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POPSThe DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By "Telepathic" Abilities Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.
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POPSCretins on the March I'll never forget the first time I saw a Ray Comfort video. He was using a banana to debunk evolution! This tool for the religious right goes far beyond parody and falls more into the area of pity. Along with his cohort, Kirk Cameron, they are pulling out all the stops on the stupid express. If you're a Creationist I'd suggest you try to wrangle a free copy. Just ignore the BS that Comfort added and read the rest. Maybe you'll learn something? Such basic ignorance of simple science is wide spread in the US. I don't recall the actual statistics but a much too large portion of the US believes this Creationist/ID drivel. Very sad indeed.
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POPSReframing Darwin THE anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 and publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is connecting past to present, science to art, philosophy to biology, just as firmly as Darwin linked chimpanzees to humans. Evolution is being presented to us by all kinds of writers, artists and scholars in widely different registers.
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POPSScientists are to turn chickens into dinosaurs. Now, a quote from the classic Jurassic Park movie: Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs... Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth... Is this really a good idea?
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POPSEarly life united “We’ve known about the gram-negative bacteria for three scientific generations. We’ve been staring at them for a hundred years, and we never realized how they came about or what made them so different,” said Lake. “Without them, we wouldn’t have eukaryotes as we do today.”According to Lake, the union likely took the form of endosymbiosis, in which one of the prokaryotes literally swallowed the other, and the two grew together. Were mammals derived from a union of insect and amphibian, the story-of-life rearrangement would be comparably profound.
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POPSWelcome To Documentary Heaven, Feed Your Brain Documentary Heaven was set up early July 2009 to provide the public with a vast collection of documentaries spanning across every genre out there. We intend on continuously updating the site on a daily basis to bring you nothing but the very best. The Idea Behind This Site: We understand that the internet can be a very interesting place filled with much to do, but have you ever had one of those days where there seems to be absolutely nothing amongst that vast collection of websites out there that could possibly interest you? Well now there is documentaryheaven.com. So whenever your bored, just relaxing or simply in the mood to watch something interesting, why not pop onto our site and find a documentary that takes your interest! There is no hidden agenda here, you see we simply just want to freely entertain the masses!!
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POPSBird brains prove to be very sexy Dr Keagy hopes this study will get people thinking about how sexual selection influences cognitive evolution."We can't ignore, however, that unless a male gets a female to mate with him, he will not pass on his genes. If an animal is carrying around something as big and expensive as a brain, why not use it for increasing his likelihood of mating?"
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POPSThe evolution of religion "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes," he writes. Those mechanisms include conformist bias (believing what your peers believe, in order to get along), a tendency to explain events in terms of personal agency (since our mental machinery for thinking about causality evolved in the context of social interaction), and interest in remote control (a bias toward beliefs that promise influence over predators, diseases, and bad weather). Given these biases, we're prone to believe in powerful, jealous, tempestuous personal deities.
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POPSRomantic Science The old artificial polarities of science and spirit persist. Unnecessarily. 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science', Richard Holmes http://www.slate.com/id/2222360/pagenum/all
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POPSWiki-List of common misconceptions weather this stuff's actually true (it has a "needs verification" thing at the top), i have no clue. but it's interesting.and some of it i have read other places. Worth a read.
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POPSChristian nutballs aim to change history for Texas schoolchildren
Aside from the obvious violation of the First Amendment, where the separation of church and state is established, Texas needs to be reminded that our public education system is established to teach our children the truth, not hearsay. It is unconscionable for our public school system to be used to rewrite history. There is no historical evidence that our founding fathers ever intended the US to be a Christian Nation. Texas, if you can get your kids into church you can teach whatever religion you think is appropriate, but keep it out of our schools, because believe it or not, not everyone holds your ideas of what this country was founded on. Any school board that gives credence to the likes of the so-called ‘expert’ Reverend Peter Marshall who preaches that Hurricane Katrina and defeat in the Vietnam war were God’s punishment for sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuals has got to be so far in the dark ages that they don’t want to be taken seriously and is lost to all re
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POPS"Origins of Life in a Lab": From Amino Acids to Apes with iPods 
There are still one or two (billion years of) steps between amino acids and apes with Apple iPods, but we've got those as well. Studies have shown in exhaustive detail how amino acids combine to create larger units called nucleotides. These posed the ultimate jigsaw puzzle: once they come together into RNA, we've seen how it can evolve and improve (and we do mean SEEN: the Scripps Institute rigged up RNA replicators and watched them evolve before their eyes) and eventually arrive at DNA, but we didn't know how the darn things made RNA to begin with. Emphasis on "didn't" - University of Manchester scientists decided to solve the problem, and please note that when U of M decides on something they don't mess around: they spent a full ten years smashing together the pre-life pieces until they eventually fit together. Just as they would have done in early Earth's oceans, which were a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than a beaker and for whom ten years is barely a blink.
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POPSSex is the ultimate absurdity Isn't it ironic that we all suffer today the consequences of how single celled organisms that lived a billion years ago choose to procreate? :-)
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POPSGaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? Recent interesting research shows that life on earth may have distinct suicidal inclinations. Human destruction of the environment is but the most recent episode. If true it has interesting implication on forming of exobiological theories, and the evolution of civilizations outside our precious planet.
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POPSWhat if, the alien, is no more than a human? These same thermodynamic arguments should also hold on Earth-like planets elsewhere in the cosmos. And if that's the case, then ET may not be so alien after all, as Higgs and Pudritz imply with the extraordinary conclusion to their paper: "The combined actions of thermodynamics and subsequent natural selection suggest that the genetic code we observe on the Earth today may have significant features in common with life throughout the cosmos." Now that's a thought....
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