Four students and their teacher in Cataluña, Spain, sent a Nikon Coolpix digital camera into the upper atmosphere recently, and captured some impressive photos. Here’s one:

More photos and a complete report of their experiments are at their blog and their flickr page. The Big Picture at the Boston Globe also has the photos.

Incidentally, the team’s blog is in Catalan, the language of Cataluña, but they have thoughtfully provided an instant-translation link for the Catalan-challenged.

March 24th, 2009 | Tags: balloon, Catalonia, Nikon, photography | Category: Astronomy, Commentary, General stuff, Physics, Schools, Science, evolution, religion | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yet another attempt to weasel creationism/Intelligent Design into public schools has died after an “academic freedom” bill failed to leave a subcommittee in the Iowa legislature yesterday.

The bill purportedly would have protected instructors from punishment or job loss if they presented “scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding chemical and biological evolution.” In fact, it was a ploy to enable suitably minded instructors to teach creationism or ID alongside evolutionary theory. Wording that is almost identical appears on a web page sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a pro-ID “thinktank.”

Full details are at The Panda’s Thumb.

Lest you think the bill might have had merit, allow me to provide a brief introduction to “creation science.” ID is just a variation of creationism, accepting an older age of the universe.

Creationism holds that:

• The account in Genesis is literal and true.
• God created everything in six days, about 6,000 years ago.
• Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, all animals were vegetarians, death was non-existent, and predation/parasitism were unnecessary.
• God got pissed at Adam and Eve, and that wily serpent in the Tree, and cursed them with unending toil, mortality, and slithering on the ground. With the Fall, God also rebooted Creation 1.0 to introduce carnivorism, predation, parasitism and all the unhappy biological problems all His creatures now face.

March 14th, 2009 | Tags: academic freedom, bill, creationism, evolution, intelligent design, iowa, john freshwater, legislation | Category: Schools, Science, evolution, religion | Comments (2)

JISHOU, HUNAN — Since a member of my immediate family will soon be moving to Iowa, I have the perfect excuse to blog about a proposal in that fine state to ensure “academic freedom.”

On the face of it, “academic freedom” would sound like a good thing, but in today’s world of newspeak, this kind of “academic freedom” is shorthand for “let’s allow the public schools to teach creationism or Intelligent Design ideas alongside the scientific theories of the Big Bang and evolution.” Similar bills have been proposed in several other — mostly Bible Belt — states, and all have the same chance of success. None — except of course in Louisiana, where one actually passed.

These bills are merely a veiled attempt by Christian kooks to subvert the US Constitution (and proper science education) by suggesting that creationism and ID are really scientific theories, not religious ideas, and therefore should be taught as valid alternatives to evolution. Trouble is, the Supreme Court ruled decades ago that creationism was religious in nature, and cannot be taught in public schools, and in 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that ID was also religious in nature, meaning the Dover, Pennsylvania, school system had violated the Constitution by permitting it to be taught in science classes.

Yet, the kooks persist, in a quixotic attempt to find some state stupid enough to pass so-called “academic freedom” legislation, so like-minded instructors can slip in so-called scientific alternatives to evolution.

March 6th, 2009 | Tags: academic freedom, creationism, evolution, intelligent design, iowa | Category: Commentary, Schools, Science, Skepticism, evolution | Comments (2)

The Panda’s Thumb has been keeping a close tab on Ohio science teacher/religious fanatic John Freshwater even since he got into trouble last year, allegedly burning a cross on a student’s arm with a Tesla coil.

Freshwater and school officials have been making their cases in adiministrative hearings since then. There have been six days of testimony so far, spread over several months. So far, the testimony suggests Freshwater was an insubordinate teacher who resisted his superiors’ efforts to bring him in line, perhaps because he believed God’s authority trumped theirs.

Members of the science department were supposed to bring their Tesla coils to the front office; Freshwater kept his. He was supposed to remove his Bible from plain sight of students; he put additional religious materials in his classroom instead. Ohio’s scope and sequence of science instruction places the teaching of evolution in the 8th grade and later, and forbids the teaching of creationism; Freshwater was telling his seventh graders that evolution was bunk, that the world was only 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed for a time.

Freshwater, who apparently is a very popular teacher and has won teaching awards in the past, is associated with rightwing Christian organizations, particularly the kind that just can’t seem to accept that old “separation of church and state” idea enshrined in the Constitution. They try to weasel their church teachings into the public schools in defiance of federal (and state) law anyway.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: insubordination, john freshwater, religion, Science | Category: Commentary, Science, Teaching, evolution, religion | Comments (2)

India launched its first unmanned space craft today, joining China in an Asian space race.

The Chandrayaan-1 is heading for the Moon, which China’s own Chang’e probe visited just last year. The Indian mission will orbit the Moon for two years, creating a three-dimensional atlas of the surface and prospecting for valuable minerals.

Two NASA experiments are also on board.

More details are here.

October 22nd, 2008 | Tags: China, india, moon, space race | Category: Astronomy, Science | Leave a comment

One of the big mysteries in biology is how early organisms got started from pre-biotic conditions. In other words, how did self-replicating organic molecules develop from inorganic chemicals?

In an attempt to answer this nagging question, in the 1950s, two University of Chicago researchers, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, performed a strange experiment. They ran electrical sparks through a mixture of gases that (at the time) were presumed to have been present in Earth’s atmosphere more than 3 billion years ago.

The results of this classic experiment were at the time astounding. Electricity running through the gas mixture produced a sludgy mess that proved to contain five amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and self-replicating molecules like DNA and RNA.

As it turns out, Miller and Urey had used two other slightly different set ups, and the results from the those they apparently ignored, since they appeared to be less successful. Still, Miller, who died in 2007, stashed the “failed” apparatus away — perhaps for posterity.

It’s a good thing he did. Researchers at Indiana University-Bloomington recently ran the sludge from the other experiments through modern analytical equipment, uncovering not five amino acids, but 22!

The 1953 Urey-Miller experiment assumed that pre-biotic Earth had a reducing atmosphere, a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor, torn by violent thunderstorms. Planetologists, however, now assume early Earth’s air had a different mix of gases than Urey and Miller had assumed, and that volcanoes, not lightning, provided the energy to get the ball rolling.

October 17th, 2008 | Tags: amino acids, origins of life, re-examination, urey-miller | Category: Science, evolution | Leave a comment