Category: Modern Science

There Seems To Be No Question About It: The Sun Affects Some Radioactive Half-Lives

NOTE: Long after this article was published, new experimental data was published indicating that the effect is not real.

Almost three years ago, I wrote about how I had changed my mind on radioactive half-lives. Throughout my scientific education (from high school through graduate school), I had it pounded in my head that radioactive half-lives are constant. There is so much energy involved in radioactive decay that there is just no way to change the fundamental rate at which a given radioactive isotope decays without taking extreme measures that don’t generally occur in nature. This was considered a scientific fact, and to question it was just not reasonable.

Over the years, however, more and more evidence has been piling up indicating that this scientific “fact” is simply not true. Some of the most surprising evidence has come from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and a German lab known as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). The group at BNL had been studying the radioactive decay of silicon-32, and they noticed that the half-life of the decay periodically increased and decreased based on the time of year. The half-life was shortest in the winter and longest in the summer. The variations were very small, but they were measurable. The PTB group was studying the decay of radium-226, and they noticed the exact same behavior. In the end, both groups concluded that the half-lives of these two isotopes were changing slightly in direct correlation with the minor variation in the distance between the earth and the sun. Thus, they concluded that the sun was affecting the rate of decay in those two isotopes.1

This conclusion was bolstered by a fortunate coincidence in which the BNL group was measuring the radioactive decay of manganese-54 before, during, and after the solar flare that occurred on December 13, 2006. They noticed that the half-life of that isotope’s radioactive decay increased more than a day before the solar flare occurred. In addition, the behavior repeated itself on December 17, when another solar flare occurred.2 Based on these two papers, it seemed obvious that the sun was exerting some influence over the half-lives of at least some radioactive isotopes.

Obviously, of course, others tried to replicate these results, and they weren’t always successful. A group at the University of California Berkeley analyzed their data for several different radioactive isotopes but saw no correlation between their half-lives and the seasons.3 However, a reanalysis of the same data seemed to show some variation correlated with the distance between the earth and the sun, although it was much weaker than what was seen by BNL and PTB. The authors of the reanalysis suggested that perhaps the influence of the sun was different for different isotopes. Since different isotopes have different half-lives, it makes sense that they would respond differently to an outside influence such as the sun.4

Well, some new data have come to light, and as far as I can tell, they confirm that at least for some radioactive isotopes, the sun is affecting the value of their half-lives.

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Stone-Age Animation

When you flip this thaumatrope back and forth, it looks like the flowers are in the vase. (public domain image)
It’s sad to see how evolutionary thinking causes so many misconceptions in the realm of science. For example, evolutionary thinking has produced the idea that “stone age” people were primitive and barbaric. Of course, as is the case with most evolution-inspired ideas, this one doesn’t stand up in light of the evidence. The more research is done, the more we know that “stone age” people had an advanced culture all their own.1 A recent finding that I just read about in Science News adds more evidence to support the fact that there was nothing very “primitive” about ancient people.

The article starts out like this:2

By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoonlike techniques to give the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find. Artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks…

While it’s very interesting that ancient artists were painting scenes that produced the impression of motion, the thing that really caught my eye was the part about the rotating bone disks. The article has three pictures that show how one of them worked (you can see them here), and when I saw those pictures, I immediately recognized it as a thaumatrope. However, according to everything I have read, the thaumatrope was invented in 1825. For example, here is how Ray Zone puts it in his book, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952:3

The fundamental principle behind the movies is persistence of vision, when a visual impression remains briefly in the brain after it has been withdrawn. This principle was demonstrated in 1825 with an optical toy called the “Thaumatrope,” invented by Dr. John Ayrton Paris.

Obviously, Mr. Ray is off by a few years!

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Animal Magnetism

Brown trout like this one return to the stream in which they hatched in order to spawn. (Click for credit)
Many species of fish, such as the brown trout pictured on the left, hatch in streams and then travel away from those streams in order to mature. However, when it is time to reproduce, they end up navigating back to the same stream in which they hatched so they can spawn there. How do they accomplish this? How do they know where they are and which way to swim in order to get back to that special stream? Based on behavioral studies, scientists have thought that these fish are able to sense the earth’s magnetic field and use it as an aid in their navigation. However, the specific source of this magnetic field sense has been elusive…until now.

A recent study has shed a lot of light on this magnetic sense, at least for trout (and presumably other similar fish, like salmon). The authors of the study set out to determine what gives the trout their magnetic sense, and they developed a rather ingenious method to aid them in their search. First, they took tissue samples from the trout’s nasal passages, because previous studies indicated that there was magnetite (a mineral that reacts strongly to magnetic fields) in those tissues.1 Then, they put cells from the tissues under a microscope and exposed the cells to a rotating magnetic field. In response, some of the cells rotated with the field.2 You can actually see a video of this happening here! Just click on the links for downloading the movies.

This is a very simple, very sensitive method for finding the cells responsible for the trout’s magnetic sense. As you can see from the video, the cells that are sensitive to the rotating magnetic field are smaller than the other cells in the tissue. Also, the authors found that only 1 in 10,000 cells in the nasal tissue have a magnetic sense. No wonder these cells haven’t been found until now! Of course, as the authors studied the cells more closely, they found evidence of thoughtful design.

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Another Example of Three-Way Mutualism. Is This Just the Tip of the Iceberg?

A white-spotted pufferfish in a seagrass bed (click for credit)

Over two years ago, I wrote about an interesting three-way mutualistic relationship between a virus, a fungus, and a plant. Less than a year later, I wrote about how people are actually walking ecosystems, participating in a huge number of mutualistic relationships with many different species of bacteria. Last night, while reading the scientific literature, I ran across another example of a three-way mutualistic relationship, and it is equally as fascinating!

This three-way relationship starts with seagrasses. Coral reefs are the “stars” of the marine world, but seagrass communities can be considered its “workhorses.” While they make up only 0.2% of the ocean’s ecosystems, they produce more biomass than the entire Amazonian rainforest!1 Why are they so productive? Because they form a wide variety of marine ecosystems that serve as nurseries for many developing fishes and homes to a wide variety of sea creatures including turtles, manatees, shrimp, clams, sea stars, etc. Because of their amazing ability to support such ecosystems, seagrasses have been studied by marine biologists for some time. However, there has always been a nagging mystery associated with them.

The roots of seagrasses trap sediments which form a rich mud that is often several feet deep. The mud is rich because it contains all manner of decaying organic matter. However, the reason the organic matter decays is because bacteria decompose it. One of the byproducts of this bacterial decomposition is sulfide, and if that sulfide were allowed to build up to high concentrations, it would actually end up harming the seagrasses themselves. However, it never does. No one has proposed a satisfactory explanation as to why this doesn’t happen.

Certainly, the seagrasses transport oxygen to the mud through their roots, and that oxygen can turn the sulfide into sulfate, which is harmless to the seagrasses. However, detailed studies show that the sulfide produced by the resident bacteria accumulates far faster than it can be removed by the oxygen that is added to the mud through the seagrasses’ roots, especially during warm seasons.2 Thus, there must be some other way that sulfide is being removed from the mud.

Marine biologists had no idea what this other way was…until now.

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Human Body Hair is Useless, Right? WRONG!

Many evolutionists think that body hair in humans is useless. The data say otherwise. (Click for credit)
One of the many reasons scientists are rejecting the hypothesis of evolution (see here and here, for example) is that many of its predictions have been falsified (see here, here, here, and here for even more examples). The more we learn about the world around us, the more clear it is that the predictions of the evolutionary hypothesis just don’t work. This is probably most apparent when it comes to “vestigial organs,” biological structures that are supposed to serve no real purpose; they are simply leftover vestiges of the evolutionary process. As Darwin himself said, they are like the silent letters of a word. They don’t serve a purpose in the word, but they do tell us about the word’s origin.

I have written about vestigial structures many times before (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) because they are so popular among evolutionists. However, as the data clearly show, the evolutionists are simply wrong about them, and the more research that is done, the more clear it becomes. The latest example is human body hair. This has always been a favorite among evolutionists. Here are two evolutionary descriptions of human body hair. The first comes from a book specifically designed to help the struggling evolutionist in his attempt to convince people that his hypothesis has scientific merit.1

Humans, like all other organisms, are living museums, full of useless parts that are remnants of and lessons about our evolutionary histories (Chapter 6). Humans have more than 100 non-molecular vestigial structures. For example, our body hair has no known function.

The second comes from a textbook2

Body hair is another functionless human trait. It seems to be an evolutionary relic of the fur that kept our distant ancestors warm (and that still warms our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes).

As is the case with most evolutionary ideas, serious scientific research has shown that such statements are simply wrong.

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A Real-Life Example of “Convergent Evolution”

Several times in the past (here, here, here, here, and here), I have written about convergent evolution and the problems it poses for anyone who wants to believe that all the amazing organisms we see today are the result of a mindless evolutionary process. As a quick review, remember that in general, evolutionists claim that similarities are the result of common ancestry. All vertebrate limbs look very similar, for example, because all vertebrates evolved from a common ancestor. While evolution “tweaked” the design of each animal’s limb so that it could be properly adapted to its environment, the basic structure of the vertebrate limb is the same in all vertebrates because they all inherited that basic structure from a common ancestor.

Of course, as is usually the case for evolution, more and more data have been collected that are inconsistent with this idea. Dolphins and bats, for example, both use sonar to navigate and to seek out prey. However, there is no hypothetical sonar-using common ancestor that links them. Thus, while they are very similar in this regard, evolutionists have to say that this particular similarity is not due to common ancestry. Instead, it is the result of “convergent evolution.” Both animals evolved the ability to use sonar independently, along different evolutionary lines. In other words, evolution “converged” on the same system in two different, unrelated cases.

Now please understand that this similarity is very deep. Indeed, the genes that allow this process to happen are nearly identical in these two animals.1-2 So in order to understand the use of sonar in dolphins and bats, evolutionists have to believe that evolution just happened to come up with the same system (all the way down to the genes) for navigation and predation in two completely different lineages.

If this were the only case in which unrelated organisms have amazingly similar systems, it might be reasonable to chalk it up to evolution just being “lucky” enough to come up with the same system twice. However, as evolutionist Dr. Simon Conway Morris tells us, nature abounds with examples of this. Indeed, most evolutionists believe that eyes must have evolved independently in unrelated lineages as many as 60 times in order to be consistent with the data at hand!3

If all of that seems far fetched to you, don’t worry. You are not alone. Most reasonable people can see when an attempt to explain around inconvenient data becomes desperate.

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Another “Fact” I Was Taught Bites the Dust

One of the fascinating things about science is that its conclusions are constantly changing. Because of new experimental techniques and closer investigation, many “scientific facts” that I was taught at university are now known to be false. This makes science interesting, to say the least! As someone who has published original research that has drawn conclusions regarding the nature of the atomic nucleus, I often wonder how long it will take for some of those conclusions to be demonstrated false!

In a previous post, I discussed Bateman’s Principle, which some evolutionists considered to be a scientific law. However, we now know that not only is Bateman’s Principle not true in many, many species, it was also based on faulty experiments. In the course of the discussion that followed, a commenter mentioned another scientific “law” that is probably wrong – the idea that a woman is born with all the egg cells she will ever have. I decided to look into this topic, and I was amazed at what I had missed in the course of my normal scientific reading. Thank you, Shevrae, for alerting me to the new advances in this area.

In case you didn’t have a detailed course on human anatomy and physiology, you might not know that it has been considered a scientific fact since the 1950s that when a woman is born, she has all the egg cells she will ever have. This “fact” is based on some really good research. During the fourth month of development in the womb, it has been shown that female babies start producing oogonia, which are cells that start to develop into egg cells. However, they are stopped early in their development and are surrounded by a protective layer of cells. This structure (the cell that is “frozen” in development and its protective case) is called a primordial follicle.

When a woman is born, she has hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of primordial follicles in each ovary, but some degenerate during childhood. When she reaches puberty, she generally has about 400,000 primordial follicles in her ovaries. After puberty, hormone cycles regularly cause some of the primoridal follicles to continue development. The nature of the protective cell layer changes, and the cell inside the protective layer continues its development into an egg cell. Interestingly enough, however, the process will not fully complete unless the developing egg cell is fertilized by a sperm. If no fertilization takes place, the cell that has been developing dies without ever forming a true egg cell.

All of the above statements are (as far as we can tell) true. Based on these facts, it has been taught for more than 60 years that since a woman starts out with hundreds of thousands of primordial follicles when she is born, she never makes any new ones. Thus, a woman is born with all the potential egg cells she will ever have. New research indicates that this conclusion is false.

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Dinosaur Feathers? Probably Not.

A Sinosauropteryx fossil showing the 'fuzz' that has been interpreted as either proto-feathers or collagen, (Click for Credit)

In 1996, a farmer and part-time fossil hunter in the Liaoning Province of China found a fossil that he recognized was rather unique. It had all the hallmarks of a dinosaur, but it had some “fuzz” on the head, neck, back and tail that looked like hair or feathers. Over the years, two distinct interpretations of this “fuzz” have emerged. Some scientists, like world-renowned paleornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia, considers it to be nothing more than collagen fibers that remain from skin structures such as frills. Others, like paleontologist Dr. Mike Benton, think it is the remains of “protofeathers,” an evolutionary precusor to bird feathers. Given the current “birds evolved from dinosaurs” craze, you can guess which view is held by the majority of those who have studied the fossil.

Of course, science is not done by majority vote. It is done by examining the data. So what do the data say about this “fuzz?” Well, in 2007, Feduccia and some colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In that study, they examined the detailed structure of the “fuzz.” They showed that its structure is exactly what you would expect for protein fibers that would be used to stiffen a system of frills. In addition, they say:1

The fibres show a striking similarity to the structure and levels of organization of dermal collagen. The proposal that these fibres are protofeathers is dismissed.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story.

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The Latest Evolutionary “Truth” To Be Debunked

A sperm about to fertilize an egg. Note the large difference in size
(Image in the public domain)

In 1948, English geneticist Angus John Bateman published what became an incredibly influential paper in the biological community. In that paper, he reported on his experiments with fruit flies. Using those experiments and referencing other scientists’ observations, he concluded that, in general, males are promiscuous in their mating habits, while females are more choosy about their mates. This rule, he said, should be applicable to both animals and plants.1

What’s the reason for this supposed trend? It’s because sperm are small and easy to produce, while eggs are large and more difficult to produce. Notice the picture at the top of this post. It shows a sperm about to fertilize an egg. Note how small the sperm is relative to the egg. Indeed, the egg is so large compared to the sperm that only a portion of the egg can be shown in the picture. A male, then, invests little in producing his sperm, so it is most advantageous for him to mate with as many females as possible. The female, however, invests a lot in the production of an egg cell, so she must be choosy as to the males with which she mates.

In the intervening 60 years, Bateman’s principle has been considered unquestionable truth in the evolutionary community. I was taught it as “scientific fact” when I was at university, and many scientists go so far as to call it a law. For example, in her book on behavioral mechanisms in evolution, Emory University’s Dr. Leslie Real writes:2

Behavioral ecology has few overriding general principles that have survived empirical investigation for very long. One of the more persistent claims is that females will generally be more choosy than males in their selection of mates. Male fitness will thus be limited by access to females (leading to increased competition among males), while female fitness will be limited by resources available for offspring production and development. This general claim has been elevated to the status of a law and often appears in the literature as “Bateman’s principle,” named after A. ]. Bateman (1948).

There’s only one problem. Bateman’s Principle is definitely not a general rule in nature, and more importantly, we now know that Bateman’s original study was fundamentally flawed.

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CHARGING Towards an Understanding of Autism

There are many myths about medicine these days. Some are harmless, but many can lead to all sorts of problems. One very harmful medical myth is the idea that autism is caused by childhood vaccination. Although many careful studies have demonstrated that there is just no link between vaccines and autism, you can still find many websites that try to argue that vaccination causes autism. A while back, I participated in a debate hosted by one such website.

In the debate, I discussed and explained the studies that show there is simply no link between vaccines and autism. I also pointed out that some of the authors involved in these studies have a proven track record for finding a link between a vaccine and a serious medical condition, so it is hard to believe that they would miss a link between vaccines and autism if there is one. Not surprisingly, the website that hosted and heavily promoted the debate removed all mention of it afterwards, because the debate clearly showed the error of the idea they they are trying to promote.

Fortunately, real scientists are searching for the actual cause of autism, and lots of progress has been made. I recently ran across a study that addresses autism and the health of the mother during pregnancy. As a result of that study, I learned about a very interesting program that was started in 2003 and is just beginning to produce some very interesting results. It is called the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study. The study recognizes that there seem to be both genetic and environmental risk factors for autism, and it is designed to produce rigorous research that will help us understand both.

The CHARGE study has already produced at least three very important and somewhat surprising results.

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