Earth Grows Gems In Minutes

Brazilian emerald. Image courtesy of Madereugeneandrew,, CC BY-SA 4.0

Joel Kontinen  

This is just another blow on millions of years. Evolutionists used to believe that gems took a long time to grow. However, a new study by Rice University published online in Nature Communications says that they can form quicker.

“The research by Patrick Phelps, Rice's Cin-Ty Lee and Southern California geologist Douglas Morton attempts to answer a question that has long vexed mineralogists: How can such large crystals be in pegmatites?”

“Aquamarine, emerald, garnet, zircon and topaz are but a few of the crystalline minerals found mostly in pegmatites, veinlike formations that commonly contain both large crystals and hard-to-find elements like tantalum and niobium. Another common find is lithium, a vital component of electric car batteries.”

Yes, the research supports the Genesis timeline of events.

Source:

Boyd, Jade, 2020, Earth grows fine gems in minutes. Phys.org 6 October.

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President Trump Praises Miracles From God For His Recovery

 

Image courtesy of The Independent.

Joel Kontinen

 On Saturday night, President Trump  released a video from Walter Reed Hospital where he is being treated for COVID-19. In the video, the visibly tired President referred to his treatments as “miracles coming down from God.”

 He began by praising the doctors, nurses at the Walter Reed Medical Centre And Then He Turned To God,

”People criticize me when I say that but we have things happening that look like they’re miracles coming down from God so I just want to tell you that I’m starting to feel good.”

Source: 

Berkowitz, Adam Eliyahu On national televisi on Trump Praises ‘Miracles From God’ Israel 365 News 4 October

 

Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced into the wild in mainland Australia

Mike Lehmann, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joel Kontinen

Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced into the wild in mainland Australia for the first time in 3,000 years.

Conservation groups released 26 of the mammals into a large sanctuary in Barrington Tops, north of Sydney.

It's thought that packs of dingoes helped eradicate them on the mainland.

There are still some on the island state of Tasmania but their numbers have dwindled over the past two decades.

 The Tasmanian devil, classified as endangered, gets its name from its high-pitch squeal and is renowned for fighting over access to animal carcases, which it grinds with the bone-crushing force of its jaws.

Animal experts say they pose no threat to humans or agriculture.

 Conservation group Aussie Ark worked with other animal groups to release the Tasmanian devils into the 1,000-acre fenced sanctuary. The animals have been placed in the sanctuary to help keep their chances of survival high. They have no supplied food, water or shelter.

The first group of 15 were released in March. After the animals showed signs of thriving in their environment, a further 11 were released in September.

Young, healthy Tasmanian devils were selected in the hope they would be ready for breeding season, set to begin in February.

"They're free. They're out there," Tim Faulkner, president of Aussie Ark, told National Geographic. "We've got some basic means of keeping an eye on them. But essentially, now it's over to the devils to do what they do."

Another 40 are set to be released into the sanctuary over the next two years.

Tasmanian devil

• Can live for more than five years in the wild, if they avoid catching cancer
• Males weigh up to 12kg, females up to 8kg
• Hearing is considered to be their strongest sense
• Devils have at least 11 distinct vocal calls
• They were given their name in 1803 when sailors reported "unearthly" calls

Over time, Aussie Ark hopes to release some Tasmanian devils into unfenced areas.

It's estimated that there are fewer than 25,000 devils in the wild in Tasmania. During the 1990s, there were as many as 150,000 but the animal population was hit by a deadly mouth cancer that drastically cut numbers.

 

The Tasmanian devil isn't the first animal to be reintroduced into the wild. In the 1990s, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the US after they were hunted to eradication. By 1996, 31 wolves had been introduced to the park. A count in 2019 found there are now 61 wolves in eight packs there.

In the UK, conservationists have taken part in a five-year trial to reintroduce beavers. During the trial, which concluded earlier this year, two families of beavers bred on the River Otter in Devon. The animals, once native to Britain, were hunted to extinction around 400 years ago.

 

Source:

BBC News, Tasmanian Devils reintroduced into Australian wild.  BBC.com 5 October

The Search For Alien Life Is Getting Odd

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Kuva: NASA, Public Domain.

Joel Kontinen 

For evolutionists, hints of bacteria on Venus are encouraging, but finding life beyond Earth is the easy part. A new analysis suggests the evolution of human-like intelligence on another planet is more improbable than we like to imagine EARTH makes life look easy. 

Our home planet is teeming with some 9 million species, including at least one smart enough to contemplate intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe. We love to think it is out there – that we aren’t a one-off, alone in an unimaginably vast cosmos. But we haven’t yet observed a truly earth-like planet, with a big planet such as Jupiter to keep as save and a good-sized  moon that keeps  our planet ‘s ocean going. 

 A string of discoveries has boosted the idea that  extraterrestrial life might be abundant. 

The growing catalogue of exoplanets, many orbiting within the “habitable zone” of their host stars, points to seemingly ample real estate on which life might be found. Closer to home, subsurface oceans on icy moons in the outer solar system hint that some life-friendly conditions might be commonplace. And then there is last month’s discovery of phosphine in the poisonous atmosphere of Venus, which suggests life might flourish even in seemingly hostile places. 

However, evolutionists have forgotten a key idea for life on Earth - the moon.  Writing in Nature, 

Robin Canup states: “The Moon is large enough to stabilize our planet's rotation, holding Earth's polar axis steady to within a few degrees. Without it, the current Earth's tilt would vary chaotically by tens of degrees.” 

 It might be easy to imagine that intelligent life has evolved on at least one planet around one of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy. So easy, in fact, that we tend to assume, given the vastness of the visible universe, that there must be other technological civilisations out there. Yet we haven’t heard from them. Why? Because no one created it. In the absence of evidence from deep space, some astronomers have recently returned their focus to Earth – and the only example of intelligent life we have – for a fresh look at the question. What they found meshes with what biologists have been whispering for a while: that anyone expecting to hear from an alien civilisation should settle in for a long wait. 

Source:

Falk, Dan, 2020. Why we're in for a long wait to hear from intelligent aliens, New Scientist 30 September 

New Evidence Hurts Feathered Dinosaur Theory

Image courtesy of Elsevier Inc. Yosef Kiat, Amir Balaban, Nir Sapir, Jingmai Kathleen O’Connor, Min Wang, Xing Xu. Current Biology. Fair use doctrine.

 

Joel Kontinen

 

Is a dinosaur still a dinosaur if it has flight feathers? A new study points to some fascinating evidence that contradicts the idea of feathered dinosaurs and confirms created kinds.

 Genesis asserts that God created creatures to reproduce according to kinds. Evolution attacks this teaching by insisting that nature evolved creatures to reproduce between different kinds. Studies like this one that take birds with wings—and creatures that have bird-specific molt strategies like Microraptor —and name them as dinosaurs essentially erode confidence in the Bible’s very first chapter.

The article also  states that a bird called a Microraptor Tthat shed its wings 100 million years ago .

 It’s no secret that birds fly in order to, among other reasons, get food and avoid becoming food. For that, they must have their feathers arranged in good order. But feathers wear out. If birds replaced their feathers haphazardly, for example, too many feathers shed from one wing and not the other, then they would lose control in flight—with lethal consequences. Therefore, many flying birds molt—replace their feathers—in a specific sequence. New research has identified evidence of this sequential molting in a so-called “feathered dinosaur."

A team of Israeli and Chinese scientists published their technical results in Current Biology. After collecting wing molt data from over 300 birds, they found that “there is not a single flightless bird species that molts its primary feathers sequentially.”¹ Since these birds don’t need to fly, they have no need to replace vital flight feathers in an orderly way. So sequential molting is specific to flying (as opposed to running or swimming) birds.

The team also noted evidence for sequential molting in a fossil from China called r. In keeping with the technical literature and popular descriptions of this extinct creature, the study authors referred to it as a “feathered dinosaur." Microraptor flew uniquely, using four wings instead of just two—two wings up front, plus two small wings on each of its hind limbs. That doesn’t make it a dinosaur at all. Why not just call it a four-winged bird?

Clear and classic anatomy refutes this new wave of including birds among dinosaurs. All dinosaurs have an open hip socket. Birds don’t. For all we know, Microraptor  had a closed hip socket, unlike dinosaurs. It would be more thorough if researchers would focus on that important detail, but instead they focus on the Microraptor’s aspects that seem to resemble dinosaurs, like their long tails and teeth.

Microraptor presents an interesting, new feature. Fossil specimen IVPP V-13352 shows a clear gap between two primary flight feathers that looks just like the gap seen in modern flying birds that use sequential molting. This creature had bird-like feathers—even flight-specific feathers—to go with its flight-ready body shape. Now, researchers are saying that it molted like a flying bird. What else does one need to call it a bird instead of a reptile?

In other words: dinosaurs were dinosaurs and birds are birds.

 

Source:

Thomas, Brian. 2020.  New Evidence Hurts Feathered Dinosaur Theory,  ICR  org 9 September

Sahara Was Once Wet

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Joel Kontinen

The Sahara was once wet.

 

 “Sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, the Sahara Desert transformed. Green vegetation grew atop the sandy dunes and increased rainfall turned arid caverns into lakes. About 9 million square kilometers or 3.5 million square miles of Northern Africa turned green, drawing in animals such as hippos, antelopes, elephants and aurochs (wild ancestors of domesticated cattle), who feasted on its thriving grasses and shrubs. This lush paradise is long gone, but could it ever return? 

 

However, a much better explanation is the flood of  Noah’s time roughly 4,500 years ago

Evolutionist claim that” the Green Sahara, also known as the African Humid Period, was caused by the Earth's constantly changing orbital rotation around its axis, a pattern that repeats itself every 23,000 years, according to Kathleen Johnson, an associate professor of Earth systems at the University of California Irvine.

This is based on the faulty teachings  of  Milankovitch cycles(i.e. changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun), They are unable to explain why our planet would have had an ice age.

Source.

Coffey, Donavyn, 2020. Could the Sahara ever be green again.?  Live Science  28 September

 

Leftist Want To Divide America

 

Image Courtesy Of Values Voter Summit / screen grab.

 

Joel Kontinen

 Dr. Ben Carson has been a Trump supporter for ages. Now, it a speech in Washington, he considered how leftists are trying to divide America.

 Dr. Ben Carson said that despite the astonishing progress made in race relations during his lifetime, people are being divided during this election season in every way possible in order to create chaos as a means to force change.   

Dr. Carson this election season, everything is race and, obviously, it’s being manipulated along those lines, said Dr. Carson, the Trump Administration’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, at the Sept. 24 Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. 

“In order to create the kind of chaos that’s necessary to make people want a change, you divide them,” said Carson.  “You divide them in every way you possibly can, by race, by gender, by age, by income, and you see that happening.” 

“We, the American people, are not each other’s enemies,” he declared, “and if you really were to sit most people down side by side and start talking about a lot of issues, you would find for the vast majority of people you agree on probably 90% of stuff.”  

“But what they want to do is they take the 10% that you don’t agree on and they just try to foment that into the biggest thing in the world and keep throwing it in front of your face night after night, day after day,” he explained of the leftist-induced destructive urban civil unrest that has rocked the country in recent months.  

“Look at corporate America —you know how they kind of fall in line and submit to Black Lives Matter and whoever else is holding the big stick over their head,” said Carson.  

“Well, guess what?  If people of faith and people of principle begin to stand up for what they believe in, they will also start catering to them,” he asserted.

For the nation to move forward, “People of faith really need to ask themselves, what do they believe?” said Carson. 

In particular,

“Do you believe … , in killing babies? Is that consistent with your faith

“Do you believe in destroying someone else’s livelihood because you disagree with them?  Is that something that’s consistent with your faith?”  

“Do you believe in calling people nasty names and making their lives difficult?  Is that the kind of love that the Bible tells us about?”

“We say we are one nation under God, and the real question is, is that true?” he continued.  “And are we a nation of faith?”  

“Do we believe in godly principles of loving your fellow man and caring about your neighbour and, you know, developing your God-given talents to the utmost so that you become valuable to people around you having values and principles that guide your life?” he asked.  

So, if these things are not rectified America will go the way every other nation that has rejected God.

Source: Mainwaring.Doug  2020.   Life Site News 25 September