In the News

Jeffrey Tomkins writes that...New surprises revealing complex bio-engineering keep emerging as evolutionary scientists continue to unwittingly obey the biblical command to "observe the ant"(Proverbs 6:6; 30:25). The latest bio-engineering discovery is that a key component of ant colony survival is based on sound (acoustic) communication systems.

One of the long-standing paradigms of animal communication is the use of airborne chemical messages called pheromones. Ants use pheromones to leave chemical trails that can be followed by other members and to also identify which nest an ant is from, along with its social status in the colony. Now, scientists can add yet another layer of complexity and communication in ant colonies based on acoustics.

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ScienceDaily reports that...A team of researchers at UC San Francisco has uncovered the neurological basis of speech motor control, the complex coordinated activity of tiny brain regions that controls our lips, jaw, tongue and larynx as we speak.

Described this week in the journal Nature, the work has potential implications for developing computer-brain interfaces for artificial speech communication and for the treatment of speech disorders. It also sheds light on an ability that is unique to humans among living creatures but poorly understood.

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Truly, DNA is a remarkable information storage medium. One naturally wonders whether the clear intelligent design implications of this project crossed the minds of the paper's authors. In terms of efficiency, DNA far surpasses any current man-made technology and can last for thousands of years. To get a handle on this, consider that 1 petabyte is equivalent to 1 million gigabytes of information storage. This paper reports an information storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram.

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ENV reports...To see is to believe. There is something very powerful, cutting through endless words and arguments, about seeing a clearly designed molecular mechanism at work.

When Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell in 2009, he also narrated and released a companion animation, Journey Inside the Cell, showing how the digital information in DNA directs protein synthesis inside the cell. Produced by Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, the animation offered a unique look at the evidence for intelligent design found in biological nanomachines and has since received more than 445,000 views on YouTube. Because of the video's phenomenal success, the CSC has now launched a sequel animation, freely viewable on YouTube. This one allows viewers to tour an amazing molecular machine known as ATP synthase.

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In The Guardian, Paul Davies writes on the origin of life...The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped. But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.

The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically life - friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.

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Most of the deleterious mutations in the human population arose in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, a survey claims.

According to a study published Jan. 10 in Nature by geneticists from 4 universities including Harvard, "Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants." By recent they mean really recent on evolutionary timescales.

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On ID the Future, Dr. Donald L. Ewert continues to explain why the vertebrate adaptive immune system does not use "random" or "chance" processes like Darwinian evolution to generate antibody diversity. Instead, he argues that the immune system is intelligently designed. Listen in as Dr. Ewert shares one of the most interesting stories in science, the generation of antibody diversity.

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In The Dove, John West speaks on the beliefs of C.S. Lewis.

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ScienceDaily reports that...scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, CA, have identified a critical component of this ear-to-brain conversion - a protein called TMHS. This protein is a component of the so-called mechanotransduction channels in the ear, which convert the signals from mechanical sound waves into electrical impulses transmitted to the nervous system. Scientists have been trying for decades to identify the proteins that form mechanotransduction channels.

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Amazing how the trinity of time, mutation, and selection came up with this!

As reported in ScienceDaily...
Caenorhabditis elegans - tiny, translucent worms with just 302 neurons - have long been studied to understand how a whole nervous system is capable of translating sensory input into motion and behavior.

New research conducted by the laboratory of Aravi Samuel in the Harvard Physics Department and the Center for Brain Sciences, however, is uncovering surprising sophistication in the individual neurons of the worms' "simple" nervous system.

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Is any living being really "simple".