Pterosaurs Were Almost Too Heavy to Fly; Their Children Could Fly Since They Were Hatched

Image courtesy of Hugo Salais López, CC BY-SA 3.0.





Joel Kontinen

Pterosaurs ruled the skies at the time of the dinosaurs. Now a cache of them has been found in China.

“The extraordinary thing about those embryos is they have a set of bones that in many respects match those of adults in terms of proportions. When they come out of the egg, they are like mini-adults,” says David Unwin at the University of Leicester in the UK.

He and his colleague, Denis Charles Deeming at the University of Lincoln in the UK, analysed the size and shape of 37 eggs from a collection of 300 found at a site in Jinzhou, China. They found that as the eggs developed, they changed shape from long and slender to relatively round.

He and his colleague, Denis Charles Deeming at the University of Lincoln in the UK, analysed the size and shape of 37 eggs from a collection of 300 found at a site in Jinzhou, China. They found that as the eggs developed, they changed shape from long and slender to relatively round."

Pterosaurs were almost too heavy for evolution to cope with them. And the giraffe-sized flying creature defied Darwinian explanations. Moreover, a rapid burial of pterosaurs suggests Noah’s flood.

There is no shortage of mosaic-like creatures in the animal kingdom. The extinct ones include Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik.

Living mosaics, such as the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater, are problematic for evolution.

They are not evolving into something else, and neither did pterosaurs.

Source:

Whyte, Chelsea, 2019. Baby pterosaurs may have hatched ready to fly right out of the egg. New Scientist (12 June).

Neptune’s Moon Triton Looks Young, Too

Image courtesy of NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

Nowadays, the planets and their moons surrounding the Sun all seem to be very much less than the 4.5 billion years assigned for them on the scale that most scientist use to compute the age of them.

Now, this tendency has also reached Neptune's moon triton. A recent article in Phys.org about the moon says:

“Astronomers using the Gemini Observatory explore Neptune's largest moon Triton and observe, for the first time beyond the lab, an extraordinary union between carbon monoxide and nitrogen ices. The discovery offers insights into how this volatile mixture can transport material across the moon's surface via geysers, trigger seasonal atmospheric changes, and provide a context for conditions on other distant, icy worlds.

Extreme conditions can produce extreme results. In this case, it's the uncommon pairing of two common molecules—carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen (N2)—frozen as solid ices on Neptune's frigid moon Triton.

It is the only large moon in the Solar System that orbits ‘backwards’ or in the opposite direction to its planet's rotation. The peculiar motion suggests that Triton is a captured trans-Neptunian object from the Kuiper Belt—a region of leftovers from the Solar System's early history, which is why it shares several features with the dwarf planet Pluto and Eris: size (roughly two-thirds that of our Moon), and surface temperatures that hover near absolute zero; so low that common compounds we know as gases on Earth freeze into ices.”

The article does not say who old Triton is, but it only states that the two molecules – carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen (N2). – are frozen on the moon.

Even Pluto and Erin and Makemake are also young.

Moreover, a dwarf planet orbiting the sun some 2 billion kilometres beyond Pluto would have a ring that suggests young age.

And, Ultima Thule also looks youthful.

Source:

Gemini Observatory, 2019, Neptune's moon Triton fosters rare icy union. Phys.org. (22 May).

Humans Should Worry Us More Than Machines, Says Founding Father of AI

Image courtesy of Gnsin, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

“Yoshua Bengio is one of the pioneering developers of artificial intelligence and winner of computing’s ‘Nobel prize’. His optimism about machines doesn’t extend to humanity.

“OVER the past decade, machine intelligence has vastly improved. That is in large part due to deep learning, a technique that gives computers the ability to teach themselves. It underpins everything from world-beating chess and Go algorithms to digital voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.”

Some fear that the AI of the future will be like God. Elon Musk, for instance, has said that AI research will come up with AI Research will create an 'immortal dictator'.

Now, Yoshua Bengio says that humans should worry us more than machines. Humans make mistakes and this might be carried out to the AI world. So its humans, and aliens who make the mistake.


Source:


Revell, Timothy, 2019. Humans should worry us more than machines, says founding father of AI. New Scientist (5 June).

Noa Pothoven: Dutch Teenager Tragically Starves Herself to Death

Life ends with death.




Joel Kontinen

A Dutch teenager starves herself to death, without informing the parents of her decision.

Noa Pothoven’s death “was associated with profound psychological suffering after experiencing sexual abuse at ages 11 and 12 and a double rape when she was 14.”

She wanted to be euthanised – but she couldn’t, as she was under the age of 21, which is the legal limit for patients suffering from “serious dementia” to limit their lives, to euthanize herself, according to Dutch laws.

She wanted to die, the pain crushed her. “When the medical caretakers and family accepted medics and her family that the girl should ‘refrain from eating and drinking to hasten death,’ as the procedure is known in the Netherlands.”

So She died, refraining from eating and drinking. but not from euthanasia although Dutch doctors can kill patients suffering from it.

Can evolution explain suicide?

Who would think about the soul of the girl?

Source:

Smits, Jeanne. 2019, Dutch teenager tragically starves herself to death. Life Site News (6 June).

Birdman Decorated With 30 – 50 Bird Beaks and Skulls – Died in Siberia

Image courtesy of The Siberian Times.



Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists think that humans have come from humble beginnings to reach top society. However, science shows that even in the beginning, humans had the will to decorate themselves.

Recently, an iceman was found in Siberia:

"Archaeologists have unearthed a Bronze Age skeleton that was buried with an unusual garment: a collar or headdress made of dozens of bird beaks and skulls.

The so-called birdman's remains, which date to about 5,000 years ago, were discovered at the Ust-Tartas dig site in Siberia's Novosibirsk region, The Siberian Times reported.

The 30 to 50 bird skulls and long beaks were arranged underneath the human skull, "laid as if they meant to cover the neck like a collar," Lidia Kobeleva, a researcher with the Novosibirsk Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Siberia, told The Times in a video."

The iceman had company. a grave found nearby, with two children and an adult male.

Even the Neanderthals wanted to decorate themselves, and
other primitive societies were not so primitive at all. And also Stonehenge tells us that early man was cleverer than we thought.

Source:

Weisberger, Mindy. 2019. Bronze Age Siberian 'Birdman' Wore a Collar of Beaks and Skulls. Live Science (3 June).

Most Atheists Believe in The Supernatural, Despite Trusting Science, Says New Scientist

Image courtesy of: Zoe Margolis, CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

Do atheist belief in science that always shows what’s right. A recent New Scientist article might cause them harm.

“Belief in the supernatural is still alive and kicking, even among people who don’t believe in a god. Research on atheists and agnostics around the world has revealed that almost nobody can claim to completely reject irrational beliefs such as life after death, astrology, and the existence of a universal life-force.

The UK-based Understanding Unbelief project interviewed thousands of self-identified atheists and agnostics from six countries – Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, US and UK. It found that despite their godlessness, a majority believe in at least one supernatural phenomenon or entity.”

As David F. Coppedge writes in creation evolution headlines New Scientist asked for the opinions of two atheists: Marjaana Lindeman of the University of Helsinki in Finland, was surprised by the findings. The other one, Jonathan Lanman, an anthropologist at Queen’s University Belfast and one of the leaders of the Understanding Unbelief project said that Humans are not rational.

The study concluded that some believed in life after death; others believed in underlying forces of good and evil; and some believed in other non-physical influences.

For instance, Richard Dawkins says that in a debate with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, he described himself as an agnostic instead of an atheist. He said that the probability of God’s non-existence is 6.9 on a 7-point scale.

That would be 98.57 per cent. Expressed as a probability it would be 0.985714285.

The probability for winning the Finnish lottery this is 0.0000065. Thus, according to Dawkins’ logic, the probability that God exists is by far much greater that winning a few million euros in the lottery.

Moreover, even atheist believe that they are have lower morals than other people.

Could they also be wrong about the existence of God?

Source:

2019. Most atheists believe in the supernatural, despite trusting science. New Scientist (30 May).

Fish Showed Coordinated Group Behaviour at Least “50 Million Years” Ago

Image courtesy of Mizumoto et al./Proceedings of the Royal Society B.





Joel Kontinen

Fish of the species Erismatopterus levatus swam in unison, as modern fish do today.

These 259 baby fish were seen by Arizona researchers, who reported in it in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They thought that the fish probably originated from America's Green River Formation, where fish between "53 million and 48 million years ago" are thought to exist.

"’ We found traces of two rules for social interaction similar to those used by extant fishes: repulsion from close individuals and attraction towards neighbours at a distance,’ the researchers wrote in their study.”

This synchronized swimming might have saved the fish from a predator, although it did not prevent them from becoming a fossil for us to see.

They might have well perished in the flood of Noah’s Time, as the research shows that “have been cut short by an underwater avalanche of sand.“

There is much evidence for the flood in Australia for example and graveyards almost everywhere.

Source:

Specktor, Brandon. 2019. 50-Million-Year-Old Fossil Shows School of Baby Fish in Their Final Moments. Live Science (30 May).