I was just given a link to information on amazing research that has been going on for quite a while. I had heard about portions of the research, but huge advancements have been made recently. The research involves making replacement body parts such as lungs, hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. The video shows the results of a successful replacement transplant of a woman’s damaged windpipe using the patient’s own cells that were grown over a precise scaffold of protein. At this...
Read MoreLiving Fossils
Living on this earth are some interesting creatures which, according to evolutionary theory, “should have” been extinct millions of years ago, yet they live on, virtually unchanged. Some of these include the opossum, the horseshoe crab, the snapping turtle, the cockroach, the platypus, and the famous coelacanth. The coelacanth is a strange fish that was thought to have become extinct along with the dinosaurs over 70 million years ago. It was known only from fossils until...
Read MoreMale Praying Mantis: Plight or Passion?
Personally, praying mantises give me the “creeps.” I am not like a friend of mine who, as a child, kept a praying mantis named, “Barbara” in his bedroom. To me, there has always been something sinister and austere about them. After reading about their reproductive habits, I had more reason to feel this way. As a part of the mating process, the male praying mantis is actually eaten by the female! If a male is lucky, the female will wait until during or after the ritual...
Read MoreThe Amazing Platypus
When specimens of the duckbill platypus were first sent to England in the late 1700’s, many English scientists thought it was a fraud. It plainly didn’t fit well in any of the categories of animals known at that time. Was it a bird, a reptile, a mammal or a combination of all of these? The platypus is an extremely interesting creature. It has fur like a mammal but it lays soft, leathery eggs like a reptile. Usually 1-3 eggs are laid in a nest built by the mother...
Read MoreAnts and Antifreeze
Pun intended, but ants really do produce antifreeze, too! Yep, it gets cold out there in the ground under a blanket of snow. Since the ants don’t have their own central heating systems, they need to have a way to keep from freezing during the winter. So the colder it gets, the more antifreeze is actually produced. Did this ability happen by chance over millions of years by mutation and natural selection as our evolutionist friends would claim? Scientists have long...
Read MoreAntarctic Fish with Antifreeze!
Think of how many times we have said, “It sure is cold this winter. Global warming nothing — it isn’t happening here!” Sometimes it would seem our blood is ready to freeze in our veins. So we crank up the heat in the house and head for the auto store to get extra antifreeze for the car. We throw extra blankets on the bed and snuggle in with a good issue of Think & Believe for comfort! Bears hibernate in their dens and other animals put on thicker fur coats, but what...
Read MoreThe Marine Iguana
Marine iguanas are found only on the Galápagos Islands located in the Pacific Ocean near Ecuador, South America. They are the only lizards that are able to live and feed in the sea. Marine iguanas are vegetarians. They feed on seaweed and algae which they find on rocks, in tidal pools, or in the sea. The adult males can grow to over 5 feet long and the females up to almost 4 feet. On land, marine iguanas are rather clumsy lizards, but in the water they are powerful,...
Read MoreBee Dances and Communication
Years ago, I saw a very interesting Moody Science film featuring the Dance of the Bees. Research first analyzed by Martin Lindauer 60 years ago showed that bees actually communicate by doing a type of energetic and vibrating waggle dance. This communicates the direction and the distance to a food source to other bees. (I wondered if they could actually talk but were just having fun doing some kind of charades at a bee party.) More recently, the Sept. 27, 2010, New York...
Read MoreMore “Living Fossils”
For the Laotian Rock Rat it was a day like any other. Then the men started chasing him. Running for his life, he was determined not to end up in a meat market like the rest of his family. Finally, he tired and was captured. Instead of knives, however, these men carried cameras. After some pictures, he was gently returned to the rocks from which he was taken. What was the occasion? Why the special treatment? Meanwhile, deep in the Coral Sea, an innocent shrimp-like...
Read MoreSurvival of the Fittest?
Natural Selection, or “survival of the fittest,” is the mechanism which is usually proposed to drive evolution. It seems obvious that those organisms, which are more “fit” in a particular environment or under particular conditions, will be those that survive. However, by itself, natural selection has no power to “create” anything. At best, all it can do is “choose” between organisms that already exist. Thus, it has no power to explain the origin of a new trait. Furthermore,...
Read MoreSpontaneous Generation
For a long time people thought that living things came from non-living things … mud turned into frogs, old rags turned into rats, and rotten meat turned into white worms. In the late 17th century, a man named Francesco Redi did an experiment to see if meat did turn into worms. He put meat into two jars, one covered with fine gauze and the other left open. Redi observed that flies crawled all over the uncovered meat laying eggs, which later turned to fly larvae (white worms...
Read MorePolar Bear Warmth
Even a polar bear has to keep warm. Part of its heat is produced in the daylight by the sun shining on its fur. The fur consists of clear, hollow hairs which are very similar in design to fiber optics. Sunlight penetrates these fibers and the warmth from the sun is transferred directly into the body. The hollow hair also provides a dead air space for insulation, thus helping the polar bear stay warm longer. Is it fair to say that since fiber optics are highly designed, so...
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Friends - Richard's Life was Changed!! - And this is why he is leading AOI's Colorado Family Camp! Join us July 30 - Aug 4 - conta.cc/3X4JroB pic.twitter.com/u8j1AP1Pmu
