Milk Drinking by Fossils

Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

Science reports the following:

“One trait that is unique to mammals is milk suckling. Suckling requires the presence of stability and motion in the throat, both of which require a complex hyoid apparatus. Zhou et al. describe a mammaliform docodontan fossil from the Jurassic that was preserved with a nearly intact hyoid.”

The abstract of the reports says this:

“ We report a new Jurassic docodontan mammaliaform found in China that is preserved with the hyoid bones. Its basihyal, ceratohyal, epihyal, and thyrohyal bones have mobile joints and are arranged in a saddle-shaped configuration, as in the mobile linkage of the hyoid apparatus of extant mammals.”

It is different from cynodonts, that are not mammals, so according to evolutionists it must have been surprise, leading to mammal’s ancestors.

This is just a Darwinian story, devoid of all true evidence.

Source:

Zhou, Chang-Fu et. al 2019. New Jurassic mammaliaform sheds light on early evolution of mammal-like hyoid bones. Science 365, 6450, 276-279. (19 July).

Secularist Think That Tiny Pebbles May Be the Reason Most Planets Spin in The Same Direction

Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

A new article in New Scientist says that it has been a mystery why planets spin the same way as their stars do, This, it says, is contrary to the standard evolutionary model.

However, if posits: The standard model of planetary growth states that planets coalesce from giant rocks that are kilometres across.

Here’s their answer:

“Models of that process result in planets that barely spin at all because similar amounts of boulders hit the fledgling planet from all sides. “

Now, how could you get similar amounts of boulders hitting all planets from all sides? that is still a problem for the standard model.

Planet-formation theories have been challenged or killed by recent finds.



Source:


Crane, Leah. 2019. Tiny pebbles may be the reason most planets spin in the same direction. New Scientist.

Elephants Store More Carbon by Destroying Smaller Plants

Image courtesy of Amoghavarsha JS, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

Elephants do a lot to keep us from the summer’s heat. An article in New Scientist says:

“Elephants do a lot of damage to plants as they stomp around the jungle, but, counterintuitively, this activity increases the biomass of the forest, letting it store more carbon.

If elephants were to go extinct, the amount of carbon stored in central African rainforests could ultimately fall by 7 per cent, according to a new analysis."


So, plant trees and let elephants roam the savannas and forests.

Source:

Wong, Sam. 2019. Elephants help forests store more carbon by destroying smaller plants New Scientist (15 July).

Beavers Help Moose and Otters

Image courtesy of Cszmurlo, Cc By-Sa 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

Beavers are known to clean polluted waters. Some evolutionists assume that a beaver could be the whale ancestor.

Nature is not necessarily red in tooth and claw. Even in the post-Fall world, we can see glimpses of peace, co-operation and goodness that defy naïve Darwinian explanations.

Here’s now New Science writes about beavers:

"A whole host of different mammals appear to benefit from having beavers in the area. In forests where beavers have been introduced in Finland, their presence is linked to increased activity of several species, including moose, otters, and weasels.

Beavers are described as 'ecosystem engineers' because their dam-building work has such a huge effect on habitats. Both the Eurasian beaver and the American beaver were almost driven extinct by hunting in the early 20th century, but they have since recovered in North America."

Source:

Wong, Sam. 2019. Beavers engineer their ecosystems in a way that helps moose and otters. New Scientist (5 July).

The Men Who Took The Bible to The Moon

Ed Mitchell on the Moon. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Last year, Science Daily had an interesting news item on the men who took the bible to the Moon.

"A rare, miniature Bible that travelled on board NASA's Apollo 14 mission in 1971 is up for auction, with bidding — currently underway — starting at $50,000.

Along with the microform King James Bible, which is mounted and framed in a gold-and-enamel setting, the auction lot includes two certificates of authenticity. One document was signed by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, verifying that the Bible made a lunar landing; the other was signed by the Rev. John M. Stout, a NASA information scientist and the director of the Apollo Prayer League (APL), which organized the moon visits of this and other lunar Bibles.

In 1971, Mitchell carried 100 Bibles to the moon's surface. Only 11 copies of the Apollo 14 lunar Bibles bear letters of authenticity signed by both Mitchell and Stout, and of those, seven copies remain in circulation, NSA representatives wrote in the catalogue."

The plan commerorates apollo 1 Astronault Edward White, "who wanted to bring a Bible to the moon but never made it there. White died when a fire ignited during a launch rehearsal on Jan. 27, 1967; the blaze also claimed the lives of two other astronauts, Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Roger Chaffee."

"Not all of the spacebound Bibles made it back to Earth. One paper copy of a Bible with a red cover — brought to the moon on the Apollo 15 mission — still rests on an abandoned Lunar Roving Vehicle dashboard, left by astronaut David Scott."

It also seems that the Bibles brought on the Apollo capsules had to do with the well-being of the crew.

So it seems that the bible-believing astronauts had a lot in common with the one who originally took the bible to the moon or to its nearabouts.


Source:

Weisberger, Mindy. 2018. Rare 'Lunar Bible' That Visited the Moon Is Up for Auction, Live Science (24.8.)

Astronauts who worshipped God

Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Now, when 50 years have passed on the firsts moon landing. Here are some of the first creationist astronauts.

In December 1968 Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders orbited the moon. They read the first ten verses of Genesis as a Christmas greeting to the inhabitants of ”the good earth”:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

Dr. Wernher von Braun (1912 –1977), the father of the Apollo programme, was also a Bible-believing Christian.

Then there was Buzz Aldrin, who after the landing celebrated communion for himself, as an antitheist had spoken of the reading by the Apollo 8 of creation. He also read Psalm 8:3-4 on the return trip.

Charlie Duke, capsule communicator for Apollo 11, spoke to Armstrong and Aldrin from Houston during the tense moments of the moon landing. He later walked on the moon himself during Apollo 16 in April 1972. Duke and his wife had been nominal Christians, but years after Apollo, he followed his wife in full commitment to Christ.

Apollo 15 astronaut creation James Irwin in the November 2013 issue of Acts and Facts. Irwin, who spent over 295 hours on the Moon, was a firm believer in the Genesis account of creation.

Many times he said that Jesus walking on Earth was far more important than mankind walking on the Moon.

Cockatoo Proves Rock Transcends Species

Image courtesy of Irena Schulz, Fair Use.




Joel Kontinen

“Birds of a feather flock together, but this cockatoo rocks alone. A new study reveals that the internet-famous cockatoo named Snowball can do more than just bust moves — whether headbanging, wildly tapping its foot or gyrating its mohawked head — in sync with the beat of the music. The parrot creates his own steps as well.” Snowball surprised the researchers again. "

Aniruddh Patel, a professor of psychology at Tufts University in Massachusetts did some tests with snowball in 2009.

“’ After that study, we noticed him doing new movements to music that we hadn't seen before,’ Patel, said. These new moves were Snowball's own creations; they weren't modeled after any cavorting from his owner, Irena Schulz, nor was he trained (for instance, no food rewards were involved) as he came up with this new repertoire, Patel said.”

The study was published online on July 8 in the journal Current Biology.

Cockatoos are a hard case for evolutionists. They are
better tool users than chimps and can make music with a stick, something that chimps don't. Playing rock is just one of their many achievements.


Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019. Cockatoo Who Taught Self to Head-Bang Proves Rock Transcends Species. Live Science (8 July).

Ravioli Starfish Makes Your Mouth Water

Image courtesy of NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Windows to the Deep 2019.



Joel Kontinen

A dive by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's recent expedition to the deep Atlantic Ocean produced a photo of a ravioli-type organism. The Plinthaster dentatus looked just like ravioli.

The starfish, that for evolutionists is a living fossil – they came into being during the Cambrian Period – and they testify of Creation’s After Its Kind thesis mentioned in the book of Genesis.

Their skills baffle scientists and they inspire bioengineering and robotics.

They are wonderfully made.

Source:

Whitcomb, Isobel. 2018. Don't Be Confused If This Starfish Makes Your Mouth Water. Live Science. (15 July).

Why Haven’t All Primates Turned Into Humans, Evolutionists Ask?

Image courtesy of Thomas Lersch, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

Biology has taken a non-Darwinian turn. Now, they are asking whether all primates have evolved into humans. This is a case of predestination against which some scientist say we should refrain from.

Even Darwinian just so stories are full of goal-orientation and teleology.

It seems that the problems evolution is facing are not about to disappear anytime soon.

As a story in live science says,

"While we were migrating around the globe, inventing agriculture and visiting the moon, chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — stayed in the trees, where they ate fruit and hunted monkeys.

Modern chimps have been around for longer than modern humans have (less than 1 million years compared to 300,000 for Homo sapiens, according to the most recent estimates), but we've been on separate evolutionary paths for 6 million or 7 million years. If we think of chimps as our cousins, our last common ancestor is like a great, great grandmother with only two living descendants."

Then comes the result:

"The reason other primates aren't evolving into humans is that they're doing just fine," Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. All primates alive today, including mountain gorillas in Uganda, howler monkeys in the Americas, and lemurs in Madagascar, have proven that they can thrive in their natural habitats."

The article also takes about ants, who have excel in things we don’t. And they are successful. And it takes on the message of why our primates left the trees. however, it speaks of goal-orientation and predestination!

Source:

Currin, Grant. 2019, Why Haven't All Primates Evolved into Humans? Live Science (14 July).

Sparrow from Dinosaur Times

Image courtesy of Zhongda Zhang / Current Biology.




Joel Kontinen

Current Biology has published data on one of the “first” case of a sparrow. It was dated at 99 million years ago.

However According to a Science articles, all Burmese dates entombed in amber rely on a single date.This is something that the researchers should thing about. Nonetheless, for instance National Geographic had this to say:

“One of these ancient fliers might resemble a modern sparrow—except for its bizarrely long toes, an adaptation never before seen in any bird, living or dead.

The newly described bird, Elektorornis chenguangi, was found entombed within less than six grams of amber, scientists report today.”

Yes, a sparrow was found in the age of the dinosaurs. It looked like a sparrow, and it probably also acted like one.

They claim that the region from where the fossil was found “was home to coastal forests full of trees that oozed tree resin.”

I would say that it speaks more of Noah’s Flood. It has left reminiscences everywhere, for instance the Heavitree Gap in Australia.

Source:

Greshko, Michael. 2019: Ancient bird foot found in amber has bizarrely long toes. National Geographic (12 July).

Don't Sing To Your Flowers

Trees sleep at night.




Joel Kontinen

Do not sing to your flowers. A new study says that plants don’t have emotions.

“Plant science biology is complex and fascinating, but it differs so greatly from that of animals that so-called evidence of plants' intelligence is intriguing but inconclusive, the scientists wrote.” says Mindy Weisberger in live science, article.

She also shows that the shows that the scientist in a new study are grumpy.

She interviewed the lead study author Lincoln Taiz, a professor emeritus of molecular, cell and developmental biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, who said .that since 2006, some researchers have claimed that plants possess neuron-like cells that interact with hormones and neurotransmitters, forming "a plant nervous system, analogous to that in animals."

The new research on plant biology is threat to the tree’s talking, as some researchers have said, And we know that some plants and the Venus flytrap knows how to count.

Yes, plants aren’t animals – but they do have all sorts of tricks.

The study was published online on July 3 in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

Source:

Weisberger, Mindy. 2019. Don't Waste Your Emotions on Plants, They Have No Feelings. Grumpy Scientists Say. Live Science (10 July).

Unusually Large “2-Billion-Year-Old Microbe” Fossils Reveal Clues About Our Ancient World

Image courtesy of Andrea Corpolongo, Fair Use.




Joel Kontinen

Not all fossils are big remains of dinosaurs. Some of them are tiny blobs that most scientist say would be cyanobacteria that evolutionists are hailing as the first true organism of any kind:

“Scientists recently discovered some of these blobs in the form of 2.5-billion-year-old fossils of primitive bacteria. These ancient microbes are likely cyanobacteria, but they are unusually large and have weird shapes protruding from them, said Andrew Czaja, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, who presented his findings on Wednesday (June 26) at the Astrobiology Science Conference.”

“If these fossils really are cyanobacteria, they could be some of the primitive organisms, or their ancestors, that helped transform our atmosphere by pumping it with oxygen. But not everyone is convinced.”

"The newly discovered fossils come from a period 100 million to 200 million years before the Great Oxidation Event — when our atmosphere went from having no oxygen to having a little bit."

Evolutionists "agree that "This is a very important time in Earth's history, both in terms of the evolution of the Earth but also the evolution of life," Czaja told Live Science..”

While in south Africa, he saw a “cool-looking rock, called a stromatolite, which is made up of layers of limestone and sediments left behind by cyanobacteria.”

He brought them home to tell his students. . after which “Andrea Corpolongo, a doctoral student also at the University of Cincinnati, then began to analyse the rock under a microscope. The fossils turned out to be hollow spheres made of an organic compound called kerogen. Some of those spheres were oblong and some had weird protrusions coming off them.”

However, some of the cyanobacteria are bigger than the ones we find today.

Anyhow, if the fossils are genuine, it shows that the living fossils are a to reason to doubt evolution, and if they’ve not, so we have a better reason to doubt want Darwin said.

Source:

Saplakoglu,, Yasemin. 2019. Unusually Large 2-Billion-Year-Old Microbe Fossils Reveal Clues About Our Ancient World. Live Science (4 July).

The Weirdest Stars Leave Astronomers Baffled

Image courtesy of NASA/IPAC, WISE/Dr. Dennis Bogdan, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Some exoplanets are weird. And some have become even weirder.

“A pair of stars about 360 light years away experienced 28 dips in their light over the course of 87 days, measurements that would normally indicate an orbiting system of planets – except that the timings of the dips seem totally random. Astronomers are completely stumped.”

They first thought aliens were the result of this.

“The stars, collectively called HD 139139, were spotted behaving strangely by the Kepler space telescope before it ran out of fuel and ceased observations. Kepler hunted exoplanets by watching for regular decreases in stars’ light caused by a planet passing between the star and the telescope on its orbit. These passes are called transits.

The dips in HD 139139’s light look just like transits, all similar in size and shape, but when Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues took a closer look at the data, they found that their timings seemed totally random – the researchers calculated that no more than four of the dips could be caused by the same orbiting object.

Then Leah Crane put some of her alien reading skills into the picture. She claims “variations might be caused by a huge alien structure that has been constructed around the stars.”

However, Vanderburg and his colleague Osborn think it’s not. They say that we might easily put something we can’t explain to be achieved by aliens until a reason or two for saying in wasn’t them after all.

This has happened in the quest for exoplanets. Complex life might require a very narrow habitable zone.

Some sightings will tend to be become failures and some will even define how we could interpret planet formation theories, For instance, hot exoplanets challenge planet-formation theories.

What is obvious is that Earth is a unique planet, just like Genesis said. Some astronomers are willing to admit that there’s no place like home in the entire universe.

Source:

Crane. Leah. 2019. The weirdest stars we've ever seen have astronomers utterly baffled. New Scientist (2 July).

Panspermia Can’t Solve the Origin of Life Hypothesis

Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

“Samples of a particular group of primitive meteorites — including a large one that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — all contain cyanide, bound in a stable configuration with iron and carbon monoxide. These same sorts of structures are found in enzymes called hydrogenases in modern bacteria and archaea, which could suggest that early life either borrowed from meteorites or that early Earth's geology formed the same kind of cyanide compounds, said study co-author Michael Callahan, an analytical chemist Boise State University.”

“The cyanide seems to have survived billions of years in space and a fiery trip to rest in icy Antarctica because it was bound up in a stable configuration with carbon monoxide and iron. ‘It's this really classical inorganic chemistry,’ Callahan said.”

“Callahan and his colleagues reported their work June 25 in the journal Nature Communications.

Naturalistic origin of life research has always been a more or less messy affair. The problem with their origin of life scenes is always the same: they don’t work.

This is can’t have happened here so they think it might have happened somewhere else. but introducing a comet in 1969. This is clearly panspermia, or the view that life evolved from somewhere else.

The problem with this is the thing that somewhere life has to be made, just making the the universe do the trick only make matters difficult for researchers, as they have to fathom where it all started.

And we know that the universe is guided by reason and it is intelligently designed. God says it happened here, so why cannot we just believe His words?

Source:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2019. Cyanide-Laced Meteorites May Have Seeded Earth's First Life. Live Science (28 June).

First Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Probably Isn't an Alien Spacecraft, Scientists Conclude

,

Image courtesy of ESO/M Kornmesser, nagualdesign, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

In 2o18, Harvard's Avi Loeb suggested that 'Oumuamua was an alien spacecraft.

It was first thought to be a comet. However, 'Oumuamua “is cigar-shaped, measuring about 200 metres in length (650 feet) and 34 metres wide (114 feet), and rotates once every seven hours. It was also found to be accelerating instead of slowing down—a discovery that was difficult to explain.”

Now, “a study published in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers has concluded 'Oumuamua has a ‘purely natural origin,’ and that a host of natural phenomena can explain it.”

Sometimes, scientists view of the universe might be wrong. More and more space signals have turn to be false.

Almost all signals caused by interstellar signals have been false.


Source:

Osborne, Hannah. 2019. First Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Probably Isn't an Alien Spacecraft, Scientists Conclude. Newsweek (1 July).