Pictures from Mars

Here is the first photo of the latest landing on Mars. They think this is the most likely spot to find life.

I don't know but I kinda prefer this Mars...







It doesn't look like something taken from Death Valley.

Young T-Rex's faced Killer Winged Lizards

Very upsetting news for T-Rex fans. Young T-Rex's were fed on by Pterodactyl-like creatures. Which unlike previously thought, walked around on land stalking their preyrather than skimming the ocean surface like gulls.

A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land.

Now one has to wonder what happened to the idea of feathers for dinosaurs...

Previously thought Extinct Turtle Discovered in Vietnam

Researchers from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo have discovered a rare giant turtle in northern Vietnam — a find that carries great scientific and cultural significance. Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle was previously thought to be extinct in the wild. Three other turtles of the species are in captivity, said experts from the Zoo's Asian turtle program.

Math Trouble

If the current temperature is 30 degrees... how is it possible for the Low today to be 40 degrees?

Butter vs. Margarine

I got this in one of those pass this email on to as many people as you know things.

Pass The Butter
~ ~ ~ ~ This is interesting ~ ~ ~ ~

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it?

They have come out with some clever new flavorings. Do you know the difference between margarine and butter?

Read on to the end...gets very interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories
Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.
Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the as me amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.
Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added.
Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less then 100 years.

And now, for Margarine..
Very high in Trans fatty acids
Triple risk of coronary heart disease.
Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
Lowers quality of breast milk.
Decreases immune response.
Decreases insulin response.
And here's the most disturbing fact....

HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.
This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).

You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded Area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: * no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)

* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperw are and spread that on your toast?

Dawkins vs. Lennox

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Emphasizing that science is always making progress, Dawkins staunchly stated that the "creative designer cannot be a satisfying explanation."

"It's tempting once again to import the easy facile idea of a designer and to say that the designer twittled the knobs of the universe and the big bang and got them exactly right," he said, alluding to the physical constants (numbers) physicists assume to derive the rest of their understanding of cosmology. If the numbers were even slightly different, we wouldn't exist, he said.

"But it seems to me to be manifestly obvious that that is a futile kind of explanation because as the quotation says 'who designed the Designer?' You have explained precisely nothing."

Which is what science has done with all of its theories concerning origins. Until science can move from absolute vacuum to a system of life, it explains nothing of origins. And that is impossible. Unless you want to start believing in magic. And I highly doubt anyone of science would want to do that. But how else can you explain the appearance of any material(living or unliving) where once there was nothing without a designer/creator?

Either the universe is eternal or it was created. Science says the universe had a beginning. Therefore it has to have a creator. It is simple logic.

And the Creator has no creator because he is outside the universe. Because something inside the created system really cannot be the cause of the system because it didn't exist prior. Otherwise if some piece of the created object existed prior to its creation you have to explain it. Otherwise, you're not dealing with origins.

With the Creator being outside the universe and time, he cannot be studied by science because science is by definition only able to study the natural world and universe because we are inside the created system. It cannot study the supernatural or what is outside the created system. Only the natural or what is inside the created system and any honest scientist will say as much. So demanding scientific evidence is an act of illogic since science by definition is incapable of studying outside the system so there can never be any scientifc evidence.

Scientists say Velociraptor had feathers

Link

A close study of a velociraptor forearm found in Mongolia shows the presence of quill knobs, bumps on the bone where the feathers anchor, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"Finding quill knobs on velociraptor ... means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove," Alan Turner

The velociraptor the researchers studied was about three feet tall and weighed about 30 pounds. The size of these animals was exaggerated in the movie.[Jurassic Park]

I find this interesting. Of course dinosaurs have fascinated me since I was in 2nd grade when they were introduced to me. Of course I had to then have a pet lizard because back then dinosaurs were thought to be large lizards. It was some type of lizard that was larger than a chameleon that was kept in an aquarium but it died after a few years and then I had chameleons. At one time I had three chameleons with one having a shorter tail because it was snapped off and it grew a new one only smaller.

But I'll just point out that the animals were not exaggerated in the movie. Raptors could grow to over 6 feet tall and that's about how tall I remember the Raptors being in Jurassic Park. After all they could go through doors and open doors. And I don't remember them towering over Grant.

The Big Bang Theory III

I wrote about the Big Bang Theory here and here and this is a continuation of it.

This is an illustration of exactly why the Big Bang Theory doesn't explain what people are really wanting to know about origins.

Someone walks into a computer room and plugs a disk that was sitting on the desk into the computer. He looks at the contents.

"Hey where is this disk from?"

"I found it in the drawer over there. It was pretty much unreadable."

"No who made it?"

"I did. I found it in the drawer and found that the disk was no longer readable by the computer so I reformatted it and started using it. I have no idea what was on it before."

"No who manufactured it? I wouldn't mind getting a few disks and I like it."

"I have no idea."

"Well you're a lot of help."

Now read the description of the Big Bang theory from the second link. When they say they don't know what came before the explosion, are they really answering what you want to know? They certainly aren't answering what I want to know.

In order to explain the beginnings of the universe, you have to start from nothing or a vacuum because if you're going to explain the beginnings of the universe you have to explain the beginnings of everything in the universe: chemicals, gases, ect. You cannot explain the beginnings of the universe by using something that exists in the universe. Science cannot do that so it cannot come up with a real theory that explains the origins of the universe.

Instead of admitting as much, they come up with a theory that "reformats" the universe that was already there and claims it explains the origins of the universe. But when you read their description you see that they do admit there was something there before but they cannot describe it because they have no way of knowing what was there before. Similar to a disk that has been reformatted. Unless you have a special tool that recovers lost disk fragments.

The Big Bang Theory II

Link

And another explanation:

About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What exisisted prior to this event is completely unknown and is a matter of pure speculation. This occurance was not a conventional explosion but rather an event filling all of space with all of the particles of the embryonic universe rushing away from each other. The Big Bang actually consisted of an explosion of space within itself unlike an explosion of a bomb were fragments are thrown outward. The galaxies were not all clumped together, but rather the Big Bang lay the foundations for the universe.

As I said at the end of the other post, without dealing with where the matter came from before the explosion, its a pretty poor explanation for the beginnings of the universe. The matter had to come from something. If the thing that caused the universe is part of the universe, then the theory is quite useless for explaining the origins.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been continuously expanding and, thus, there has been more and more distance between clusters of galaxies. This phenomenon of galaxies moving farther away from each other is known as the red shift. As light from distant galaxies approach earth there is an increase of space between earth and the galaxy, which leads to wavelengths being stretched.

In addition to the understanding of the velocity of galaxies emanating from a single point, there is further evidence for the Big Bang. In 1964, two astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, in an attempt to detect microwaves from outer space, inadvertently discovered a noise of extraterrestrial origin. The noise did not seem to emanate from one location but instead, it came from all directions at once. It became obvious that what they heard was radiation from the farthest reaches of the universe which had been left over from the Big Bang. This discovery of the radioactive aftermath of the initial explosion lent much credence to the Big Bang theory.

Even more recently, NASAs COBE satellite was able to detect cosmic microwaves eminating from the outer reaches of the universe. These microwaves were remarkably uniform which illustrated the homogenity of the early stages of the universe. However, the satillite also discovered that as the universe began to cool and was still expanding, small fluctuations began to exist due to temperature differences. These flucuatuations verified prior calculations of the possible cooling and development of the universe just fractions of a second after its creation. These fluctuations in the universe provided a more detailed description of the first moments after the Big Bang. They also helped to tell the story of the formation of galaxies which will be discussed in the next chapter.

The Big Bang theory provides a viable solution to one of the most pressing questions of all time. It is important to understand, however, that the theory itself is constantly being revised. As more observations are made and more research conducted, the Big Bang theory becomes more complete and our knowledge of the origins of the universe more substantial.

No it explains why the universe is expanding. Not how it was created.

The Big Bang Theory

Link

The link doesn't shy away from the holes that exist in the theory:

Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We don't know.

So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.

Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory

What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?
First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.
Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."

So one has to wonder how often things just appear out of thin air in the natural world and start expanding. Seems rather illogical to me that something will just appear without someone/thing forcing the issue.

Any discussion of the Big Bang theory would be incomplete without asking the question, what about God? This is because cosmogony (the study of the origin of the universe) is an area where science and theology meet. Creation was a supernatural event. That is, it took place outside of the natural realm. This fact begs the question: is there anything else which exists outside of the natural realm? Specifically, is there a master Architect out there? We know that this universe had a beginning. Was God the "First Cause"? We won't attempt to answer that question in this short article. We just ask the question

And it seems to me that without explaining the where it came from, the theory does a pretty bad job of explaining the universe's origins. It would sorta be like assuming a baby was formed as it entered the world from the womb instead of back when the sperm met the egg.

Preserved Woolly Mammoth found

Link

A young woolly mammoth calf was found perfectly preserved in the frozen Yamal Peninsula, north-west Siberia. It was between six months and a year old when it died and it appears that it had a run in with a predator since its tail was bitten off.

Its tail being bit off is its only defect.

It is possibly that they might try to clone from it. If they do, lets home this "Jurassic Park" doesn't have the disaster in the movie. (Like do background checks on their employees)

An interesting mystery

Link

A five acre lake in the southern Andes in Chile has simply disappeared. No one can figure out what happened. There was no earthquake that could have caused the bottom to open up and swallow the water.

A river that once flowed from the lake has turned into a crick.

Experts are being sent in to investigate.

I wonder what department acts as the Missing Lakes Bureau

5 foot tall Penguins

Link

At one time, there was five foot tall penguins living in the warm weather of Peru. They lived around 30 million years ago according to the scientists that found them. They had 7 inch beak.

This find has turned on its head the old theory that said that penguins did not approach the equator until roughtly 10 million years ago. This shows they have been living in the warmer climates for considerably longer. And this find dates to one of earth's warmest periods in its history.

Creationism vs. Evolution

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Inside the article it claims that Evolution is the idea that humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years. And it claims that creationism is the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

Why is it so hard to describe these two theories correctly?

Evolution is the idea that a population will adapt to the environment around them through changes in their gene structure from one generation to the next.

Creationism is the idea that God created the universe and everything in it and that the universe continues to function because he controls it.

It always drives me nuts when people do not describe the two theories accurately. And when you get right down to it, there really is no reason why both theories cannot be true.

Now if the article said the Theory of Human Evolution or Young Earth Creationism, then their descriptions would be accurate. But that's not what they were describing.