Category: News

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Mark Perakh, who was an author at Panda’s thumb passed away. From the NCSE website: Perakh was born (as Mark Yakovlevich Popereka) on November 2, 1924, in Kiev, Ukraine. After serving in the Soviet Army during World War II, he earned the equivalent of a PhD in physics from the Odessa Polytechnic Institute in 1946.… more

As observant readers will doubtless be aware, the generous pre-order deal (steep discount + free shipping + 4 free digital books) for Stephen Meyer’s forthcoming book, Darwin’s Doubt, was extended into the month of May by popular demand. Click here to take advantage now! You can also listen to this ‘ID the Future’ podcast featuring Casey… more

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The NCSE has announced that their director Dr. Eugenie Scott will be retiring by the end of this year. I wonder who will be chosen to replace her? NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott announced on May 6, 2013, that she was planning to retire by the end of the year, after more than twenty-six… more

Contrary to what some scientists have asserted previously (see here and here), there’s no good evidence that humans were responsible for the extinctions of around 90 giant animal species that once roamed Australia – including the Diprotodon pictured above, a hippopotamus-sized giant wombat that roamed Australia until 46,000 years ago. In fact, most of these… more

The following excerpt is taken from an Associated Press report by Melinda Deslatte, which was published in thetowntalk.com on May 1, 2013: A Louisiana law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms will remain on the books, despite criticism that it’s a back-door way to teach creationism. The Senate… more

For decades, physicists have been struggling to reconcile two very different pictures of the world: the classical view, which sees the world as being made up of discrete, well-defined objects; and the quantum view, in which things don’t have sharp boundaries but are blurred in space and time. Now, Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute… more

If you look at the news headlines over at Science Daily for May 3, 2013, you’ll immediately see that their top story is: “Monkey Math: Baboons Understand Numbers.” Which, to put it quite bluntly, is pure poppycock. The full title of the story linked to reads: Monkey Math: Baboons Show Brain’s Ability to Understand Numbers,… more

An 11.9 million-year-old ape fossil discovered in Catalonia, Spain, in 2002, and subsequently given the name Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, lived around the time when the great apes first appeared, according to Dr. Ashley Hammond, a University of Missouri anatomical expert who examined the creature’s pelvis and co-authored a recent study describing its morphology. Science Daily has… more

A new paper in Nature is reporting that “Altogether, in a [Saccharomyces] genome containing only 6,000 open reading frames (ORFs), we detected over 1.88 million unique transcript isoforms (TIFs) (or 776,874 supported by at least two sequencing reads…).” They detected 26 major TIFs (mTIFs) and 48 TIFs in total per open reading frame, and “estimate a… more

Go here to pre-order the book! more

This is the kind of headline I’d expect to see from the Onion. If only it were so… more

Dr. Stephen Meyer will feature in the third hour of tomorrow’s Michael Medved show, the first of his new Science & Culture Weekly Update series. Be sure to tune in! more

An interesting paper recently appeared in Genome Biology and Evolution finding that the Beta-globin pseudogene is under purifying selection. From the abstract, HBD encodes the δ-globin chain of the minor adult hemoglobin (HbA2), which is assumed to be physiologically irrelevant. Paradoxically, reduced diversity levels have been reported for this gene. In this study, we sought a detailed… more

An interesting debate took place last week featuring Dr. Frank Turek and David Silverman, with a range of both strong and weaker arguments. The topic was the existence of God, but some I.D.-relevant themes came up in the debate. See it for yourself here. more

A series of podcasts are being released on “ID the Future” based on the book by Nickell John Romjue, I, Charles Darwin. The first episode of this series is already available at the “ID the Future” website. Be sure to also check out the I, Charles Darwin website where you can purchase the audiobook as a CD or… more

The Discovery Institute has announced that the deadline for applications to attend the 2013 summer seminars on intelligent design has been extended by one week. The new deadline is Monday, April 22. Successful applicants will have all of their expenses covered and will get to spend a week in Seattle hanging out with many of the leading… more