Below are more web article summaries with links for the period 3-8
December 1999.
Some of the links may require free registration and some of the
long links may need rejoining because of word-wrapping in
transmission.
My comments are in square brackets.
Steve
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991208/sc/space_planets_4.html
Yahoo! Wednesday December 8 ...Scientists Propose New
Theories on Planet Formation ...(Reuters) - New planetary systems
being discovered do not look much like our own because they may
have been formed in a very different way ... "We know as an
observational fact that planets are common but we don't known
whether the circumstances that could lead to habitable planets are
common...," said Armitage ... (66/669) [More evidence that our
solar system and Earth are rare, and indeed unique?] See also:
http://www.cnn.com/1999/TECH/space/12/08/space.planets.reut/index.html,
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/planets991208.html
ABCNEWS...Dec. 8... That would explain how the two planetary
giants - each more than 10 times the mass of the Earth - could exist
at the far edge of the solar system, where there was not enough
gas and dust to make a planet eons ago. The study is based on
computer simulations ...It was published in Thursday's issue of the
journal Nature..." (64/654); &
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_555000/555473.stm
BBC Wednesday, 8 December, 1999... the planets in our Solar
System have not always been in their current orbits ... Jupiter may
have formed much further from the Sun... the giant planets...ended
up in their present orbits as a result of violent and chaotic
scattering... proto-Jupiter creates a spiral density pattern...but ...
fragments into smaller proto-planets. ... Uranus and Neptune may
have migrated outwards and Jupiter may have come in. ...
question... whether the Earth has always been where it is now?
(83/835) [A chaotic origin of our Solar System, which produced
`just-right' circular orbits and an Earth-Moon system may turn out to
be so fine-tuned in its initial conditions that it is yet more evidence
for supernatural Intelligent Design?]
http://www.cnn.com/1999/NATURE/12/08/dnapatent.ap/index.html
CNN ... Judge rules major DNA patent invalid December 8, 1999 ...
(AP) ... biotechnology giant Hoffman-La Roche promised to appeal a
judge's ruling that one of its patents used in DNA analysis was
questionably obtained and is invalid. ... Promega Corp... argued that scientists
got the important patent in 1990 by misrepresenting their experiments and
falsely claiming advances over previous discoveries... (63/636)
[Another case of scientific fraud where big money was at stake?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991207/sc/mars_future_1.html
Yahoo! Tuesday December 7 ... More Mars Missions Scheduled
Despite Latest Loss... (Reuters) - Ever since an Italian astronomer
saw "canals" on Mars, humans have looked to the Red Planet for
clues of life in outer space, and even the loss of NASA's Mars Polar
Lander will not stop that quest... "The excitement about Mars is
pretty much just focused on the question of whether there is any life
or fossil life on Mars," said Park, who is based at the University of
Maryland. The questions that may be answered by sifting through
the martian surface are essential ones about earthly identity, Park
said. "If nature was to (create life) somewhere else, would it do it
the same way? We are likely to learn an enormous amount about
ourselves that we couldn't learn any other way." Even a
discouraged-sounding Richard Zurek, a project scientist on the
Mars Polar Lander, did not suggest stopping the search for signs of
liquid water -- a prerequisite for life -- on Mars...The unsolved
mystery is where the water went, and whether any life formed
before the water departed... (186/829) [This shows that the real
objective behind NASA's attempts to land more probes on Mars is
exobiological. And underlying that is the materialistic-naturalistic
assumption that life is just a chemical reaction which will inevitably
occur, when all the conditions, e.g. water, are present]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991206/sc/tech_ibm_3.html
Yahoo! Monday December 6 ... Supercomputer 'Blue Gene' to
Probe Gene Mysteries ... (Reuters) - [IBM] ... plans to...build a
supercomputer ... and put it to work pushing the boundaries of what
is known about how proteins are formed and their role in human
disease. ... named "Blue Gene," capable of more than 1 quadrillion
operations per second, or 1,000 times more powerful than the Deep
Blue machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in
1997...will initially be used to model how proteins fold, ... initially
would entail folding a 50 amino-acid sequence... (95/959). See
also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_553000/553690.st
m IBM says its Smash architecture differs from existing approaches
in three ways: It will dramatically simplify the number of instructions
carried out by each processor. It will use a massive parallel system
capable of more than eight million simultaneous threads of
computation (compared to the maximum of 5,000 threads today).
The computer will be self-stabilising and self-healing, automatically
overcoming failures of individual processors and computing
threads." [Interesting how complex protein amino acid folding is that
to model all its potential configurations requires a supercomputer a
1000 times more powerful than the most powerful chess playing
computer. Maybe they will discover that some proteins like histone-
4 are irreducibly complex `islands' which cannot be led up to (or
down to), by step- by-step Darwinian changes? Also interesting
about the computer's proposed self-healing powers. It may clarify
the steps required for any self-healing system and show that such
systems in living things had to be intelligently designed?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991205/sc/science_australia_2.html
Yahoo! Sunday December 5 ... Scientists Challenge
Conventional Sea Level Theory ... (Reuters) - Australian scientists
say they have discovered evidence of rapid change in world sea
levels and of a dramatic fall in geologically recent times -- directly
challenging current conventional wisdom. Dr Robert ...has tapped
the secrets of worm coatings on once-submerged rocks to shake
established theory that sea levels are presently as high as they
have ever been. Based on height measurements of worm coatings
on rocks now well above sea level, and carbon dating tests which
show them to be as recent as 3,500 years old, Baker argues that
sea levels have not been steady since the last ice age, as is
commonly believed..." (118/479) See also:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters19991203_3880.html
[If will be interesting to see if this holds up. It would be more
evidence for catastrophism vis-a-vis uniformitarianism]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991203/sc/health_gene_6.html
Yahoo! Friday December 3 ..... (Reuters) ... researchers have
found no evidence of human error that could explain the death of a
teen-ager enrolled in a gene therapy experiment... a modified cold
virus, or vector, incorporating a potentially corrective gene
...initiated an unusual and deadly immune-system response that led
to multiple organ failure and death," (54/554) [Evidence that lateral
gene transfers may not be as easy as first thought. The immune
system may regard foreign genes as invaders and eliminate them?]
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Stephen E. (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ Email: sejones@iinet.net.au
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Web: http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Warwick 6024 -> *_,--\_/ Phone: +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, Western Australia v "Test everything." (1 Thess. 5:21)
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