December 31, 2006 - January 6, 2007 Archives
Titan Has Liquid Lakes, Scientists Report in Nature Jan. 3, 2007 (Source: JPL)
Liquid Lakes on Titan The existence of oceans or lakes of liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan was predicted more than 20 years ago. But with a dense haze preventing a closer look it has not been possible to confirm their presence. Until the Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, that is.
Scientists report definitive evidence of the presence of lakes filled with liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan in this week’s journal Nature cover story.
Radar imaging data from a July 22, 2006, flyby provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid on Titan today. A new false-color radar view gives a taste of what Cassini saw. Some highlights of the article follow below.
Here's some happy news for all you warriors against creationism: Mark Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that wonderfully indispensable and entirely portable version of the Index to Creationist Claims, can now be purchased in paperback for less than $15. It was previously only available in a rather pricey but but extremely well bound edition. Next time you attend a talk by Ken Ham or Duane Gish or any of the common-as-dirt wandering creationists (or Kent Hovind, once they let him out of jail*), you'll want a copy of this with you—teach them to fear the power of well-referenced and clear answers to their crazy objections.
*Say, do you think we ought to take up a collection and buy a copy for the prison library?
You can catch Tangled Bank #70 at ¡Viva La Evolución!
Today, the Baltimore Sun has the first detailed news article on Russia’s 21st-century Scopes Monkey Trial. It comes complete with monkeys:
The Shraibers announced their plans for the lawsuit at a March news conference that featured free bananas. In July, when they mailed the paperwork to court, they were accompanied by an actor in a monkey suit - a stunt since dubbed “stupid” by Romanov, who asked that the monkey not come near him.
It’s a new year, and it will be a busy one here in Iowa when it comes to evolutionary biology. I want to highlight two upcoming events: Iowa City’s first annual Darwin Day celebration featuring a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci, and an upcoming symposium on evolution and intelligent design, featuring John Haught and Wesley Elsberry. These events will be held in February and March, respectively; more information on both of them can be found over at Aetiology. Hope to see some readers there!
In 1988, Purvis et al proposed an interesting hypothesis about silent mutations:
Purvis IJ, Bettany AJ, Santiago TC, Coggins JR, Duncan K, Eason R, Brown AJ. The efficiency of folding of some proteins is increased by controlled rates of translation in vivo. A hypothesis. J Mol Biol. 1987 Jan 20;193(2):413-7.
We propose that the way in which some proteins fold is affected by the rates at which regions of their polypeptide chains are translated in vivo. Furthermore, we suggest that their gene sequences have evolved to control the rate of translational elongation such that the synthesis of defined portions of their polypeptide chains is separated temporally. We stress that many proteins are capable of folding efficiently into their native conformations without the help of differential translation rates. For these proteins the amino acid sequence does indeed contain all the information needed for the polypeptide chain to fold correctly (even in vitro, after denaturation). However, other proteins clearly do not fold efficiently into their native conformation in vitro. We argue that the efficiency of folding of these problematic proteins in vivo may be improved by controlled synthesis of the nascent polypeptide.
The Sternberg saga continues, spurred by this podcast by the DI’s Rob Crowther. They’re still flogging this silly claim that the NCSE was “spying on” Sternberg; in fact, all they were doing was trying to find out whether he was in league with Meyer and the DI to surreptitiously get Meyer’s substandard and inappropriate article published (and of course, the evidence clearly suggests exactly that). I love the way they’re spinning this - it’s “spying” to do the same sorts of google searches that, I’m sure, DI employees do every single day. They use that word “spying” quite intentionally, of course; it evokes just the right sinister image of men lurking in the shadows and planting bugs in your house.
Continue reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: "It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history." Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader's appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore "gaps" in the fossil record.
The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase's reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don't know what I mean, here's a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.
Continue reading "Science and the National Park Service: a festering problem" (on Pharyngula)
The promise of the administration of the National Park Service (NPS) to conduct a high-level review of its policy of selling the creationist book, “Grand Canyon: A Different View”, has gone unfulfilled for three years. A press release from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) takes aim at the near-terminal foot-dragging of the ideology-driven NPS administration in Washington D.C. A three-year promise of this sort is well past its sell date.
Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Here’s a thought for a New Year’s Resolution for the NPS administration: do the review and clear up this issue.
The well-known liberal rag the National Review has a column from John Derbyshire on Kitzmiller plus one year. It’s worth a read:
Those of you who have been watching the blogs over the last few days know that a kerfluffle has gone on about Richard Dawkins’s position on religion and religious freedom. Basically, Dawkins signed this scary-sounding petition, it was linked from the Official Richard Dawkins website, an ID blog that likes to think the worst about Dawkins freaked out, Ed Brayton freaked out because the plain reading of the petition (to American ears; see below) seemed anti-civil liberties, then PZ Myers freaked out in reaction to Ed, etc., etc. PZ did helpfully get some clarification from Dawkins, who then retracted his signature of the petition, but the disavowal didn’t cover the issues of whether or not the government should prevent parents from giving their children religious instruction, leading to yet more thinking of the worst on the ID blogs and yet more confusion in the comments on the blogs of PZ and Ed.
Well, I know that it is far more fun to spend endless threads bickering about what Richard Dawkins probably meant and whether or not it is good or evil, but as PZ noted, it really is better to email the guy. We can’t blame Ed for not doing so, because the petition had a clear meaning on its face. But it seemed to me that the problem was that the petition meant very different things in British vs. American contexts. I sent my hypothesis to Dawkins and he has confirmed it; I comment a bit more at the bottom.
