Live Science Features the Eiffel Tower but Fails to Disclose the Inspiration Behind Its Structure: Our Thighbone

Image courtesy of Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

Biomimicry or copying design features seen in living organisms has become a lucrative research field, as the originals are almost always better than what human engineers could have come up with.

One of the oldest examples of biomimicry is the Eiffel Tower in Paris. French engineer Gustave Eiffel studied the work of anatomist Herman von Meyer.

Eiffel was especially interested in the strength of the human femur. Writing in Answers magazine, Dr, Don DeYoung explains:

“In the 1850s, Meyer had studied the human femur, or thighbone, which connects to the hip. This bone, the largest in our body, has an unusual off-center ball joint that fits into the hip socket. For strength, the bone’s curved head has many internal bone fibers, called trabeculae. These bone fibers crisscross each other in layers and are precisely aligned to withstand the varying forces of tension and compression. As a result of this ingenious design, the femur efficiently supports and transfers the off-center weight of the person. The femur’s ball joint may look awkward, but it functions superbly for a lifetime of movement unless bone disease interferes.”

He goes on to say that Eiffel made use of Swiss engineer Karl Cullman’s discovery, viz. that the “trabeculae fibers closely resembled the struts and braces used in buildings.”

Thus, the Eiffel Tower could “be built with a minimum amount of iron for maximum strength.”

Built in 1899, at 324 metres (1,063 feet), it was the once highest building in the world.

In a longish article, Live Science omits the source of this design.

However, it could be more honest to give credit to whom credit is due.

It is no secret that inventors have copied most of their basic designs from creation.

We can see examples of amazing design and hi-tech solutions almost everywhere.

Let us not forget that God is the original Inventor. Humans merely copy his designs.

Sources:

DeYoung, Don. 2009. One Leg Up On Architects. Answers 4 (4): 58–59.

Palermo, Elizabeth. 2017. Eiffel Tower: Information & Facts. Live Science (September 28).

More Soft Tissue: Original Pigment Found in Late Cretaceous Dinosaur Eggs

See any colours here? Image courtesy of Wiemann et al. PeerJ, 2017.





Joel Kontinen

Darwin’s theory never predicted the discovery of soft tissue in fossils assumed to be tens if not hundreds of millions of years old.

Yet hardly a month goes by without the news of original protein or some sort of unfossilised bone being dug up.

We would definitely not expect to find so old soft tissue.

Researchers have found soft tissue in dinosaurs, fish, marine reptiles, birds and even Cambrian creatures.

A paper recently published in the journal PeerJ features the discovery of original pigment in a Late Cretaceous (i.e. “70–66 million year” old stratum).

According to the abstract,

“The eggshell parataxon Macroolithus yaotunensis can be assigned to the oviraptor Heyuannia huangi based on exceptionally preserved, late developmental stage embryo remains. The analyzed eggshells are from three Late Cretaceous fluvial deposits ranging from eastern to southernmost China. Reevaluation of these taphonomic settings, and a consideration of patterns in the porosity of completely preserved eggs support an at least partially open nesting behavior for oviraptorosaurs. Such a nest arrangement corresponds with our reconstruction of blue-green eggs for oviraptors. According to the sexual signaling hypothesis, the reconstructed blue-green eggs support the origin of previously hypothesized avian paternal care in oviraptorid dinosaurs. Preserved dinosaur egg color not only pushes the current limits of the vertebrate molecular and associated soft tissue fossil record, but also provides a perspective on the potential application of this unexplored paleontological resource.”

Pigment has been found in even “older” fossils.

The expression ‘fluvial deposits’ almost always refers to burial by an abundance of water. The most likely period for this was the global flood that devastated the early earth in Noah’s days.

Source:

Wiemann Jasmina, Tzu-Ruei Yang et al. 2017. Dinosaur origin of egg color: oviraptors laid blue-green eggs. PeerJ 5:e3706.

Blind Kiwis: Is Losing Eyesight Evolution or Orwellian Newspeak?

Image courtesy of Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

It seems that Darwinists are hoping to convince the unconvinced that evolution can go backwards. In doing so, they might resort to Orwellian newspeak, i.e., change a word’s meaning to the opposite of what it originally meant.

Recently, researchers found three completely blind kiwis. The birds were otherwise healthy.

New Scientist suggests that losing eyesight is 'regressive evolution'
. It attempts to give a reason for why this might be thought of as evolution:

“The flightless nocturnal birds may be evolving to lose their eyesight altogether, suggest the researchers. The blind kiwis seem able to survive just as well using other senses such as touch, smell and hearing, so maintaining good eyesight might be a waste of energy.”

Some cave salamanders, crabs and arachnids can get along well in their dark world although they can’t see.

Kiwis are nocturnal birds. Flightless, they don’t look like the average sparrow. They lack flight feathers and their bones are heavier than those of most birds.

Archaeopteryx, for instance, had feathers that are more “modern” and birdlike than the ones kiwis have.

So, losing a trait can hardly be called evolution, unless, of course, evolution refers to all kinds of change, but then it will no longer be of the Darwinian variety.

Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2017. New Zealand’s iconic kiwi birds may be losing their sight. New Scientist (22 September).

Tent-Making Bats Can Vary Their Heart Rate from 200 to 1,000 Beats per Minute

Uroderma bilobatum. Image courtesy of Charlesjsharp, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

The tent-making bat (Uroderma bilobatum) is a tiny creature, weighing 20 grams (0.7 oz.) or less and has a body length of roughly 6 centimetres (2.4 in).

It gets its name from building tent-like structures from giant leaves.

The amazing thing about this Panaman bat is that it can vary its heart rate from over 1,000 beats per minute to 200 beats. A slower heartbeat helps to save energy.

A recent paper in the journal eLife by Teague O’Mara, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and colleagues analysed the lifestyle of these bats.

Reporting on the study, an article in Science says:

“But the big surprise was that when the bats were resting, their hearts periodically slowed down sharply, O’Mara and colleagues report this week in eLife. Several times each hour, the bats lowered their already slowed heart rates from about 300 beats per minute down to 200 beats per minute for about 6 minutes. Over the course of a day this saves 10% of their daily energy budget, the researchers report.”

We might call this fuel efficiency or the preservation of energy, and it looks like the bat has been designed to be efficient in varying circumstances.

It is not alone in this. We can see intelligent behaviour both in plants and animals, as well as hi-tech solutions almost everywhere, including in us.

Bats pose several other problems to Darwinism. They can fly really fast. Some fruit bats have a smart navigation system that tells them where to go.

Echolocation is another. It seems that even the earliest bats could echolocate.

Source:

Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2017. To avoid starving, this bat varies its heart rate from 1000 to 200 beats per minute. Science (22 September).

Older Than the Universe? Methuselah Star HD 140283 Is a Big Problem for the Big Bang

Image courtesy of Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO, CC BY 4.0.





Joel Kontinen

The Methuselah Star, or more formally known as HD 140283, is an enigma for those who believe the universe began with a big bang some 13.8 billion years ago.

“At just 190 light years away, we can measure its luminosity, surface temperature, and composition very precisely; we can also see that it's just beginning to evolve into the subgiant phase and towards becoming a red giant. These pieces of information, combined, allow us to get a well-constrained value for the star's age, and the result is disturbing, to say the least: 14.46 billion years,” astrophysicist Ethan Siegel writes in Forbes magazine.

And that is not its only problem. HD 140283 does not look like it is among the earliest stars:

“Yet some of the other properties it displays, like an iron content of 0.4% the Sun's, suggest that it's very old, but not quite among the very oldest stars of all. Although there is an uncertainty on the age of around 800 million years, that still places it uncomfortably early, and hints at a potential conflict between how old the stars are and how old the Universe is.”

In other words, some stars have to be older than HD 140283, if Big Bang cosmology is true.

HD 140283 is a population II star that has relatively little metal. The BB model postulates that these stars were preceded by population III stars, which are assumed to be extremely massive and hot with hardly any metal.

The Big Bang model is built on questionable assumptions, such as the initial quantum fluctuation, cosmic inflation, the elusive dark matter and missing dark energy as well as antimatter that is likewise missing.

In addition, the earliest galaxies formed too quickly.

The Genesis model does not have these problems.

Source:

Siegel, Ethan. 2017. The Greatest Cosmic Puzzle: Astronomers Find Stars That Appear Older Than The Universe. Forbes (7 September).

Artists Copy Perfectly Preserved Cambrian Clam

Space alien? Image courtesy of Dwergenpaartje, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

Few researchers would expect Cambrian creatures to be perfectly preserved. After all, they are assumed to be over “500 million years” old.

However, some specimens of Agnostus pisiformis were so well preserved that Mats E. Eriksson, a geology professor at Lund University, Sweden, says: "The incredible degree of preservational detail means that we can grasp the entire anatomy of the animal, which, in turn, reveals a lot about its ecology and mode of life."

Live Science suggests it looks like a space alien.

It takes great faith to believe that soft body parts could be preserved for half a billion years, but that is exactly what evolutionists have to believe in order to keep their faith.

Time and again we get to read about exceptionally well preserved Cambrian creatures, including a fossilised brain and a mass jellyfish graveyard.

Artists have now made a copy of A. pisiformis that was only a centimetre (0.4 inches) long.

Live Science explains why the tiny sea creature is important to evolution:

“The odd little critter is also useful to modern scientists as what's called an index fossil. Index fossils are fossils that appear in only a particular time period, so they're used to date layers of rock: If the fossils appear in a rock layer, there's no question about when that layer formed.”

There is a not-so-flattering name for this kind of reasoning that is a sure way of ensuing that no one will ever find a rabbit in Cambrian strata, and evolutionists can pretend that they’re doing science.

It’s called circular reasoning.

Image courtesy of Dwergenpaartje, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2017. 500-Million-Year-Old Creature Looks Like Space Alien in Re-Creation. Live Science. (18 September).

Egg-Shaped Exoplanet Is Extremely Hot and Pitch Black

An artist's impression of exoplanet WASP-12b. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI).



Joel Kontinen

If you think that Earth is just an ordinary planet, you might probably want to think again.

Many exoplanets are weird. HD 131399 orbits in a system with three suns. HATS-14b is so strange that it has practically killed current planet-formation theories.

And then there are the hot ones. Some exoplanets are hot. Some are even hotter.

The temperate on the hot Jupiter WASP-12b 2600 is degrees Celsius. And that is not its only weird feature.

WASP-12b is egg-shaped and has a year slightly longer than one Earth day. It orbits it star some 1,400 light years from us. With almost no albedo, it hardly reflects any light and is in effect pitch black.

As far as we know, there is only one planet that is perfectly suited for life – the one we call home.

ESA/Hubble Information Centre. 2017. Hubble observes pitch black planet. Science Daily. (14 September).