Church of England Sees Wisdom in Understanding Evolution

Good religion needs good science by Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs

When a big new idea emerges which changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights. The church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy, and has since realised its error. Some church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
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Subsequent generations have built on Darwin’s work but have not significantly undermined his fundamental theory of natural selection. There is nothing here that contradicts Christian teaching. Jesus himself invited people to observe the world around them and to reason from what they saw to an understanding of the nature of God (Matthew 6: 25–33). Christian theologians throughout the centuries have sought knowledge of the world and knowledge of God. For Thomas Aquinas there was no such thing as science versus religion; both existed in the same sphere and to the same end, the glory of God.
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Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well.

2008 Innovation Generation Grants

The Motorola Foundation today announced the recipients of its 2008 Innovation Generation grants, which provide $4 million to 92 K-12 education programs across the country.

Eileen Sweeney, director of the Motorola Foundation: “Building a diverse pipeline of critical thinkers, skilled scientists and engineers is a by-product of our efforts that not only will benefit Motorola and our industry, but it also will support a sustainable workforce and bolster the country’s competitive advantage in the global, knowledge-based economy.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strengthening Education: Meeting the Challenge of a Changing World, jobs requiring science, engineering or technical training will increase 24 percent between 2004 and 2014 to 6.3 million. The disparity between the growing demand for critical thinkers and the country’s ability to adequately prepare students to fill these jobs has been widening for decades. The lack of skilled graduates in these fields poses a significant threat to sustained U.S. competitiveness in the global, knowledge-intensive economy.

Examples of this year’s grant recipients include:

* American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) – The AISES National American Indian Science and Engineering Fair and Expo inspires American Indian and Alaska Native students from all 50 states to pursue their interest in science and engineering through in-person and virtual presentations of research, access to role models and mentors, and hands-on demonstrations of scientific and engineering innovations across industries.

* Edheads in Columbus, Ohio – A highly interactive website for middle school girls interested in engineering design will be used nationally by schools and after-school programs.

* Rochester Institute of Technology – TechGirlz weeklong camp for girls who are deaf and hard-of-hearing and entering seventh, eighth or ninth grades fosters their long-term interest in STEM and enhances their awareness of the opportunities available to them in these disciplines in higher education.

* University of Central Florida – My Sports Pulse engages Florida middle school and high school students in a youth mobile learning initiative that imparts science and technology concepts through interactive sports games and tests.

Move over MRSA, C.diff is Here

Clostridium difficile (C.diff), a bacteria, is increasingly posing health risk. Rising Foe Defies Hospitals’ War On ‘Superbugs’

Even as hospitals begin to get control of other drug-resistant infections such as MRSA, a form of staph, rates of C. diff are rising sharply, and a recent, more virulent strain of the bug is causing more severe complications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are 500,000 cases of C. diff infection annually in the U.S., contributing to between 15,000 and 30,000 deaths. That’s up from roughly 150,000 cases in 2001.
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Many patients get C. diff infections as an unintended consequence of taking antibiotics for other illnesses. That’s because bacteria normally found in a person’s intestines help keep C. diff under control, allowing the bug to live in the gut without necessarily causing illness. But when a person takes antibiotics, both bad and good bacteria are suppressed, allowing drug-resistant C. diff to grow out of control.
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Only 3% to 5% of healthy, non-hospitalized adults carry C. diff in their gut, but that rate is much higher in hospitals and nursing homes, where carriers can spread the bacteria to others. Studies at several hospitals in recent years have shown that 20% or more of inpatients were colonized with C. diff, and a 2007 study of 73 long-term-care residents showed 55% were positive for C. diff. Even though the majority had no symptoms of disease, spores on the skin of asymptomatic patients were easily transferred to the investigators’ hands.

Ancient Ants

Blind “Ant From Mars” Found in Amazon

An ant so unlike all other living ants that it was given an extraterrestrial name has been discovered in the Amazon rain forest, biologists announced today. The tiny new species is the only known surviving member of an ant lineage that separated from the main family more than a hundred million years ago, DNA analysis revealed.

The pale, eyeless ant appears to be adapted to living underground, possibly surfacing at night to forage. Its long mandibles suggest that the 0.08-inch-long (2-millimeter-long) animal is a predator, most likely of soft-bodied creatures such as termite larvae.

Christian Rabeling, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, found a single specimen of the new species, thought to be a worker ant, in tropical soils near Manaus, Brazil. Rabeling’s team named the new creature Martialis heureka—”Martialis” means “of Mars
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The new species’ genes suggest that it broke away from the main ant family before the origin of all other living ant groups, which include 20 subfamilies that together contain more than 12,000 species.

New Antipsychotics Old Results

Risks Found for Youths in New Antipsychotics

A new government study published Monday has found that the medicines most often prescribed for schizophrenia in children and adolescents are no more effective than older, less expensive drugs and are more likely to cause some harmful side effects. The standards for treating the disorder should be changed to include some older medications that have fallen out of use, the study’s authors said.
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“I think the reason the use of these newer drugs has gone up so fast is that there was this widespread assumption that they were safer and more effective than what we had before,” Dr. McClellan said. “Well, we’re seeing now that that’s not the whole story.”

The Robotic Dog

From Boston Dynamics. [update 2017 – Google sold Boston Dynamics to Softbank (Japan)]

via: Man’s New Best Friend: The Robotic Dog [I removed the broken link]

A Cheap And Efficient Wind Turbine

Energy Ball – A Cheap And Efficient Wind Turbine

Home Energy is a Swedish company which has designed a new wind turbine that is very silent and it’s based on six curved rotor blades attached to a rotor hub at both ends. The new and futuristic wind turbine is called Energy Ball and when it rotates it looks like a sphere and it creates a wind flow which resembles the rapids of a river – this wind flow pattern is called the Venturi effect.

Tardigrades In Space (TARDIS)

Research showing that Tardigrades (Water Bears) can survive in space without protection has been in the news lately. There is a blog with a few posts from the research team (only from last year unfortunately): Tardigrades In Space (TARDIS). They chose not to publish the research in an open access fashion, unfortunately.

Tiny Critters Survive Space

These small, segmented animals not only survived a 12-day orbital expedition, some members of the community felled by solar radiation actually recovered upon their return to Earth.

“How these animals were capable of reviving their body … remains a mystery,” said lead researcher Ingemar JÃ¶nsson, with Sweden’s Kristianstad University, who writes about the discovery in this week’s issue of Current Biology.
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Most of the 3,000 creatures not only survived, but they went on to reproduce once they came back to Earth. About 12 percent of the animals exposed to ultraviolet radiation revived after being put back in water, a puzzling find since researchers presume the sterilizing rays broke down the tardigrades’ DNA. “This type of radiation cuts the DNA strand effectively in most organisms”

North American Fish Threatened

North American Fish Under Threat

Nearly 40 percent of fish species in North America are imperiled, according to a new survey by fish experts, the U. S. Geological Survey, and the American Fisheries Society, up 92 percent from the last survey done in 1989.
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No single cause explains the ongoing fish losses, Taylor and others agree. Habitat loss, invasive species, diseases, dams, and water contaminants all contribute.

“Fish are kind of canaries in the coal mine,” said Howard Jelks of the USGS and lead author of the report, published in Fisheries. “If you change the water to something that’s not able to support these fish, it’s also not going to be as high quality for recreating, for eating the fish out of these streams, for drawing water that’s ultimately used for drinking, or for other things.”

Friday Fun – CERN Version

Enjoy. Ok, you might not want to go download this groups other tracks (if you do there aren’t any, by the way) but it is a fun LHC adventure. By Katherine McAlpine and others at CERN.