Sen. David Vitter, R-La., earmarked $100,000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties.

The earmark appears to be the latest salvo in a decades-long battle over science education in Louisiana, in which some Christian groups have opposed the teaching of evolution and, more recently, have pushed to have it prominently labeled as a theory with other alternatives presented. Educators and others have decried the movement as a backdoor effort to inject religious teachings into the classroom. Source

This is so sad. First off, the Constitution says that the government shall not favor any religion, and by allowing the teaching of Creationist Theory, they are doing exactly that. They should also label Intelligent Design as a theory based on faith and not a theory in scientific terms. It has no scientific backing, whereas evolution is something that is seen all throughout nature over and over with data to back it up. Secondly, if they want to show other theories, then they must include all, including the theory of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Scientology, and others. Not everyone has the same creationist theory that Christians have and by including their’s and not that of other religions they are stepping on the Constitution, something that is already being done by giving your tax money to religious groups to promote their religion to begin with. It seems the Constitution no longer matters. *sigh*

“Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals ‘could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.’ Moreover, ‘the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry… as a flip-flopper.’”

Very interesting. I think we all knew some of this though. That’s why Conservatives are unable to accept things such as gay marriage, religious tolerance (didn’t Jesus preach love for everyone?), the planet being more than 6000 years old, etc.

New research published in the journal Nature (19 July) has proved the single origin of humans theory by combining studies of global genetic variations in humans with skull measurements across the world. The research, at the University of Cambridge and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), represents a final blow for supporters of a multiple origins of humans theory.

Watch out Creationists. Your beliefs are crumbling under the weight of scientific proof by the second.

Competing theories on the origins of anatomically modern humans claim that either humans originated from a single point in Africa and migrated across the world, or different populations independently evolved from homo erectus to home sapiens in different areas.

The Cambridge researchers studied genetic diversity of human populations around the world and measurements of over 6,000 skulls from across the globe in academic collections. Their research knocks down one of the last arguments in favour of multiple origins. The new findings show that a loss in genetic diversity the further a population is from Africa is mirrored by a loss in variation in physical attributes. Read more

“The Register is reporting that the UK government has stated there is no place in the science curriculum for Intelligent Design and that it can not be taught as science. ‘The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programs of study and should not be taught as science.’” via slashdot

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

“No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said. read more…

Amazing. I never knew whales could live that long. Very interesting stuff. Found the article via Slashdot

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The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years, astronomers said on Monday.

By tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 110,000 miles an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole.

Black holes are drains in space that have gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Huge ones are believed to lurk at the centers of many galaxies including the Milky Way, which contains the sun.

“It would take 200,000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey,” Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

No one has ever seen a black hole, but astronomers study the way matter and energy behave around them.

An international team led by Fathi studied the black hole at the middle of NGC1097, a behemoth with 100 million times the mass of the sun.

The team managed to observe behavior 10 times closer to the black hole than ever before, Fathi said, seeing clouds of material within 10 light-years of the galactic core, where the black hole is believed to reside.

Previous research has detected gas clouds from 100 to 1,000 light-years from the galaxy’s heart.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The galaxy is about 47 million light-years away from Earth, relatively close in cosmic terms. Yahoo! News

The anointing oil used by Jesus and his disciples contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since been identified as cannabis extract, according to an article by Chris Bennett in the drugs magazine, High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner? The incense used by Jesus in ceremonies also contained a cannabis extract, suggests Mr Bennett, who quotes scholars to back his claims.

“There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion,” Carl Ruck, professor of classical mythology at Boston University said.

Referring to the existence of cannabis in anointing oils used in ceremonies, he added: “Obviously the easy availability and long-established tradition of cannabis in early Judaism _ would inevitably have included it in the [Christian] mixtures.”

Mr Bennett suggests those anointed with the oils used by Jesus were “literally drenched in this potent mixture _ Although most modern people choose to smoke or eat pot, when its active ingredients are transferred into an oil-based carrier, it can also be absorbed through the skin”.

Quoting the New Testament, Mr Bennett argues that Jesus anointed his disciples with the oil and encouraged them to do the same with other followers. This could have been responsible for healing eye and skin diseases referred to in the Gospels.

“If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil _ and receiving this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ,” Mr Bennett concludes. Source: Guardian Unlimited

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.

Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.” Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is — and is not.

In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.

“It’s a major finding in a very sensitive area,” said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. “Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep.”

The work raises a raft of new questions — not least of which is why white skin caught on so thoroughly in northern climes once it arose. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates.

The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races.

Several sociologists and others said they feared that such revelations might wrongly overshadow the prevailing finding of genetics over the past 10 years: that the number of DNA differences between races is tiny compared with the range of genetic diversity found within any single racial group.

Even study leader Keith Cheng said he was at first uncomfortable talking about the new work, fearing that the finding of such a clear genetic difference between people of African and European ancestries might reawaken discredited assertions of other purported inborn differences between races — the most long-standing and inflammatory of those being intelligence.

“I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different,” Cheng said.

The discovery, described in today’s issue of the journal Science, was an unexpected outgrowth of studies Cheng and his colleagues were conducting on inch-long zebra fish, which are popular research tools for geneticists and developmental biologists. Having identified a gene that, when mutated, interferes with its ability to make its characteristic black stripes, the team scanned human DNA databases to see if a similar gene resides in people.

To their surprise, they found virtually identical pigment-building genes in humans, chickens, dogs, cows and many others species, an indication of its biological value.

They got a bigger surprise when they looked in a new database comparing the genomes of four of the world’s major racial groups. That showed that whites with northern and western European ancestry have a mutated version of the gene.

Skin color is a reflection of the amount and distribution of the pigment melanin, which in humans protects against damaging ultraviolet rays but in other species is also used for camouflage or other purposes. The mutation that deprives zebra fish of their stripes blocks the creation of a protein whose job is to move charged atoms across cell membranes, an obscure process that is crucial to the accumulation of melanin inside cells.

Humans of European descent, Cheng’s team found, bear a slightly different mutation that hobbles the same protein with similar effect. The defect does not affect melanin deposition in other parts of the body, including the hair and eyes, whose tints are under the control of other genes.

A few genes have previously been associated with human pigment disorders — most notably those that, when mutated, lead to albinism, an extreme form of pigment loss. But the newly found glitch is the first found to play a role in the formation of “normal” white skin. The Penn State team calculates that the gene, known as slc24a5, is responsible for about one-third of the pigment loss that made black skin white. A few other as-yet-unidentified mutated genes apparently account for the rest.

Although precise dating is impossible, several scientists speculated on the basis of its spread and variation that the mutation arose between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. That would be consistent with research showing that a wave of ancestral humans migrated northward and eastward out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.

Unlike most mutations, this one quickly overwhelmed its ancestral version, at least in Europe, suggesting it had a real benefit. Many scientists suspect that benefit has to do with vitamin D, made in the body with the help of sunlight and critical to proper bone development.

Sun intensity is great enough in equatorial regions that the vitamin can still be made in dark-skinned people despite the ultraviolet shielding effects of melanin. In the north, where sunlight is less intense and cold weather demands that more clothing be worn, melanin’s ultraviolet shielding became a liability, the thinking goes.

Today that solar requirement is largely irrelevant because many foods are supplemented with vitamin D.

Some scientists said they suspect that white skin’s rapid rise to genetic dominance may also be the product of “sexual selection,” a phenomenon of evolutionary biology in which almost any new and showy trait in a healthy individual can become highly prized by those seeking mates, perhaps because it provides evidence of genetic innovativeness.

Cheng and co-worker Victor A. Canfield said their discovery could have practical spinoffs. A gene so crucial to the buildup of melanin in the skin might be a good target for new drugs against melanoma, for example, a cancer of melanin cells in which slc24a5 works overtime.

But they and others agreed that, for better or worse, the finding’s most immediate impact may be an escalating debate about the meaning of race.

Recent revelations that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical has proved that race has almost no biological validity. Yet geneticists’ claims that race is a phony construct have not rung true to many nonscientists — and understandably so, said Vivian Ota Wang of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda.

“You may tell people that race isn’t real and doesn’t matter, but they can’t catch a cab,” Ota Wang said. “So unless we take that into account it makes us sound crazy.” Washington Post

The stars are so distant that they cannot be seen directly using telescopes, but their presence has been inferred from glimmers on infra-red radiation. A team led by Alexander Kashlinsky picked out the signature of the cluster from the cosmic infra-red background (CIB), a glow of radiation. The team measured the CIB, and created an image by removing the contributions made by other stars and galaxies. Times Online

A researcher in Africa has finally spotted the rare white giraffe that he’s been seeking for twelve years, and he’s got a photograph to prove it.

Charles Foley, a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researcher, first heard rumors of the white giraffe in 1993 when he was working in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park doing research on savanna elephants.

Intrigued, Foley set out to find the animal, but by the next year, the sightings had stopped coming in.

“I assumed it had died, either at the hand of man or best,” he said. “I never stopped looking though.”

Foley’s persistence paid off this summer. While conducting a routine aerial survey of a group of the park’s elephants, he spotted a white speck in the distance.

“I looked … blinked … looked again … and it was still there,” Foley said.

Foley told his pilot to make another pass over the spot and managed to snap a photograph of the white giraffe just as they flew over the trees.

“The proof is there to see — a mostly white giraffe with small dark blotches on its body,” Foley said. “Only the bottom half of its legs were the more traditional brown color.”

Foley doubts the giraffe he photographed is the same giraffe sighted in 1993, and that it is probably not a pure albino animal. Albino animals lack the pigments that give their skin color.

Rather, Foley thinks the giraffe was probably just lighter than normal. Source:MSNBC

The skull of the skeleton found on the bank of the Columbia River nine years ago shares common characteristics with other “paleo-Indians” of North America, said David Hunt, physical anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, who pieced together the skull for the first time.

“You can tell when it fits exactly,” he said of the ancient three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “I could just feel it.”

But that finding alone raises more questions about various theories of how the Americas were populated, said Douglas Owsley, also a forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian and leader of the scientific team.

“He’s of a line we weren’t expecting,” he said. “What was a simple model is not right. He shows the complexity.”

At this point, scientists aren’t prepared to say more than that.

“He could be somebody locally born and raised, or he could be an immigrant himself,” Owsley said.

Kennewick Man, who was found with a spearhead embedded in his hip, has been at the center of a mystery about his origins and a controversy over what to do with him since his discovery in 1996. Several Northwest tribes, including the Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Colville, claimed him as an ancestor and asked to rebury the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

A few months later, scientists sued to block the reburial and petitioned for the right to study the rare skeleton.

In 2002, a federal court ruled that the bones could be studied, a decision that was upheld two years later.

So far, the long-sought investigation has raised more questions than it’s answered. Even Kennewick Man’s age — both biological and archaeological — are up in the air. He was originally believed to have been in his mid-40s when he died about 9,300 years ago. Scientists are now hedging that.

The bones have been judged to be 8,400 radiocarbon years (which are not the same as calendar years), but with a range of 2,600, which Owsley said was unacceptably broad. Scientists plan to redate the bones to narrow the age.

And regarding his chronological age at the time of his death from undisclosed causes, Owsley was circumspect.

“We may be inclined to modify that,” he said, but wouldn’t elaborate.

There are a few things they know for sure, however. A sophisticated CT scan used to measure and reconstruct models of the bone fragments helped show which way the spearhead entered the man’s hip bone.

But they’re not telling — yet.

The spearhead lodged in his hip appeared to be a healed injury, Owsley said, although there is still debate over whether it was an active site of infection.

“I do know when (the spear) hit he knew it,” Owsley said. “It was sheared off at the tip, and you can see the base is broken where he grabbed it and twisted it off.”

And the man likely had other misadventures.

Hugh Berryman, a consulting forensic anthropologist who works for crime labs in Tennessee, is an expert on bone fractures caused by everything from gunshots to gravity.

His job was to sort out which fractures in the skeleton came from the pressure of being buried in the earth and then eroding out of the bank of the river, and which happened during Kennewick Man’s life.

There do appear to be some fractures that occurred when he was alive, Berryman said.

The team, which has spent nearly every waking hour at the Burke Museum in Seattle looking at, analyzing and talking about the bones for the past two weeks, was elated over the details that were emerging.

Dozens of variables, from the pattern of algae deposits to fine water abrasion, rodent nibbling and sediment deposits, were duly noted and factored into the story of the bones.

“We have had our days where we spent the whole day on a single bone,” Owsley said.

“Our primary goal was to have a very exact inventory of the bones,” he said. The decomposing skeleton, broken into nearly 400 pieces, had many fragments that hadn’t yet been described and cataloged.

All the data from the first phase of the inquiry will be compiled into a report this fall and passed along to a second team of scientists who will begin their examination of the bones early next year.

The second phase will try to determine finer details such as whether he was intentionally buried or died accidentally and was covered in silt where he fell.

A third phase of study will try to determine characteristics such as “robusticity,” physical size and where and how the Kennewick Man was “muscled up,” Owsley said. That information could lead to clues about his lifestyle and activities.

“The bone records its own history,” Berryman said. “This is like a rare book. We’re reading a page at a time.”

Source