Amazing discovery: Solar flares have an effect on radioactive decay

Solar flares can have an effect on radioactive decay. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Researchers usually assume that radioactive elements decay at a constant rate although some studies conducted in the past few years (read more here and here) throw a dark cloud over this view.

Last week Stanford University published an intriguing report on the effect of solar flares on the decay of radioactive elements. This new research challenges ingrained beliefs in the reliability of dating methods.

It all began at Purdue University, where a group of researchers was trying to use the decay rate of radioactive isotopes to generate random numbers. They soon found out that the decay rates were not as regular as they had assumed and that there were irregularities in research conducted in the field.

Then they discovered that silicon-32 and radium-226 decay slightly faster in winter than in summer. Peter Sturrock, emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford University, says: "Everyone thought it must be due to experimental mistakes, because we're all brought up to believe that decay rates are constant."

In December 2006 Jere Jenkins, a nuclear engineer at Purdue University, measured the decay rate of manganese-54 and found out that it dropped slightly about a day and a half before a solar flare.

Jenkins and Ephraim Fischbach, who studies random numbers at Purdue University, concluded that the Sun’s neutrinos have an effect on the decay rate.

Peter Sturrock, who studies ”the inner workings of the sun”, advised them to check previous research results on how the Sun’s rotation had an effect on the decay rate of radioactive elements measured on Earth. They found a clear 33-day cycle.

In other words: isotopes do not decay at a constant rate.

The discoveries at Purdue and Stanford could revolutionise our thinking about dating methods. Faith in millions of years might well weaken once people realise the significance and implications of the research results.

However, the ideological baggage associated with the idea of millions of years might cause some skeptics to reject the new discoveries like they initially refused to believe in the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaurs and carbon-14 in diamonds.

Source:

Stober, Jan. 2010. The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements. Stanford University News. (23 August).

A new monkey fable: Feel like crying? – Thank evolution, it’s good for us

These reptiles will hardly cry of sorrow.




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists have often pondered over the origin of laughter. However, they have not focused much on crying though they have attempted to find out why we cry.

Only humans are known to cry for emotional reasons.

Tears have an important function in keeping our eyes moist. Scientists who believe in Darwinian evolution have nevertheless wanted to associate crying with natural selection that would not have preserved this ability if it had not been beneficial to humans as a species.

Jesse Bering, a psychologist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Belfast University believes that ”those of our early ancestors who were most empathic probably thrived” since they were able to build strong communities in which crying could have been a powerful weapon. Crying signals both empathy and guilt and can according to Bering be a mechanism produced by evolution that helped to preserve strong social bonds.

Randy Cornelius, a psychologist at Vassar College, thinks that tears originated as an intraspecies communication method. ”There'd be a selection pressure to develop a signaling system that wouldn't let predators in on the fact that you're vulnerable," he says.

These kinds of stories do not have anything to do with empirical science and cannot be tested or falsified. They are nevertheless part and parcel of the Darwinian worldview in which storytelling plays a major role.


Source:

Aubrey, Allison. 2010. Teary-Eyed Evolution: Crying Serves A Purpose. NPR. (23 August).

Marks of Lucy’s stone tool found? Anthropologists disagree on old bones

Nature recently advertised the marks of the assumed stone tools of Australopithecus on its cover.




Joel Kontinen

Did Lucy use stone tools? Recently Nature published a letter that reported the discovery of bones in Ethiopia assumed to be approximately 3.4 million years old. Anthropologists think that they bear the marks of stone tools. They calculated the age of the bones from the volcanic ash in the region.

Shannon McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged and colleagues believe that the marks in the bones are evidence of the earliest use of stone tools. They assume that Australopithecus afarensis used the tools 800, 000 years before H. habilis learnt to make such implements.

Not all anthropologists agree with the interpretation of McPherron and Alemseged. Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times that the ”claims greatly outstrip the evidence”. Sileshi Semaw, a paleoanthropologist at Indiana University says that he is ”not convinced of the new discovery.” He goes on to say that trampling animals or other natural causes have often misled scientists in the past.

The researchers have not found any tools at or near the site where they discovered the bones so the debate has to do with the cause of the marks. No evolutionist will publicly admit that H. sapiens could have used the tools to carve up Australopithecus since they do not believe that modern man had evolved at the time.

For the same reason they still believe that Lucy left the Laetoli footprints.

The most logical solution to the dilemma would be to admit that Lucy could not have been capable of using stone tools and that faulty assumptions behind dating methods have led them astray.


Sources:

McPherron, Shannon P. & al. 2010. Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia. Nature 466:7308, 857-860.

Wilford, John Noble. 2010. Lucy’s Kin Carved Up a Meaty Meal, Scientists Say. The New York Times (11 August).

The resurrection of a dead gene?

Juan de Flandes: Resurrection of Lazarus. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Some evolutionists believe in a rather different kind of resurrection.




Joel Kontinen

Recently, the New York Times featured an interesting resurrection story, embedded into a Darwinian wordview that otherwise basically denies the supernatural. Gina Kolata writes:

”The human genome is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years — the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk. Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. This is the first time, geneticists say, that they have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.”

She was referring to a paper published in Science that discussed the origin of Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD). The NYT version of what the paper says is considerably more vivid than the matter-or-fact reporting in Science.

The belief in the resurrection of dead genes stems from the view that humans are full of vestigial organs and our genome is mostly made up of junk, leftovers from a Darwinian process.

When Darwinian biologists found that most sections of our DNA did not code for proteins, they assumed that they were junk. However, when they learned more about these introns, some were ready to change their minds.

In 2003 Scientific American quoted John Mattick, a molecular biologist at the University of Queensland, who stated that the failure to recognize the importance of introns ”may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” He went on to say: ”What was damned as junk because it was not understood may, in fact, turn out to be the very basis of human complexity.”

Recently, Nature also admitted that junk DNA is a misnomer.

The idea of a resurrected gene is based not on science but on Darwinian mythology.

Sources:

Gibbs, Wayt W. 2003. The unseen genome: gems among the junk. Scientific American 289:5, 26–33 (November 2003).

Kolata, Gina. 2010. Reanimated ‘Junk’ DNA Is Found to Cause Disease. The New York Times (19 August). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/science/20gene.html?_r=3&hp

Lemmers, Richard J. L. F. & al. 2010. A Unifying Genetic Model for Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy. Science 329: 5994. (20 August) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1189044v1

The New York Times on bizarre science blogs

Science blogs that bow to Charles Darwin deal with many subjects but rarely with science. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

If we assume that science blogs deal with science, we will probably be mistaken, The New York Times suggests.

The newspaper is hardly known for its conservative views so that its article on science blogs is quite a surprise.

Already the title of Virginia Heffernan’s article, Unnatural Science, might tell us something of its content.

Heffernan read some well-known science blogs and discovered that the scientists and other people who write them hardly ever focused on writing about science. PZ Myers, who has acclaimed notoriety for being a feisty defender of atheism, for instance chooses to insult those who do not share his godless worldview.

Myers’ views of the Eucharist celebration in the Roman Catholic Church or the assumed child marriage of the prophet Muhammed are by far more egregious than the Danish cartoon featuring Muhammed that raised blood pressure in Muslim countries a few years ago.

It is rather difficult to understand how anyone could promote scientific knowledge by insulting Muslims, for instance, but perhaps ”science blogs” have a logic of their own.

Often these blogs use science as a smoke screen for attacking those who do not bow to Charles Darwin.

The Scientific American newsletter lends support to Ms. Heffernan’s thesis. Almost all its columnists and writers are atheists/free thinkers/skeptics, who seem to have a hard time trying to understand why most people reject their worldview.


Source:

Heffernan, Virginia. 2010. Unnatural Science. The New York Times. (30 July).

Scientific American: Doubting evolution is dangerous!

Joel Kontinen



It might be dangerous to read this blog, at least according to Scientific American. The popular science magazine laments that so few Americans (45%) believe in Darwinian evolution.

In a recent survey published in Science and conducted by the National Science Board, only 45 per cent of the respondents affirmed that modern man has evolved from an animal. In addition, only 33 per cent said they believed in the Big Bang.

The danger that Scientific American refers to has not decreased in the past few years. Previous surveys have given similar results in the USA, United Kingdom and elsewhere. There are far more Darwin doubters than atheists, humanists and other ”free thinkers” would like.

This is not strange since reality, all the way from the tiny nano motors in a cell, looks like it has been designed.


Source:

Krauss, Lawrence M. 2010. Faith and Foolishness: When Religious Beliefs Become Dangerous. Scientific American (August).

A journey inside a cell

Joel Kontinen

Protein synthesis is not the product of chance but the digital information coded in DNA directs it. This brief video produced by the Discovery Institute shows that the cell has been designed to function intelligently.



The apostle Paul wrote in Romans (1:20), ”God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”