How could these delicate features be preserved unharmed for 65 million years?  Just one million years is a long, long, long, long time for continents to shift, mountains to rise and fall, and catastrophes to scar the earth.  Should not this fossil be taken to challenge current theories about the age of dinosaurs?  Carl Wieland reported in Creation magazine that many dinosaur fossils still contain the original bone material.  Imagine the paradigm shift if evidence becomes overpowering that dinosaurs lived in the relatively recent past.  Doesn’t this fossil cry out for a re-evaluation of the assumptions?  Now all we need is a good living dinosaur to be found.  Don’t laugh; recently pine trees from the age of dinosaurs were found in Australia, alive and well, and many other living fossils extend back farther than that in the assumed evolutionary time scale.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs. • Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Dating Methods. • Next amazing story.

When you are investigating the unknown, you do not know what you will find, but money is always hard to find, especially for investigating the unknown.
Next headline on: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

This special issue of Neuron addresses two of the most basic and interesting questions about the neural bases of human behavior: how reward is processed in the brain, and how this influences our behavior.  Indeed, perhaps the most general observations that can be made about our behavior (or that of just about any organism) are that (1) its primary and ultimate goal is to seek reward (and avoid punishment), and (2) we are not always so good at doing this. As elementary and self-evident as are these observations, a closer consideration of each raises profound questions about the nature of human behavior and how it is guided by reward.  First, how do we evaluate and compare the diverse forms of reward-satisfying a biological need, pursuing a form of leisure, living longer, or helping another-that are available to us?  From an evolutionary perspective, these might all be viewed as mere stepping stones to the ultimate reward: ensuring the future of our genetic lineage.  However, from another perspective, that of the individual going about her daily life, the more proximal forms of reward are of paramount importance.  They must be assessed and compared to one another–in implicit calculations if not within the full view of consciousness–so that she can decide, in a timely manner, what to do next.  How are these calculations carried out, across vastly different domains of information, in the face of a staggering array of behavioral possibilities, so frequently, and so quickly?  The second observation is equally perplexing.  Why are we so often bad at doing this?  Despite millions of years of evolution and its culmination in the truly glorious (though at times equally nefarious) capabilities of the human brain, isn’t it remarkable that the behavior of even reasonably intelligent individuals can be as idiosyncratic, seemingly irrational, and sometimes patently counterproductive as it often appears to be?

Here we see the personification fallacy again, clear as day.  This is a frequent sin in evolutionary literature.  Here also we see high praise for the design in nature, the “truly glorious” capabilities of the human brain, with just the assumption that it evolved (see begging the question).  There is also an impermissible word used (nefarious), a foul because evolutionists do not believe in moral evil.  Worst of all is the blatant reductionism that sees all human activity, no matter how sublime, as nothing more than desire to gain reward and avoid punishment.  How do you, gentle reader, feel about the ultimate reward described above – not heaven, seeing your Creator face to face and hearing him say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” and sharing joyful relationships with righteous beings forever – but passing on your genes?  Is that what makes you work so hard, and do all you do?  So what if another generation of evolutionary pawns gets to proclaim the mantra, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  Whoop de do.

There is a lot of material in this issue, much more than can be quoted to adequately convey the thinking of the authors, but one aspect is notable: there is no doubt in their minds whatsoever that human behavior must be understood in solely evolutionary terms.  Ethics, religion, revelation, love, responsibility – all these are out.  They have no need of these hypotheses.  They might have a case if they were successful, but where is the success?  They can point to nerve impulses on a sheet of graph paper here, and monkeys that know which button to press there, and some economic models that give rough predictions of group behavior over yonder.  The rest is mostly questions and a maze of variables too vast to even approach.  Evolutionary behaviorism is a perpetual research program with no ultimate answers.
Worse, it shoots itself in the foot.  If evolutionary biology can explain all behavior in terms of selection for rewards and against punishment, and these are the result of uncaused, unplanned, unguided, purposeless forces of selection, how do they know their own answers are true?  Maybe they are the result of a selfish game to get the reward of more grant money, or avoid the punishment of getting fired under the “publish or perish” rule.  And why are they so baffled by the stupid choices people make?  People used to speak of sin and responsibility and wisdom and discernment, but now those are impermissible in the toolbox of causes.  Now, a gambler is a just a helpless pawn of selective pressures that acted on his apelike ancestors.  The adulterer is actually doing a good thing by carrying on the affair; like what was claimed about birds in a recent study, cheating might be an evolutionary strategy to minimize the effects of inbreeding.  Good and evil have been replaced by selective pressures.  Scientists like this would go to church not to hear the message, but to analyze the forces of natural selection that produced that organism up there on the platform who is imploring sinners to repent, or calling for volunteers to go to the mission field and help those living in superstitious darkness.  OK, let’s turn that reasoning around.  So what selective pressures led them to become scientists?  If their own explanations are mere manifestations of game theory or selection, how can they claim they are more valid than the preacher’s?  If they retort that science has a track record of finding truth about nature, where is the track record here?  It is all profound mysteries, a vast complexity of variables, oversimplified models, conflicting theories, disconnected disciplines, and empty promises.  It’s vaporware masquerading as empirical science, with no delivery date requirement.  It’s reductionist nonsense, “nefarious” because it absolves people of responsibility for their actions.
One of the last ideas Stephen Jay Gould had before he died was a compromise plan for science and religion called “non-overlapping magisteria.”  Basically, he said to religious people, we’ll give you the arts and humanities if you will leave the natural world to the scientists.”  This is a lot like Joe saying to Mike, “You can have the toys, but I get to keep the weapons.”  What happens?  Pretty soon, Joe is holding a gun to Mike’s head and saying, “Hand over the toys.”  Materialistic science will never be content with just rat mazes and encephalograms.  They want to arrogate unto themselves the title of High Priests of Knowledge.  They want to seize every field of inquiry into their eternal research project, and convince everyone that all other players are disqualified, especially preachers of the Word of God.  Let’s see how they feel about ethics and morals when their spouse cheats or blows the life savings at Las Vegas, or a vandal sprays the house with profane graffiti.  No righteous indignation allowed.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

A more fitting memorial would be a plaque mentioning the unmarked graves of 100 million people who perished under totalitarian regimes built on the principle of survival of the fittest.  Yes, Darwin did not personally advocate or foment these regimes, and would probably have opposed them.  But it is a fact that Hitler, Stalin, Marx, Ingels, Lenin, and Chairman Mao all saw Darwinian evolution as the basis in natural science for their views.  Marx said this explicitly.  Stalin, while a seminary student for the Russian Orthodox Church, read the Origin of Species and became an atheist.  Darwin’s work laid the foundation of a philosophy of atheism and materialism which persists to this day in the scientific bureaucracies that idolize him while jettisoning the scientific philosophies Kepler and Pasteur based on design.  Darwin did nothing to stop those even in his day that took his ball and ran with it.  He himself, as a recent biographer portrays, was knee-deep in Victorian sexism, racism, and classism that progressed through his later years.  The originator of idea may not be totally responsible for those that abuse it, but ideas have consequences.
The City of Edinburgh would do well to honor another of its famous sons that had much more to do with the practical scientific advances of our modern world: James Clerk Maxwell.

Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

John Wood was discouraged.  For more than 40 years he had been studying meteorites, in hopes that the first rocks formed in the solar system would reveal when and how they and other planetary bodies came to be.  Now a leading figure in his field, Wood was beginning to suspect that the evidence might not be there.  And in a plenary lecture at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, he stunned his colleagues by saying so.
After 200 years of studying meteorites, “we still don’t understand what they are trying to tell us,” Wood lamented (Science, 31 August 2001, p. 1581).  “I personally wonder whether we ever will.”

“There’s a big puzzle how you can possibly store CAIs for millions of years waiting for chondrules to form,” says [Frank] Shu [Taiwanese astrophysicist].  Marble-sized bits of rock orbiting in the gas of the solar nebula would have been dragged into the sun within tens of thousands of years, he notes, not millions.

The new date has its drawbacks, [Alexander] Halliday [of Zurich, Switzerland] notes.  For one thing, the work also reduces the date of the moon’s formation from 60 million years after the solar nebula formed to 30 million years.  The later origin had neatly matched the age of the moon’s oldest rocks, which were presumed to have quickly frozen out of the ocean of magma covering the new moon.  The revised age of the moon creates a 30-million-year gap, forcing scientists to explain either why moon rocks took so long to form or where the first ones went.  “That’s a bit of a surprise,” says Halliday, one to be sorted out with more chemical and isotopic analyses.

In his scenario, the young sun blasted the nearest nebular material with heat and radiation and then blew the resulting blobs of molten rock up and out over the nebular disk in the magnetically driven wind typical of newborn stars.  Falling back onto the disk, the droplets became chondrules, which formed the building blocks of both chondrites and terrestrial planets.

Wood has reason to still be discouraged.  The news can hardly seem that hopeful, because each solution is breeding new problems.  If the earth accreted in short order, then it puts the formation of the moon (already an unlikely happenstance) into a much narrower window of time.  Added to this are new ad hoc mechanisms (X-winds and shock waves) that require finding a cause.  If you are a regular reader, you know that these are not the only difficulties with the nebular/planetesimal hypothesis for the origin of the solar system.  See the recent headlines about Uranus and Neptune, Io’s volcanoes, the nanodiamond deficit, and comets, along with many other such stories in our Solar System chain links.  These are all in addition to the biggest puzzle: our finely-crafted planet earth itself, with its radiation shields, water oceans, and numerous other “anthropic” features that make it perfectly suited for life.
Naturalistic theorists think they have done their job if they can finagle some story, any story, that is remotely plausible after a few beers, like speculating on how Paley’s watch in the woods came together by an earthquake, a landslide, a tidal wave and a meteor impact in a carefully-timed sequence.  Materialistic scientists are like prisoners locked in a dungeon of their own making, cheering one another up with false hopes that they might be able to bore a hole through the walls with their fingernails.  It would never occur to them in 30 million years to just reach over and use the key.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

Wallace was no Christian, certainly, and is a paradoxical figure for sure, but the Darwinian materialists cannot tolerate any suggestion that natural selection is anything less than the creator of all living wonders.  That is why Darwin is the historical champion of evolutionary theory, not Wallace, who almost beat Charlie to the punch.  “Pseudoscience” is their label for anything beyond material causes, including God, used to explain any biological phenomenon.  From molecular motors to hummingbird wings, from exploding seed pods to human gymnasts, natural selection is the catch-all, do-all wonder worker.  It is the biggest materialist panacea in history.  And what is the evidence for this alleged “mechanism” and “engine” that drives molecules to evolve into men, and monkeys into Presbyterians?  Finch beaks, peppered moths and other trivial variations.  (Mallett exaggerates, “Darwin’s viewpoints on these topics are completely vindicated: for example, the idea that peacock tails evolved by female choice is strongly supported by experiment” – he needs to read our Sept. 9 headline on this).  Natural selection is a vacuous concept that cannot explain a hill of beans.  (Beans require thousands of molecular motors and a huge coded DNA library of complex specified information, and they depend on tiny molecular machine in bacteria to get their nitrogen.)  Too much ink is wasted on whether Darwin or Wallace should get more credit for this bloated idea.  Too little credit is given to Edward Blyth, the creationist who thought it up earlier, 24 years before Darwin’s Origin.  Blyth saw natural selection not as a creative force, but a conservative mechanism the all-wise Creator built into living things for their survival in changing environments.  That can be supported by observations; evolving whales from amoebas is another (just-so) story.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

This is more fun than watching cavemen beat each other over the head with clubs.
Next headline on: Early Man.

False alarm.  Call back when they get out of the theater and back to their consoles.  You can’t blame them for getting bored, though, just sitting there year after year.
Next headline on: SETI. • Next headline on: Movies. • Next dumb story.

Did you catch the circular reasoning here?  Nowhere do these authors supply any evidence for how a gill could turn into a complex spinning device that can generate one of the most ideal materials known to science, spider silk, or how any of these other complex structures – wings and lungs – could arise from a long progression of mistakes (mutations).  All they do is look for similarities in what they think are independent lines of evidence, which in fact are related by a common assumption: evolution.  There’s a joke about a man named Joe who got drunk Monday night on gin and soda, drunk again Tuesday on ale and soda, and drunk Wednesday on vodka and soda.  The obvious conclusion is that soda caused Joe’s drunkenness.  These evolutionists see soda in the fossil record, comparative anatomy (homologous organs) and molecular phylogeny, but missed the point: every one of their lines of evidence is contaminated with the alcohol of Darwinism.  From the starting base, they have already assumed that these organisms (trilobites, horseshoe crabs, spiders and insects) all have a common ancestor, then they use that assumption of common ancestry to demonstrate common ancestry.  Comparative anatomy is built on the assumption of evolution (homologous organs arose from a common ancestor, and then are used to demonstrate common ancestry).  Molecular phylogeny is built on the assumption of evolution (conserved genes have a common ancestor, so if you find conserved genes they demonstrate common ancestry).  The fossil record might be able to demonstrate actual descent from a common ancestor, if there were plentiful transitional forms, but all these authors point to are horseshoe crabs – living fossils, unevolved for supposedly 500 million years!  Thus every one of the so-called independent lines of evidence invoked by these authors already assume Darwinian common descent to be true, so they are reasoning in a circle.  They’re drunk on Darwinism while singing “How dry I am.”
Next headline on: Bugs. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Population genetic theory shows that the efficacy of natural selection is limited by linkage—selection at one site interferes with selection at linked sites.  Such interference slows adaptation in asexual genomes and may explain the evolutionary advantage of sex.  Here, we test for two signatures of constraint caused by linkage in a sexual genome, by using sequence data from 255 Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans loci.  We find that (i) the rate of protein adaptation is reduced in regions of low recombination, and (ii) evolution at strongly selected amino acid sites interferes with optimal codon usage at weakly selected, tightly linked synonymous sites.  Together these findings suggest that linkage limits the rate and degree of adaptation even in recombining genomes.

Another serious blow for Darwinism.  The title says it limits selection in fruit flies, but fruit flies have been Exhibit A of evolution since the 1930s.  Hardly any other species has been studied for evolutionary mechanisms in such detail.  We have lots of weird mutants: flies with wrinkled wings, flies without wings, flies with duplicate wings, flies with red eyes or black eyes, flies with legs growing where the antennae are supposed to be.  None has ever arisen with a clear evolutionary advantage.  Now, the very power of natural selection has been called into question.  Are school teachers going to be able to quote P.N.A.S. in science classes, or is that off limits now?  (Darwinism must be presented as impregnable in school; biology teacher Roger DeHart was dismissed from teaching biology for quoting Stephen Jay Gould and scientific journals that were critical of the power of natural selection.)
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Even the pro-evolution website National Center for Science Education states that the Supreme Court only struck down laws that mandated “balanced treatment” of creation and evolution, or prohibited evolution teaching – it does not follow that creation has no place in the science classroom (see non-sequitur in the Baloney Detector).  Holden’s claim is no more logical than concluding, if the court had struck down a law mandating equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, that therefore Republicans are illegal.  This highly-biased report in Science has no place in a journal that is supposed to be an open-ended search for truth.  Science editors are welcome to their opinion of the Supreme Court decision, but they should not lie about what it said.
Next headline on: Schools.

“Compromise,” as Galen puts it, is fast becoming the new buzzword as researchers uncover the details of floral evolution.  Many scientists have long explained flower fashions rather simply: From richly red bee balm to the cornflower’s spiky crown, popular theory has gone, each flower has evolved the right color and shape to attract effective pollinators.  The yucca plant, for instance, turns its flowers upward at dusk, to be pollinated exclusively by the yucca moth, which rolls up its heavy pollen like a snowball.

But today, a growing number of scientists are looking for more subtle evolutionary forces—from nectar thieves and herbivores to environmental demands and developmental changes—that might also sculpt floral traits.  “We’re taking a more pluralistic view,” says evolutionary ecologist Sharon Strauss of the University of California, Davis.  And they’re raising some eyebrows in the process.

Like design?  Speaking of humble lilies of the field, Jesus claimed that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these (Matt. 6:29).  Darwinism, however, finds no beauty in flowers.  It seeks to reduce everything to selfish utilitarianism: the flower only wants to pass on its genes, so it will do any selfish trick in the book to lure in the good bugs and make the bad bugs miserable.  So that, children, is how we got roses and petunias and orchids and snapdragons and azaleas.  This is the reductionist legacy of naturalistic evolutionism: it robs nature of beauty.  But function and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive; a bridge can be ornate, yet permit passage of traffic.  A Christian alternative viewpoint would not deny that flowers are functional, that as reproductive organs they must attract pollinators and repel intruders.  Instead, it would say that in the process of making an interconnected world of living things, the Creator expressed beauty out of His goodness.  Flowers have, what Francis Schaeffer termed, useless beauty.  But this is not a scientific approach, an evolutionist will complain.  Well, given (1) that the fossil record makes the evolution of flowering plants an “abominable mystery” (in Darwin’s words, and still true today), and (2) that (as this article reveals) evolutionists have no convincing case that natural selection could produce roses and petunias and azaleas, we ask, is naturalism a scientific approach?  Abrupt appearance, beauty – these are the observations that Darwinism cannot explain.
Next headline on: Bugs. • Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism.

Any undergraduate astronomy student knows that the stellar life cycle mapped on the color-luminosity diagram is one of the best-understood processes in astrophysics, or at least it is often presented that way.  Where does this star fit on the diagram?  We are told that stars take millions of years to evolve from one stage to another, but here is one that went from a small sunlike star to a supergiant within months.  This one is called a “totally new addition to the astronomical zoo.”  But how different is it, really, from other main sequence stars?  Maybe stars can “evolve” quicker than earlier believed.  Stellar evolution is, of course, not evolution in the sense of increasing in complexity or information.  It is the working out of physics and chemistry under gravity, better termed “stellar aging.”  We are not seeing creative processes here, but destructive processes, as the star’s matter and energy is being flung outward into space.
Next headline on: Stars.

Whether the Hubble image settles the debate remains to be seen, but there is no indication of a bridge in the photograph.  Nevertheless, readers should be aware that a good deal of image processing goes into images that are released to the public.  Anyone who has worked with digital images knows how easily they can be manipulated.  It is now a matter of ethics and trust to believe images posted on the Internet.  Images released by reliable sources should not be dismissed out of hand, of course; one should just be aware and read the fine print.  What’s more important than this one disputed image is the statistical nature of the evidence.  Are there too many alignments of discordant-redshift objects to be accounted for by chance?  One weakness of the minority view was that it lacked a coherent physical mechanism that could produce redshifts apart from the expansion of the universe.  Arp’s suggestion that quasars were ejected from galactic nuclei seems implausible to many.  It will be interesting to see if he makes a better case, but for now, this new photograph appears to strengthen the case that redshifts are cosmological; i.e., that they are a function of universal expansion and therefore indicators of distance.  Some creationists had used the older photographs to question the redshift evidence for the big bang theory.  Redshifts, however, do not bear on the question of whether the universe was created or not.  The naturalistic big bang theory still has its lumpiness problem and other severe headaches, cosmological redshifts notwithstanding.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

Your Immune System: How the Assassins Recognize the Terrorists   10/03/2002
Killer T cells, like roving assassins in a search and destroy mission, look for viral terrorists and obliterate them in their hideouts.  But first they have to recognize who is friend or foe, and in auto-immune diseases or tissue rejection, sometimes mistakes are made.  How the cell flags its contents, and how the T cell detects it and responds, is a complex and mysterious process.  Scientists are nearing completion of understanding the general picture from start to finish.  One question that remained was how a system that is highly conserved from mice to men could produce a unique “scent” at the cell surface, so individual that your immune system can sense the difference between “you” and “foreign.”  An important piece of the puzzle has recently been identified and reported in the Oct 3 Nature by U.C. Berkeley biochemists.  But to understand it, we have to back up and create some word pictures, or else get bogged down in abstruse jargon.  Pardon us in advance for the silly analogies and mixed metaphors; the reality is really quite amazing.
Killer T cells recognize body cells infected with a virus because each cell has a sophisticated system of wearing its innards on the outside.  An individual cell can have about 10,000 flags on its surface, composed of pieces of every protein found in the interior.  These flags, like sausages always nine amino-acid links long, are mounted on flagpoles, or rather meatpoles, called MHCs.  How do they get there?  Well, as proteins inside outlive their usefulness and are tagged for recycling, a barrel-shaped meat cleaver called a proteasome chops them into sausages up to 15 units long.  Sent back into the cell, most are quickly seized upon by roving dogs (aminopeptidases), but some manage to make it into the subway (endoplasmic reticulum) through special mechanical gates made just for them (TAP, for “transporters associated with antigen processing”).  There, another cleaving machine starts dismantling them one link at a time.  Crowded nearby are MHCs looking for the unique nine-unit pieces that fit them just right.  When no match is found, the chopper keeps cutting the links all the way down for recycling.  But if an MHC finds a nine-unit sausage that matches perfectly, it mounts it and ferries it to another special porthole on the cell surface, where it plants it to wave in the breeze.  A killer T cell, roving about with a nose that makes a bloodhound look like a man with a bad cold, sniffs all these pieces of meat and is able to detect foreign meat (viral protein scraps) that are not “USDA approved” so to speak.  If it finds one, the penalty is severe: the whole cell is targeted for incineration.  But it’s a small price to pay for health of the body.  This is a nonstop state of war and the stakes are high.  Any cell that harbors terrorists must be destroyed.  Besides, there are trillions more cells that can take their place.
What these scientists found was the chopper (aminopeptidase) in the subway that trims the sausages down.  They named it ERAAP, and found that it does not need to be concerned with fitting each nine-link sausage to the appropriate meatpole (MHC); it just chops away, one link at a time, and if an appropriate meatpole is nearby to grab it, fine.  If not, it chops it all the way down and the individual links (amino acids) are made available for recycling into new proteins.  In his News and Views perspective on this discovery, Hans-Georg Rammensee calls this “Survival of the Fitters” – “the way ERAAP works is a fine example of how nature uses the survival-of-the-fittest principle, even inside the cell, to solve a complex task in an economical way.”

Thus he ruined a good story with a bad punch line.  Equivocation is the fallacy of shifting definitions of terms in mid thought.  “Survival of the fittest,” as it is usually understood, has no application to the complex, purposeful system pictured here.  He’s playing with words, making a pun, to make this seem relevant to evolutionary theory.  Darwinism is, by definition, a trial and error, purposeless, directionless process, but here in the immune system you have a long series of processes directed to a goal.  Like a Rube Goldberg machine, if any elements are missing or don’t work, the system breaks down.  It’s actually a wonderful recycling and signalling system, as if spies constantly roam the recycling bin for information that might be useful to the FBI outside.  Aren’t you glad that your security forces on the outside have these allies on the inside that let them know if all’s well, or if a Trojan horse has breached the city walls and invaders are within?  The fact that the viruses’ own proteins are subject to this same signalling system lets the killer T cells know what is really going on inside, and take the appropriate countermeasures when necessary.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

This means that the trend is downward, not evolutionarily upward, despite their optimism that “The wealth of biological data now available has revealed the prolific evolutionary adaptation of old proteins for new functions.”  OK, show us.  Where is the evolution of new function?  They talk about enzymes that have lost their activity, but give no watertight cases of any new functions being gained by nonenzymes.  The only examples look like regaining of previous function that was inactivated somehow, like unchaining Prometheus.
The paper is full of the word evolution but it’s really about degradation.  It is also filled with the assumption that proteins with similar folds are homologous (meaning: derived from common ancestors), even when they have low sequence similarity.  Thus they are guilty of circular reasoning.  They believe homology derives from common ancestry, then use the homology as evidence for common ancestry.  The trend of all things is toward disorder.  We’re waiting for someone to show a plausible sequence of steps that can buck the trend, and go from random sequence to working enzyme that performs a new and useful function.  Take us from iron ore to a working vise, for instance, through a sequence of small intermediate steps where each one has an advantage that can be acted on by natural selection.  (But don’t get us started on natural selection.)  Oh, and by the way, get your own ore.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

Speaking of Mars, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory today released its first data archive of images from the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft that went into orbit less than a year ago.  A few days later, On October 7, they released a set of 18,812 more images from the immensely successful Mars Global Surveyor.  The feature image is a high-resolution view of a crater with gullies that appear to have been formed by liquid water.

Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere work together to shield us landlubbers from the rifle range outside our bubble.  To see how this works, recall our May 10 headline on earth’s storm windows.  Mars does not have these protections.  Movies of astronauts prancing around on Mars are not realistic in light of these risks.  Man may go to Mars someday, but the project will mainly underscore how blessed we are on the home planet.
Next headline on: Health. • Next headline on: Mars.