Australia gives asylum to five Iranian footballers after they did not salute the Iranian flag.
This blog discusses the historical reliability of the Bible, the creation/evolution debate and apologetics in general.
The advent of farming led to new evolutionary pressures on humans. Image courtesy of Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library
Joel Kontinen
An analysis
of ancient and modern DNA suggests the extent of convergent evolution in
different peoples around the world is even greater than we thought.
When did
humans really evolve according to Darwinism? According to the book of Genesis,
they started at the advent of humanity, but the evolution believing people have
a different view, supposing it was during the time man discovered farming.
A study combining the growing number of ancient genomes from living people has given us our best picture yet of how humans have evolved over the past 10,000 years or so. It shows that people in different parts of the world evolved in similar – and sometimes even identical – ways after we adopted farming.
“Some of the same traits and the same genes are under
selection in different populations,” says Laura Colbran at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Source:
Michael Le Page 2026
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Joel Kontinen
Billions of years ago Mars hosted lakes, streams and perhaps
even a huge ocean according to evolution believing scientists.
A remarkably hardy bacterium can survive pressures similar
to those generated when asteroid impacts blast debris off Mars, a new evolutionary
study has found.
The findings, published earlier this week in the journal PNAS Nexus, may prompt scientists to reconsider
where life could exist across the solar system and
could lead to a reassessment of "planetary
protection" rules designed to prevent contamination between worlds.
"Life might actually survive being ejected from one
planet and moving to another," study co-author Kaliat Ramesh, a mechanical
engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said. "This is a really
big deal that changes the way you think about the question of how life begins
and how
life began on Earth."
Researchers recently exposed the bacterium Deinococcus
radiodurans to the pressures experienced during an asteroid strike. The microbe
survived, suggesting that impacts could spread life from planet to
planet.
The new findings lend support to a long-debated theory known
as lithopanspermia,
which proposes that life
can spread between planets by hitching a ride on
fragments of rock blasted into space by massive impacts. The idea
remains unproven.
For the study, Ramesh and his colleagues tested the
endurance of Deinococcus radiodurans, an exceptionally resilient
bacterium found, among other places, in Chile's high-altitude deserts. With a
thick outer shell and a remarkable ability to repair its own DNA, D.
radiodurans is famously tolerant of intense radiation, freezing
temperatures, extreme dryness and other harsh conditions similar to those found
in space. It has been nicknamed "Conan the bacterium," after all.
To simulate the forces involved in an asteroid impact,
the researchers sandwiched samples of D. radiodurans between two
steel plates. Using a gas-powered gun, they fired a projectile at roughly 300
mph (480 kph), subjecting the microbes to pressures between 1 and 3
gigapascals.
Nearly all of the microbes survived impacts generating 1.4
gigapascals of pressure, while about 60% remained alive at 2.4 gigapascals. At
lower pressures, the cells showed no signs of damage, though researchers
observed ruptured membranes and some internal cellular damage at higher
pressures, the study reports.
"We continuously redefine the limits of life,"
Madhan Tirumalai, a microbiologist at the University of Houston who was not
involved with the new study, told The New York Times.
As the pressure increased, the researchers also detected
heightened activity in genes responsible for repairing DNA and maintaining cell
membranes.
"We expected it to be dead at that first
pressure," Lily Zhao, a mechanical engineer at JHU who led the experiment,
said in the statement. "We started shooting it faster and faster. We kept
trying to kill it, but it was really hard to kill."
The experiment eventually ended, the statement read, because
the steel structure holding the plates "fell apart before the bacteria
did."
This study
does not take the existence of a Creator as established. Only God can give life to planets such as Earth.
Source:
Sharmila Kuthunur 2026
Image courtesy of Christian Darkin/Science Photo Library
Joel Kontinen
The worst known mass extinction wiped out over 80 per cent
of marine species. But despite these huge losses, many ecosystems did not
collapse, with a variety of animals and even top predators managing to survive
the cataclysm.
The findings suggest that each ecosystem’s fate was
determined, in part, by its own unique mix of species. The same may be true of
modern marine ecosystems, which are also facing major threats from climate change.
The mass extinctions that evolutionists think are true,
never happened millions of years ago. Many creationists say that they happen ed
at the time of Noah’s flood, some 4,500
years ago.
Source:
Michael Marshall 2026
It will be Purim in Israel in a few days. In 400 BC during the event, the proud Haman tried to kill all Jews but Mordecai and Esther attempted to kill the Jews, and Haman and his sons were killed on the gallows he had designed for Mordecai.
Now, with
the death of Khamenei on Purim has been reached its goal. The suppressor of the Jews is no more.
Reconstruction of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis. Image courtesy of Gabriel Díaz Yantén, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.
Joel Kontinen
Not all dinosaurs were big, some were relatively small. They
weighed less than a small chicken.
The 95-million-year-old fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was
found at the La Buitrera site in northern Patagonia, Argentina, in 2014.
The first specimen of Alnashetri, found in 2012, was a
set of incomplete hindlimb bones, says Peter Makovicky at the
University of Minnesota, who was part of the study on the new fossil. With only
fragmentary remains, it was impossible to say more than that it was probably an Alvarezsaur. “We were not even sure if it was a juvenile or fully grown,” he
says.
“With a whole skeleton, we suddenly had all the information
to understand how Alnashetri was similar or differed from other
species, and a key to understanding how the unusual anatomy of Alvarezsaurs
evolved,” says Makovicky.
The new fossil has very long, slender hind limbs and
surprisingly long forelimbs that retain three well-developed fingers. Detailed
analysis of the fossil bones revealed the dinosaur was an adult and at least 4
years old.
Alvarezsaurs were once thought to be early ancestors of
birds. However, it is now clear that, while Alnashetri might have had
some superficial resemblance to a bird, it and all the Alvarezsaurs were, in
fact, non-avian theropods. “The new discovery certainly underscores this,” says
Mackovicky.
Some evolutionists think that dinosaurs have been descended from
birds.
Previously, it was thought that all the tiny alvarezsaurs
had very short, stout forelimbs with a large thumb but shrunken side digits,
and tiny teeth. Palaeontologists thought these anatomical features evolved
alongside their shrinking body size because they only ate ants and
termites, says Makovicky. “But Alnashetri does not fit that
mould – it is among the smaller Alvarezsaurs, but neither its teeth nor its
forelimbs are reduced, because it represents a much earlier branch on the Alvarezsaur evolutionary tree.”
In fact, its forearms are more typical of other Theropods
rather than a specialist ant-eater, he says. “Alnashetri is tiny but is
otherwise built like a more typical Theropod – given its small size, it
probably ate its fair share of invertebrates, but probably had a wider range of
prey.”
That means palaeontologists still don’t fully understand why
these dinosaurs became so small. “We’re left with only a vaguer sense that Alvarezsaurs were successful at occupying the niches of very small predators,”
says Mackovicky.
Source:
James
Woodford 2026
The Adorant figurine, approximately 38,000 years old, consists of a small, ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots. Image courtesy of Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0.
Joel Kontinen
Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of
writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first
writing system, cuneiform,
according to a study of mysterious signs engraved on figurines and other
artefacts found in Germany. If confirmed, this pushes back the emergence of a
proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years.
Ancient humans have long made deliberate marks on objects,
but some of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe
around 45,000 years ago took this to a new level. Many of the artefacts they
made, such as pendants, tools and figurines, were engraved with sequences of
graphic symbols such as lines, crosses and dots. These groups also painted
symbols on cave walls alongside depictions of animals, and the meaning
of these symbols has been contentious.
But if we think what actually happened so long ago, People have always been people,
According to Genesis, people
would try to write at the very beginning
of society.
Source:
Alison George 2026
A Romanesco broccoli. Image courtesy of Jon Sullivan. Joel Kontinen It is practically impossible to believe that some of the phenomen...