What Makes Bone So Strong?

Even this electron microscope image of hydroxyapatite crystals in bone doesn't reveal its amazing secret.
(Public domain image)
Bone is a truly incredible substance. It is as strong as steel but at as light as aluminum. Not only is it strong, but it is surprisingly flexible as well. As is the case with most things God made, human technology cannot come close to producing something with bone’s amazing properties. Consider, for example, the work of Antoni Tomsia at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He and his colleagues are trying to artificially produce something with the characteristics of bone, but they simply cannot come up with anything as elegant and sophisticated as bone. He says:

People want a strong, light, and porous material, which is almost a contradiction in terms, but nature does it…Bone is made from calcium phosphate and collagen, which are both extremely weak. But nature mixes them together at room temperature and without toxic chemical [sic] to create something that is very tough — this fascinates us.

What makes bone so special? The short answer is that we don’t really know. However, we are learning. For quite some time now we have known that bone is a mixture of many things, principal among them a protein called collagen and a calcium compound called hydroxyapatite. The collagen gives bone its flexibility, while the hydroxyapatite gives bone its strength.

However, the hydroxyapatite in bone is stronger than hydroxyapatite made in the lab. Why? It has to do with the size of the crystals. When hydroxyapatite is made artificially, the individual crystals that form are very large. In bone, the crystals are very small, on the order of 3 billionths of a meter long. These nanocrystals have long been thought to be the reason that hydroxyapatite in bone is so strong. However, scientists haven’t been able to understand why the nanocrystals stay so small in bone.

Now Klaus Schmidt-Rohr and his colleagues might just have figured that part out!

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Bacteria That Cause Tooth Decay….Good for you?

A human mouth infected with thrush.
(Image in the public domain)
You are looking at the inside of a person’s mouth. I know…the picture is gross. However, sometimes science is gross. You just have to get used to it. In my opinion, the science is well worth the gross picture. What makes this picture more gross than most pictures of a person’s mouth is that this mouth is infected with a yeast called Candida albicans. That’s what is causing the yellow gook you see in the mouth. This infection, commonly called thrush, is not very serious. Of course, it’s not very pleasant, either.

Interestingly enough, the yeast in question is called a dimorphic fungus. This means it can exist in one of two forms. It can exist as a collection of individual yeast cells, or it can grow threadlike structures called hyphae. These hyphae clump together to form a fungal body called a mycelium, which is what you are looking at in the gross picture above. The microscopic photo below shows you both forms of Candida albicans.

Candida Albicans in both forms. Click image for credit.

So if you have Candida albicans in your mouth, you won’t have thrush as long as the cells don’t form hyphae. If they stay in their yeast cell form, your mouth won’t look like the picture above. The interesting question, of course, is what keeps them from forming the hyphae?

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“Conserved DNA” and “Useful DNA” – An Evolutionary Predicament

As I have stated before, naturalistic evolutionists are forced to have a very simplistic view of life. Since they cannot accept that life was designed by an incredibly intelligent designer, they are forced to look at life through a ridiculously simplistic lens. This produces all sorts of problems for them. One of the more recent ones involves the amount of DNA that is “conserved” in class Mammalia.

For those who don’t know the term, “conserved DNA” is DNA that is similar across many different species. In the simplistic evolutionary view, DNA that is very important will be very similar in many different organisms, because important DNA cannot change very much. As Tina Hesman Saey writes in Science News1

About 7 percent of the human genome is similar to the DNA of other mammals, said Arend Sidow of Stanford University. Because it is similar, or “conserved,” geneticists assume this DNA is the most integral.

As Saey’s article indicates, this leaves Sidow to conclude that, “very little of the human genome is really necessary.” According to evolution, if only 7% of the human genome is conserved across all of class Mammalia, this indicates that most mammalian DNA was mutating freely, with very little constraint, during the long period of mammalian evolution. This, in turn, indicates that most mammalian DNA does little to affect the survivability of the mammal in question, and thus most mammalian DNA is not necessary. Indeed, the title of the article is, “Genome may be full of junk after all.”

Like most evolution-inspired ideas, however, this flies in the face of what science tells us about DNA.

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Still More Evidence That Babies in the Womb are Fully Human

A baby devloping in the womb (click for credit)
In a previous post, I noted that from a scientific point of view, it is quite clear that a baby developing in the womb is fully human. In fact, people who claim otherwise are forced to argue against science. This produces some really absurd ideas, such as Josh Rosenau’s claim that it is hard to distinguish between a baby developing in the womb and cancer!

Now even though I doubt that it will change the minds of the fervent pro-abortion crowd out there, it is important to communicate what science tells us about a baby developing in the womb. As I mentioned in the previous post linked above, not only does genetics tell us that from the moment of fertilization, a baby is 100% human, but recent studies also indicate that when given the opportunity, babies in the womb will socialize. This, of course, adds to the genetic evidence and confirms that babies in the womb are, indeed, fully human.

The newest thing science tells us is that parts of the brain that were thought not to develop until after a baby is born are actually well-developed in the womb. Interestingly enough, those parts of the brain are involved in the kinds of activities that make us…well…human.

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Debate on Vaccination Vanishes from Anti-Vaccination Website

On Monday, December 13th, I debated Dr. Boyd Haley on the question “Do Vaccines Cause Autism?” I took the scientific position, which is no. It was sponsored by the International Medical Council on Vaccination, which produces all sorts of anti-vaccine misinformation. Prior to December 13th, they publicized the debate heavily, and their website indicated that a recording of the debate would be posted after the debate was finished.

Interestingly enough, the recording was never posted on their website. Now something even more interesting has happened. Currently, there is absolutely no mention of the debate on their website at all. If you Google the word “debate” and restrict the domain to the International Medical Council on Vaccination’s website, you find several addresses where it was once mentioned:

www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2010/12/04/debate-on-vaccination/
www.vaccinationcouncil.org/tag/debate/
www.vaccinationcouncil.org/page/4/
www.vaccinationcouncil.org/page/2/

However, if you go to those addresses now, you get either an error message or a list of other articles. If you search for “debate” using the search box on the International Medical Council on Vaccination’s website, you find nothing related to the debate.

Does this surprise me? Not really. Does it disappoint you? If so, don’t worry. You can watch the debate here. (Thanks to Matt Fig for converting it to Youtube format.) Once you watch it, perhaps you will understand why such a heavily-promoted event has been wiped off the website of the group that hosted it!

NOTE: In addition to uploading the debate to Youtube, Matt Fig found the International Medical Council on Vaccination’s original post publicizing the debate:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101210075650/http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2010/12/04/debate-on-vaccination/

I Always Knew Cats Were More Elegant…

Cats have an elegant means of drinking. (Click for image credit)
I have always been a cat lover. It’s not that I don’t like dogs; I do. In fact, I have one friend who says his dog misses me for a while every time I leave his home. Nevertheless, when it comes to what pets I want to have in my home, cats win over dogs every time. I have always found cats more… well… elegant than dogs. Now, a new study confirms this is true, at least when it comes to how they drink.

Pedro M. Reis, the lead author of the study, was watching his cat (Cutta Cutta) drink one day. He knew that like dogs, cats cannot use their cheeks to suck in liquid. Thus, they must pull liquid into their mouths using their tongues. As he watched his cat, he wondered what physical mechanisms were at work. He thought surely someone had studied how cats drink water before, but the best thing he could find was a 1940 film called Quicker ‘n a Wink, which featured MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton.1 While it had some nice high-speed photography of a cat drinking, it didn’t really explore what was going on in terms of the physics involved. As a result, his team decided they would find out for themselves.

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You can watch the debate here

On Monday, December 13th, I debated Dr. Boyd Haley, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky, on the question “Do Vaccines Cause Autism?” I took the scientific position, which is that they do not. In my previous post on the subject, I noted that if you want to see the shoddy science promoted by those who believe that vaccines cause autism, you should watch the debate.

Well, despite the technical problems associated with the debate, I think it really did show how shoddy the science is on the anti-vaccination side. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can watch the debate yourself:

Click Here To Watch The Debate

Thanks to Matt Fig for converting it to Youtube format!

If you are having trouble viewing that file, here is a larger file that is not compressed. You shouldn’t need anything other than Windows Media Player to watch it.

Click here for the larger file

Why Are Asexual Animals Rare?

The Amazon Molly reproduces without any genetic contribution from a male (click for credit)
Most biology students know that there are two forms of reproduction: sexual and asexual. In sexual reproduction, the genome of the offspring is made from two contributors: the male parent and the female parent. In asexual reproduction, a single organism reproduces, and the offspring are genetically identical (barring any mutations) to the single parent. In general, bacteria reproduce asexually, while most animals and plants reproduce sexually. However, there are some animals that can reproduce asexually. Sea stars, hydra, and planarians are examples.

What most biology students don’t know is that there are examples of individual species of animals that reproduce asexually, even though other very similar animals reproduce sexually. Take, for example, the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), which is pictured above. It is thought that this species arose when a female Atlantic molly (P. mexicana) sexually reproduced with a male sailfin molly, (P. latipinna). While both the mother and the father (as well as all other members of the genus) reproduce sexually, the Amazon molly reproduces asexually. So when this interesting fish produces offspring, they are all genetically identical to the parent, except in certain rare instances, such as when mutations occur.

Now interestingly enough, there are a few forms of asexual reproduction in animals, and the one employed by the Amazon molly is called “gynogenesis.” In this form of asexual reproduction, a male is needed, but he contributes nothing to the genetics of the offspring. Essentially, the female produces eggs that have the full complement of genes (technically called a “diploid egg”), but they cannot begin development into offspring until they are stimulated by the presence of a male’s sperm. The problem, of course, is that all Amazon mollys are female. As a result, the Amazon molly “mates” with similar fishes, usually ones from the same genus.

One really interesting question related to all this is, “Why is it rare?” After all, sexual reproduction is annoying. You have to find a member of your own species that is the opposite gender. The Amazon molly’s form of asexual reproduction still requires a male, but it can be from a wide range of species. As a result, it is much easier for the Amazon molly to find a mate. Why, then, isn’t this kind of reproduction found very often in animals?

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The Faith of Some Evolutionists is Mind-Boggling

I just came across an article in the journal Science called “Irremediable Complexity?” 1 In the article, the authors describe an evolutionary idea called “constructive neutral evolution,” which was first proposed in 1993. The paper starts out stating something that is quite obvious:

Many of the cell’s macromolecular machines appear gratuitously complex, comprising more components than their basic functions seem to demand.

Of course the cell seems “gratuitously complex” to an evolutionist, since an evolutionist is forced to believe that everything found in cells (as well as the cells themselves) developed as a result of random processes acted on by natural selection. You would not expect amazingly complex things to be produced that way. Nevertheless, when you look at cells, you see all sorts of amazing complexity. Of course, those of us who understand science know that the cell’s machinery is not gratuitously complex. It is simply very well designed by a Designer who built a lot of adaptability and diversity into His creation.

The paper goes on to ask how we can understand such “gratuitous complexity” in light of evolution. The real answer is that you cannot. However, that’s not the answer an evolutionist likes, so the authors have to come up with something else. They quickly reject the widely-held adaptationist belief that the complexity is just the result of natural selection preserving any random changes that improve basic function. While they admit that this view can explain some of the simpler aspects of the cell, it clearly fails when discussing some of the really complex parts of the cell.

Their reasoning is quite valid, but their proposed solution takes even more faith to believe than the adaptationist view!

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Not So Fast, NASA

I recently commented on NASA’s paper regarding bacteria that can successfully incorporate arsenic into their biochemistry. Well, another blogger who has more expertise related to the paper has posted a very critical analysis. It is worth reading.

Essentially, the blogger believes that it is very possible the bacteria that lived in the arsenic-only cultures might have been scavenging phosphorous from others in the population that had died. As a result, the blogger is skeptical that arsenic was incorporated into the bacteria’s biochemistry to any meaningful extent.

The blogger is especially critical of the analysis claiming to have found arsenic incorporated into the bacteria’s DNA. He thinks the DNA-related data can be explained by contamination:

If this data was [sic] presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.

Based on the comments, it seems the blogger is sending a modified version of the post to Science as a letter to the editor. It will be interesting to see how the NASA group responds.