Category: The Wonders of Creation

Have you met STEVE? It’s a strange event that has been photographed by several people who spend a lot of time photographing auroras. One of them (Chris Ratzlaff) suggested the name “Steve,” which was inspired by the animated movie Over the Hedge. Apparently, one of the characters in the movie named something he didn’t understand “Steve.” When the scientific community began studying this phenomenon, they kept the name but made it more “scientific.” They called it STEVE for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.”

Since STEVE events happen where auroras are found, it is reasonable to think that they are related to auroras in some way. However, auroras are visible every night when you are at high latitudes and the viewing conditions are favorable. By contrast, STEVE events are visible only a few days each year, at least according to the photographers who have documented them. Also, auroras produce a glow that spreads wide throughout the night sky, while STEVE events produce ribbons of light.

So what causes these events? Currently, scientists can’t say. The initial study said they might be similar to auroras, which are caused by high-energy charged particles that have been trapped by earth’s magnetic field interacting with molecules in the upper atmosphere. This interaction gives the molecules excess energy, and they emit that energy in the form of visible light, mostly reds, greens, and blues. Scientists looked at satellite imagery that was taken during a documented STEVE event, and they did see charged particles moving at high speeds through the appropriate region of the atmosphere, but they couldn’t say for sure that they were related to the event.

Now, some of the authors of that study have published an analysis that indicates STEVE events are not very similar to auroras. They looked at imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s polar orbiting satellites that happened to be over a documented STEVE event on March 28, 2008. It was in the perfect position to see if high-energy charged particles were interacting with the upper atmosphere during the event, and it saw none.

As a result, there is currently no explanation for what causes STEVE events. I look forward to seeing where the research goes on this!

The picture above shows a phenomenon that can be seen during the summer by people who live at latitudes of 50-65 degrees. They are called noctilucent (“night shining”) clouds, and they appear to glow in the twilight sky. They aren’t actually glowing, and they aren’t really clouds, either. Instead, they are bands of ice crystals that are way above the clouds, in an upper part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. There is very little water in the mesosphere, and it is extremely cold there. When conditions are right, however, what little water that exists there can freeze into tiny ice crystals, forming short-lived “clouds.”

Why do they appear to glow? Well, at twilight, the sun is below the curve of the earth, so you can’t see it directly. However, if you were up higher, you could still see it. Indeed, this video shows a drone observing the sunset at a height of 80 feet and then rising to 400 feet to see the sun set again. So even though you can’t see the sun once it sets, higher altitudes still “see” it. That means the sun’s light is still shining brightly on things that are high in the sky, including the ice crystals. Some of that light scatters off the crystals and heads to the earth. If you are at the right place on the earth and it is dark enough, you can see that light, and it looks like the light is coming from the “clouds” themselves. Here is an excellent time-lapse series that shows both noctilucent clouds and an aurora.

Why am I blogging about this phenomenon? Because this year has been an unusually good year for seeing it. Indeed, reports of these “glowing clouds” have tripled this year compared to last year. What’s causing it? According to Dr. Lynn Harvey of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, it’s because there is an unusual amount of water in the mesosphere this year. It is also a bit colder than normal. Combine those two effects and you have more ice crystals and therefore more noctilucent clouds.

Why is it wetter and colder this year in the mesosphere? We don’t really know. In fact, noctilucent clouds are a bit of a mystery in general, since they were first reported in the summer of 1885. Whether that means they just started forming then or just happened to be noticed then, we don’t know. However, most other striking atmospheric phenomena had been observed much earlier. Auroras, for example, were reported in ancient china and were named by Galileo in 1619. It’s hard to believe that a similar atmospheric phenomenon that can be seen at the same latitudes existed but remained unnoticed until 1885.

Of course, unlike auroras, noctilucent clouds are rare and short-lived. After all, they occur only in the summer and, in order to see them, it needs to be pretty dark, since sunlight overwhelms the small amount of light coming from the ice crystals. Thus, the sun has to be below the curve of the earth for the observer. However, once the sun is well below the curve of the earth, it no longer shines on the ice crystals in the mesosphere above the observer. This fact might have made them less likely to be observed and, even when they were observed, less likely to be believed, since they would “disappear” after a while.

So it may be that noctilucent clouds clouds are a fairly recent phenomenon caused by human activity, and it may be that whatever human activity is causing them is increasing their frequency. Of course, it may also be a natural phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time. We just don’t know. That’s the great thing about science. There always seem to be more questions than answers!

In 1619, Orazio Grassi (a mathematician, astronomer and architect) wrote about three comets that had recently appeared in the sky. He gave evidence that they must have been far from the earth, even beyond the moon. Galileo wrongly believed that comets were in earth’s atmosphere, and so he wrote Il Saggiatore (The Assayer) in reply. Although Galileo’s overall argument was wrong, the piece does contain a statement that is quite profound:

Philosophy [he is referring to what we call “science” today] is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

While most scientists who use this quote are talking about physics and perhaps chemistry, the fact is that mathematics seems to be the language in which God wrote His creation. As a result, all areas of science (even biology) require the use of mathematics to unlock the true secrets of creation. I recently ran across a paper that illustrates this point rather well.

The authors were using a mathematical technique called Voronoi Diagramming to model how certain cells in an embryo pack together to form the shapes of the organs that are developing. Generally speaking, most biologists assume that the cells become column- or bottle-like in shape so that they can squeeze together and form the smooth curves that characterize the shapes of the organs. However, their mathematical model predicted that another set of shapes would develop – shapes that are so unique they don’t even have a name. As a result, the authors call the shapes scutoids, which refers to the scutum and scutellum, features found on certain insects, like beetles.

Drawings of two scutoid-shaped cells are shown on the left side of the illustration below, and the way those two shapes fit together are shown on the right side of the illustration.

Now, of course, the authors didn’t just believe the results of their mathematical model. After all, the mathematical model contains assumptions, and those assumptions could be flawed. However, armed with the knowledge of those shapes, they examined specific tissues in developing fruit fly larvae. Sure enough, they found tissue structures that are composed of scutoid-shaped cells.

Why do cells form these shapes in developing fruit fly embryos (and presumably other embryos)? The authors state:

Using biophysical arguments, we propose that scutoids make possible the minimization of the tissue energy and stabilize three-dimensional packing. Hence, we conclude that scutoids are one of nature’s solutions to achieve epithelial bending.

In other words, they produce the most stable tissue at the lowest energy.

Now remember, the reason the authors found this brand-new cell shape is because they started with mathematics, just as Galileo instructed. Writing more than 300 years after Galileo, Sir James Hopwood Jeans (English physicist, astronomer and mathematician) tells us why he thinks Galileo was right:

Lapsing back again into the crudely anthropomorphic language we have already used, we may say that we have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. [The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press 1931, p. 122]

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about a galaxy that has no “need” for dark matter. This is interesting, because most galaxies “need” dark matter to explain the motion of their stars. Based on the mass that is actually observed in most galaxies, the stars should not be moving the way that they do. Thus, scientists think there must be a lot of mass in those galaxies that cannot be seen (dark matter). To make their current theories work, scientists estimate that about 80-85% of the mass in the universe comes from dark matter. Since dark matter is thought to be so prevalent in the universe, scientists have tried to detect it directly, without any luck.

How do you detect something you can’t see? First, you have to have some idea of what you are looking for. Then, you design an experiment to see if what you think you might be looking for really exists. The most “promising” candidate for dark matter is a class of hypothetical particles called “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs). These are particles that don’t interact with matter using the electromagnetic force. Since the electromagnetic force works via the exchange of photons, if a particle doesn’t use the electromagnetic force, it produces no light. Instead, WIMPs are thought to use only the gravitational force and the weak force, which works only at the subatomic level and is responsible for most of the natural radioactivity on planet earth.

Since all the matter we know of uses the electromagnetic force, WIMPs are obviously strange particles. However, they are allowed by the mathematics of the standard model of physics, which is why they are considered the most “promising” of the candidates for dark matter. How do scientist try to detect WIMPs? The most sensitive WIMP detector is called XENON1T, which is filled with liquid and gaseous xenon. The design of the detector allows scientists to identify electromagnetic interactions that occur between particles hitting the detector and the liquid xenon inside. They discard those interactions, and what’s left should be any interactions that use only the weak force. Those, of course, would be caused by the WIMPs.

The team of scientists using XENON1T reported their latest results at a seminar on May 28th, and so far, they have not seen a signal that is consistent with what is expected for WIMPs. I think their results argue strongly that WIMPs don’t exist, but that’s not the only explanation. The results could also mean that physicists don’t understand WIMPs as well as they thought, and these particles actually interact more weakly with matter than what the theories tell us.

Continue reading “Another Unsuccessful Attempt to Detect Dark Matter”

DNA is a wonderfully complex chemical that we are still a long way from fully understanding. Its ability to store information is amazing. Experiments indicate that a single gram of DNA (a gram is approximately the mass of a U.S. dollar bill) can store 500,000 CDs worth of information! It uses a complicated system of alternative splicing so that a single region of the molecule can store the information needed to produce many different chemicals (see here and here, for example). It is so complex that even the best chemistry lab in the world cannot produce a useful version of it. In the end, the best human science can do is make tiny sections of DNA and then employ yeast cells to stitch those segments together so that they become something useful.

In 1953, American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick published a landmark paper describing the structure of DNA that we have all come to know: the double-helix. Since then, however, scientists have discovered at least 10 other structures that DNA can take on. One of the more interesting ones is called the i-motif structure, which is illustrated above. Rather than the well-known double-helix, it is a four-stranded, interlocking ladder.

This rather bizarre form of DNA was first discovered as a structure produced in the lab, and many biochemists thought that it couldn’t exist in most living organisms (especially humans), because it tends to form in acidic conditions. Human blood is just slightly basic (pH between 7.35 and 7.45), so it was thought that i-motif DNA wouldn’t be found in human cells. However, a new paper provides very strong evidence that i-motif DNA not only exists in human cells, but that it is constantly forming and unforming based on what is going on in the cell!

The researchers decided to look for this form of DNA in human cells by making an antibody that would bind only to the i-motif form of DNA. They tagged the antibody with a fluorescent dye that would glow green when the antibody attached. They demonstrated that the antibody was faithful to bind only to that form of DNA, and they put the antibody in the nucleus of a human cell. Using a microscope, they were able to see antibodies glow in several different places, indicating that i-motif DNA was, indeed, present in the nucleus.

What’s even more remarkable, however, is that the glowing regions turned on and off. This indicates that the i-motif structure was being made from the double-helix form and then transformed back into the double helix form. Why? There’s no solid answer to this question, but the researchers noticed that i-motif DNA tended to form a lot during transcription. If you don’t recognize that term, in order to make a protein, the cell must read the “recipe” for that protein from the DNA and then send that recipe to another place in the cell to make the protein. The first part of that process (reading the DNA) is called transcription, and the second part (turning it into a protein) is called translation. That means i-motif DNA is formed more frequently when the cell is starting the process of making a protein.

Because of this, the researchers suggest that the i-motif form of DNA provides some sort of regulation in the production of proteins. After all, the cell not only needs to know how to make proteins, but it also needs to know when to make them and how much to make. The “how” part is something we know pretty well. The “when” and “how much” parts are still quite mysterious to modern science. We have uncovered (and partially understood) some of DNA’s regulatory mechanisms, but as this new discovery of i-motif DNA in human cells indicates, we still have a long way to go.

DNA is just one of the many marvels in Creation that testify to the design ingenuity of the Creator, and the more we learn about it, the more I stand in awe!

Dark matter is one of those things that scientists use to make up for an observation which is inconsistent with the known laws of physics. When astronomers look at the motion of stars in a galaxy, they can use Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to estimate how much mass must be in the galaxy to produce the motion that is observed. However, they can also use the amount of light they see coming from the galaxy to estimate how much mass is there. In general, those two masses don’t agree. The motion of the stars indicates significantly more mass than the light coming from the galaxy.

That’s where dark matter comes in. Since the matter we can see using the light that comes from a galaxy doesn’t account for the motion of the stars within the galaxy, there must be a lot of matter that is too dark to see. But if it’s too dark to see, it must be some strange type of matter that is fundamentally different from the matter we have studied here on earth. Many experiments have been done trying to directly observe dark matter, but so far, they have come up empty. Thus, if dark matter exists, its nature is a complete mystery to us. This is frustrating, since astrophysicists think that about 80% of the mass in the universe comes from dark matter!

Some scientists (I count myself among them) are hesitant to accept that about 80% of the universe’s mass is made up of something we can’t detect, so they look for alternate explanations. One group suggests that on very large scales, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is slightly different from what it is here on earth. These physicists suggest a modified version of the law, which they call Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). If you accept their modification, the need for dark matter goes away. Another scientist suggests that if you actually apply Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation properly (taking into account that there are multiple bodies exerting gravitational force on all the other bodies and that those bodies are in constant motion), you need very little (if any) dark matter to understand why the stars move so quickly in galaxies.

Well, these three competing ideas (dark matter, MOND, and multiple-body analysis) have just been presented with a means by which they can distinguish themselves: a diffuse galaxy charmingly named NGC 1052-DF2, which is pictured above. This is the first discovered galaxy for which the mass calculated from the motion of the stars is pretty much equal to the mass calculated from the light that we see. Thus, there is no “need” for dark matter in this galaxy.

Now this galaxy is anything but a run-of-the-mill collection of stars. Most galaxies have a noticeable central region. This one doesn’t. Most galaxies have dense enough stars that there are portions through which you cannot see. This galaxy is completely see-through. Most galaxies have tight clusters of stars that orbit the outer parts of the galaxy. While this one has those clusters, they are about twice as large as the clusters seen in other galaxies. Most galaxies show evidence of a central black hole. This one doesn’t. Finally, it is part of a group of galaxies that is dominated by a very large, active galaxy known as NGC 1052. It’s possible that all these features somehow explain the apparent lack of need for dark matter.

I really hope the group promoting MOND and the scientist promoting a multiple-body solution to star motion in galaxies turn their attention to this new discovery. While I am happy to believe in dark matter if there is strong evidence for it, right now, I am inclined to believe there is an alternate solution to the “missing mass” problem in galaxies. Hopefully, further analysis of this galaxy will help us find out.

Newsweek headlined its article, “Scott Kelly: NASA Study Confirms Astronaut’s DNA Actually Changed in Space.” The article says:

After landing, 93 percent of Scott Kelly’s genes returned to normal, the researchers found. The altered 7 percent, however, could indicate long-term changes in genes connected to the immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, oxygen deprivation and elevated carbon dioxide levels.

The Telegraph headline reads, “Nasa astronaut twins Scott and Mark Kelly no longer genetically identical after space trip.” The article states:

But new findings by Nasa have found that life away from planet Earth has exacted a surprising toll. The pair are no longer genetically identical twins.

Please understand that both of these articles are doing what is typical of the modern media when it comes to science. They are taking results that are really, really interesting, and they are hyping the results to the point where they are not telling the truth anymore. NASA did do a wonderful experiment on the genetic effects of being in space a long time, and while the results are quite remarkable, they don’t indicate that space changes a person’s genes. They indicate that space changes the expression of certain genes, and for some, that change is remarkably long-lived.

Continue reading “NASA’s Study Indicates Space Changes GENE EXPRESSION, not GENES!”