nation’s pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
Me as Abraham Van Helsing, using the special effect.
(Credit: Lucas Collett, a fellow actor in the production.)
This post is a bit different from the standard fare you find on my blog, but it is about two of my passions: acting and chemistry. As longtime readers are probably aware, acting is a hobby of mine. I write Christian Dramas, most of which are best characterized as “skits,” and I also act in them. In addition, I do some community theater. Most of it is done at Anderson’s Mainstage Theatre as well as a new local group, The Alley Theatre. However, I have done some shows with other groups. In 2006, for example, I played Maurice (Belle’s Father) in Indianapolis Civic Theatre’s production of Beauty and the Beast. You can see a couple of scenes from the show here and here. The young lady who played Belle is one of the best actresses with whom I have ever worked, and I have worked with a lot of actresses!
In any event, I recently played the role of Abraham Van Helsing in Anderson Mainstage Theatre’s production of Dracula. The script is a relatively new one, but I think it is the best one I have seen. In the scene where Van Helsing confronts Dracula with a crucifix, the script says that Dracula is suppose to touch the crucifix, and it is supposed to briefly catch fire. I asked the director if she wanted that effect, and she said, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t look stupid.” I took that as a challenge.
Based on my past experience in the theater, I know of a substance called “flash cotton,” and based on my knowledge of chemistry, I understand that it mostly consists of a chemical called nitrocellulose. I had learned to make it for another show I was in years and years ago, so rather than buying it, I made it myself. The recipe is really simple, as long as you can get the ingredients.
Medical students using laptops in class (click for credit)
In the fall of 2014, I taught a chemistry class at Anderson University. While I had been a guest lecturer for several university-level courses over the years, it was the first time in 19 years that I had taught an entire, semester-long class. As a result, I experienced some things I had never experienced before, and one of them was students using laptops to take notes. It wasn’t incredibly common in my class, but every day, a few students would come in, sit down, and open up their laptops.
I wasn’t crazy about the students using laptops in my class, mostly because I think they can be distracting for the students using them. If a student sees an e-mail message or Facebook notification, it is easy for the student to flip over to those things rather than concentrate on what is happening in class. However, I strongly believe that at some point, you need to start treating students as adults. Thus, I didn’t tell them that they couldn’t use laptops. I did note who the laptop users were and, when I processed test scores, I would compare the average of the students using laptops to the average of the rest of the class. Each test, the laptop users had a lower test score average.
Of course, my sample size was very small. As a result, the statistical error kept me from making any firm conclusion regarding laptop use in class and performance on the tests, but the results did correlate with my “gut feeling” regarding laptop usage, so I became even more convinced that laptop usage in class harms a student’s performance. Little did I know that there is actually a large body of statistically-significant research on the subject, and the studies are in general agreement: taking notes with your laptop is simply not as effective as taking notes longhand.
