SHOVELMONKEY'S TEST PIT

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

"Monkey see, monkey do?". May 30, 2005: The evolution/creationism controversy was featured on the May 27, 2005, installment of The Journal Editorial Report, a news and discussion program featuring members of The Wall Street Journal's editorial staff that airs weekly on PBS stations across the country.

The segment began in Dover, Pennsylvania, where the ... [National Center for Science Education]

This kinda of thing just gets my "panties" in a wad! This Report has the same old thing that is always put forward by the ID'ers. There is Eugene Scott fighting the good fight and trying to keep these religous wack jobs out of the science classes on one side. The other side is the ID'ers lawyer who probably knows as much about Evolution and Science as our "Dear" President.
There is no scientific backing for ID, it is bad science! Let the children learn science in the classroom and religion at church or home.

comment [] 6:54:26 PM

Preservation Halls

Wood rots readily, and so even though itís been used for construction around the world and through the ages, almost every wooden building ever made has eventually disappeared. But Heather McKillop, an anthropologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and a team of snorkelers recently discovered an important exception: a group of twenty-three hardwood and palm-wood buildings that are still partly intact after some 1,400 years. Embedded in mangrove peat on the floor of a huge lagoon off the coast of Belize, they are the first ancient wooden buildings ever found in the Mayaís homeland.
The wood in the buildings dates to between a.d. 600 and 900, when grand Mayan cities such as Palenque and Tikal flourished in the area. At the time, the lagoonís buildings were on dry land; a subsequent rise in sea level transformed the site into mangrove forest. The mangrovesí water-logged roots decayed into peat, and the peatís acidity and lack of oxygen kept the wood from rotting.
What went on in all those buildings, and at some twenty other nearby sites discovered by the snorkelers, was salt making on a grand scale. Local entrepreneurs apparently boiled seawater or brine (seawater made saltier by being poured through salt-saturated soil) in standardized ceramic pots, packed the salt residue into their canoes, and paddled upriver to the inland, salt-deprived cities of the Yucat·n Peninsula. Other desirable goodsóseafood, stingray spines for ritual bloodletting, conch shells for use as hornsówere transported inland from other sites.
In addition to hundreds of wooden posts, which demarcated both exterior walls and interior rooms, ceramics were found in great abundance in the lagoon. One large wooden paddle buried in the peat has also been recoveredóthe first one ever found, though identical paddles are depicted in ancient Mayan art. (Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences 102:5630ñ34, 2005) Natural History Magazine, June 2005.

óS. R.

Strike, Counterstrike
Poison can be a formidable weaponóparticularly if itís 10,000 times more lethal than cyanide. Tetrodotoxin, the substance in pufferfish organs that may be Japanese cuisineís biggest thrill, turns up in other animals, tooóamong them the rough-skinned newt. This newt, a resident of the American West, has the stuff in its skin, which acts as an excellent deterrent to predators.

But some populations of garter snakes eat the newt willingly. How is that possible? Shana L. Geffeney, a biologist at Utah State University in Logan, and several colleagues say just a few key mutations in one garter-snake gene are enough to do the trick. Tetrodotoxin kills by paralyzing its victims. It worms its way into a hole in a protein expressed in the membrane of muscle cells that control contraction. There the poison blocks the movement of sodium into the cells. If the sodium canít move, the muscles canít contract. In the poison-tolerant snakes, however, the protein differs from the one in vulnerable snakes by only a few amino acids. Thatís enough to thwart the tetrodotoxin and keep the muscles goingóuntil either prey or predator evolves a new weapon. (Nature 434:759ñ63, 2005) Natural History Magazine, June 2005.

comment [] 6:43:58 PM