Mark Boslough is a Research Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he is funded by NASA to model impacts on Jupiter, asteroid deflection methods, and cosmic airbursts in Earth’s atmosphere. He has spent much of his career seeking validation or “ground truth” for his airburst models. He has participated in expeditions around the world to airburst locations including the glass-forming event in the Libyan Desert of Egypt, the 1908 Tunguska explosion, and the 2013 Chelyabinsk event. He received his PhD in Applied Physics (with studies in Geophysics) from Caltech in 1983, where he specialized in hypervelocity impact experiments. He has worked at all three DOE national laboratories, first as a student at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory performing shock temperature measurements, then at Sandia where he pioneered the use of hydrocodes to model cosmic airbursts for planetary risk assessment, and finally at Los Alamos where he continues his efforts to understand the physics of airbursts and quantify their contribution to impact risk.

On Sept. 20, 2021, I received an email from a colleague and impact expert who wrote, “I suspect you've seen the recent Nature paper about the airburst in the Jordan Valley. I wonder if we could talk about it?” It was the paper, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el‑Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” by Bunch et al., and the so-called Comet Research Group (CRG). It was actually published by Nature Scientific Reports, which is not Nature.

Many others were also tricked by the nature.com domain, and this confusion was exploited by one of the paper’s coauthors, George Howard, the group’s blogger and cofounder of the CRG that cosponsored the work. He tweeted that day, “This week's Monday night post is on today's Nature pub on our discovery of Sodom. Future posts on Gomorrah. And the Ark. Click the top right hamburger at the Cosmic Tusk and subscribe now for future Revelations, now that we're done with Genesis lol.”

He left ambiguous which “Nature pub” he was referencing, but he didn’t keep his readers guessing about the subject matter. To the authors who were promoting the paper, it was all about the biblical city of Sodom. As a political science major, wealthy businessman, and former GOP senate staffer, it was never clear what scientific contributions Howard had made to the CRG, other than blogging and promotion, that had qualified him to be a regular coauthor of their papers since 2007.

But this paper was different.

Continue Reading

Robert M. Zink is Professor, School of Natural Resources and School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Curator, Nebraska State Museum; and Author of The Three-Minute Outdoorsman (2014) and The Three-Minute Outdoorsman Returns (2018). He teaches evolution and avian biology.

Over the last few years in my evolution class, I bring up some of the claims made about the biological accuracy of the Noah’s Ark narrative. The students were fascinated to learn that some think that Noah brought dinosaurs on the Ark; naturally, questions began to fly. The first is, inevitably, how could there be two velociraptors on the boat and any other animals left alive? Or, there was a dinosaur that was 6 stories high, how’d that work? When I pointed out that some have claimed that Noah might have brought juveniles, or fed them plants or meal worms, the eye rolling was dizzying.

One of the students made an amazing point that I had missed – if Noah had taken animals from deserts, prairies, tropical rain forests, polar ice caps, etc., when the flood waters receded, were their environments just like before and full of food? It’s hard to imagine flood waters disappearing and the tropical rain forest reappearing intact.

The notion of two-by-two immediately hits anyone who has had a genetics course because they’re aware of the devastating effects of inbreeding. Even though Noah didn’t bring only his wife, but also three sons and their wives, the level of inbreeding would have rivaled that of the Habsburgs and been a crushing genetic blow to the rekindling of humanity.

Continue Reading

A colleague just alerted us to an article, Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, in the April 10 edition of the Washington Post. According to Mark Johnson, the author of the Post article, the paper “described ways in which evolution unfolds in both living and nonliving systems, a subject relevant to the search for life elsewhere in the universe.”

Michael L. Wong, an astrobiologist and the editor of the paper, confirmed that the paper had been withdrawn because two of the authors who are based in the United States feared retaliation, including possibly deportation. Dr. Wong told the Post,

“I was so looking forward to reading this paper because I think the ideas in it are potentially transformative,” Wong said. “But the fact that people, scientific researchers, are afraid of just engaging in normal scientific discourse, putting their well thought out ideas into the public sphere so that everybody can see them, read them, come to their own conclusions about them and then debate them ― it is so disheartening.”

As I suggested in an earlier article, quoting the Righting America blog, this is where we are, 100 years after the Scopes trial.

To see comments on this post click below:

Continue Reading

According to a recent blog post by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger, A Century After Scopes: Much Has Not Changed, and Much Has Changed. I was most interested in their observation that William’s father was a fundamentalist who passionately opposed evolution. But he was also a geologist who searched for oil, believed in an “old earth,” and subscribed to what is known as “day-age theory,” that is, the belief that the “days” in Genesis are not literal, 24-hour days, but rather represent ages. Thus, at the time of the Scopes trial, creationism realistically accepted the vast age of the earth.

Today, thanks primarily to Henry Morris, creationists do not accept an old earth and consequently are forced to deny, for example, geological science. Ultimately, they undermine virtually all of science and, according to Trollinger and Trollinger, promote an alternative education system which is

"not just about getting creationism, the Bible, and white Christian nationalism into the public schools. It is also about funding private schools, including fundamentalist schools. It is about expanding the right-wing subculture. It is about taking dominion over the culture."

This, they say, is where we are 100 years after the Scopes trial.

To see comments on this post click below:

Continue Reading