Predators of the Monarch Butterfly

Millions of Monarch Butterflies become food for various predators every year. Besides their life cycle being very short, especially in the warmer months, their fragile wings are very susceptible to water. Even a few drops of the morning dew can be hazardous, and in colder weather wing icing (like aircraft) can be disastrous!

There are a multitude of little predators that eat the Monarch eggs and larvae such as ants, mites, spiders, and wasps. The adult monarchs are especially vulnerable to being eaten by predators while at the winter migratory sites where their population density is incredibly large, and the over-wintering time cooler weather causes them to be in a semi-dormant state making them easy to catch prey. Often their roosting trees are smothered with thousands of Monarchs.

The food source for the monarch larvae caterpillars is the milkweed plant. The plant contains toxic chemicals which the young monarch is immune to, and the residue of these toxins remain in the adult Monarch Butterfly.

They display bright orange and black colors to warn others of their noxious taste, which limits many hungry species. But other killers, notably mice, voles, and a few species of birds, are not deterred. The biggest threat to the Monarch Butterfly is from two bird species: the Black Headed Grosbeak, and the Black Backed Oriole. These birds, apparently unaffected by the butterfly's defensive chemical composition, often eat over ten percent of the monarch population in the over-wintering settlements. You can imagine a hungry bird going to the "all you can eat" buffet.

To learn much more about Monarch Butterflies visit http://monarch-butterfly.info - All Rights Reserved Jim Pratt.

One of Jim's most popular writings is about the Monarch's amazing several thousand mile annual migration to Mexico and California http://monarch-butterfly.info/Migration.html

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To Clone or Not to Clone - Therein Lies the Question

Soon, you will be able to clone yourself, many religious folks maybe appalled by this, but I wouldn't be if I were you, it is a good thing and the science available from such things will increase life expectancy and help us stay young and fulfilled, in a youth like fashion for 100s of years.

Before passing judgment or accepting the party-line with your decision of whether cloning is good or bad - may I be so bold as to recommend a book to you that explains what cloning is and what the potential is, perhaps you might dump your perception for now and consider all this? The book is:

"In His Image - The Cloning of Man" by David Rorvik - 1978.

The first part of this book dives deep into the morality issues of cloning, the religious barriers of society and the reality of what will soon be possible. Part II of this book describes the exact methods as to how cloning works and the methods used to create this future destiny and advances in science and medicine.

Indeed cloning has been in the news quite a bit lately in fact an article in USA Today 11-12-2007: Ban human clones or expect them soon, U.N. says;

Failure to outlaw reproductive cloning means it is just a matter of time until cloned individuals share the planet," said Brendan Tobin, a human rights lawyer who co-authored the report.

And so what if they do, what if human scientists become their own god to a very limited degree and start cloning their own? Clones are people too, they will be humans, so what is the problem? Please think hard on this, and quoting scripture, well that is simply not a viable reason to prevent cloning, you are going to have to do better than that.

Reference articles recently in the news bringing this topic back to life:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2007-11-10-cloning_N.htm?csp=DailyBriefing

http://www.slate.com/id/2177834/?gt1=10636

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington

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Why Is Nanotechnology Important?

First, you need to know what the term means...I will reference Wikipedia for a proper definition.

Nanotechnology refers broadly to a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers, and the fabrication of devices with critical dimensions that lie within that size range.

It is simply technology of the smallest kind. Why is that important? The laws of physics as most of you know them don't function in quite the same way when you talk about things this small. But you may be surprised to know that this is not "new" technology.

The first use of the concepts in 'nano-technology' (but predating use of that name) was in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important, etc.

This technology is making leaps and bounds. Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, all of these are related terms. You could ride an elevator into space because of nanotubes. Nanofiltration will bring water to rural areas who otherwise could not properly filter drinking water. There are ideas in the works that would allow nanomachines to deliver medicine directly to specific types of cells in the body. For example, an injection of nanobots with a chemotherapy drug for cancer could deliver the dose directly to the cancer tissue, reducing the damage to other tissues, and the quantity of medicine needed for treatment. There are nano materials that you can wear just like your shirt, that can change instantaneously into bullet and pierce proof material. There are literally thousands of other applications out there, but what is important for you to know is that this is a legitimate, and worthwhile thing to study.

These ideas are no longer science fiction, they are real.

Find more information at A Programming Pro
http://www.aprogrammingpro.com/2008/02/16/why-is-nanotechnology-important

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Modern Birds Lived With Dinosaurs

It seems that dinosaurs have recently acquired many new neighbors. At the beginning of the year, science journals announced that beetles lived during the dinosaur era. Recently, we learned that platypuses were also existent at that time. Now we can add modern birds to the list.

For a long time Darwinists have advised us to look at the bird feeder if we want to get a glimpse of latter-day dinosaurs. They believe that finches and woodpeckers are the descendants of the "terrible reptiles".

Evolutionists maintain that modern birds appeared "only" 60 million years ago or about five million years after the demise of the dinosaurs. But a recent study published in the journal BMC Biology refutes this view. A research team at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor led by graduate student Joseph Brown examined the rate of mutation with the help of the molecular clock. Mutations are basically copying mistakes that have a habit of accumulating in the genome of a species. Evolutionists believe that the clock is ticking at a reasonably uniform pace, and thus suppose that the amount of accumulated mutations helps to find out when certain species broke off from a common ancestor.

Brown and his colleagues concluded that modern birds already lived some 100 million years ago.

The use of the molecular clock involves many assumptions. For instance, the steady rate of the clock is based on the belief that mutations accumulate in different species at the same speed. However, according to chemist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, observations have shown that the mutation rate is constant over a generation in an organism. Thus the clock cannot tick at the same speed for bacteria and elephants, for example. Brown actually suggested that if one assumes that the mutation rate is constant in different bird species this can lead the research astray.

Turning dinosaurs into birds would otherwise also be impossible. Changing scales into feathers would be an insurmountable hurdle. No one has been able to explain convincingly how it could have happened even in theory. For instance, Scientific American acknowledged in 2003 that it was time to discard old notions of feather evolution. Richard Prum and Alan Brush, the authors of the article, admitted that the evolution of feathers was problematic. But they nevertheless chose to believe that it was possible and had happened.

In real life, turning a dinosaur into a bird is an extremely flimsy idea since evolutionists themselves believe that Archaeopteryx, the "reptile bird" that was supposed to have lived already about 80 million years before the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. And Archaeopteryx had fully developed, aerodynamic feathers.

The recent study, which was also reported by National Geography News, suggests that at least in theory some researchers are willing to discard the outdated view that the finches at the nearest bird feeder are latter-day feathered dinosaurs.

Joel Kontinen is a translator and novelist currently living in Finland. His background includes an MA in translation studies and a BA in Bible and Theology. He likes to keep up-to-date on science news and often comments on creation/evolution and origins issues.

Blog: http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com/

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