Back in 1996 NASA announced that it found a rock in Antarctica which rock came from Mars and contained microscopic fossils. One of the early and persistent objections against the biological origin of the microfossils was their size. They were about a tenth the size of known life forms.

At the time Robert Folk of the University of Texas objected that he had found many such "nanobacteria" in rock strata and even thought that these nanobacteria were the origin of travertine and other mineral deposits. Indeed, it turns out, few researches had ever looked for any life forms smaller than 200 nanometers (nm, billionths of a meter or yard). Folk’s claim forced others to look for these nanobacteria; and they found them!

The nanobacteria are the size of viruses and occur about everywhere. They range in size from 30 to 180 nm. Not only are they found in plaque, blood, food, and drinks, but they also love sulfurous hot springs, underwater volcanic vents, and Antarctic ice. The fossils in ALH84001 are almost identical to living samples found in the Columbia River Basin. They live in deep wells and caves, too.

Some of the newly discovered nanobacteria exhibit antibiotic and anti-carcinogenic properties to which numerous diseases easily fall prey. This may be why sulfurous hot springs have a reputation for having healing properties. Consequently, pharmaceutical companies are mum about their research into the DNA structures of these nanobacteria.

Consequently, the "nanofossils" found in the so-called Martian rock, may actually be of terrestrial origin, particularly, Antarctic nanobacteria. It would be interesting to examine the moon rocks returned by the Apollo program. Do they, too, show these nanofossils? I doubt it, but don't hold your breath waiting for the suggestion to be performed. Today science's role is indoctrination, not a quest for truth and facts. Even more than that, today’s science falsely so called (1 Timothy 6:20) is commissioned to prepare the world for the "inevitability" of communism, which Marx called "Democracy." (The reader will note that the United Nations police actions (wars) are all to "make the world safe for democracy." But as Jefferson said and the founding fathers of the United States echoed, democracy is the worst form of government ever conceived by man.)

Back in the mid-sixties physicists discovered that if time were to flow backwards, it would not look like a movie played in reverse as seen in a mirror. They noted that neutral particles called kaons sometimes decayed in a way that violated CP symmetry. Now CP symmetry is part of a package called CPT (for charge, parity, and time reversal) symmetry. That says that if one swaps antimatter for matter, and view the universe in a mirror and reverse the direction of time (arrow of time), then experiments should work as they do in this present world. The CPT theorem, now demonstrated valid to 18 decimal places, means that time-reversal symmetry could hold if charge-parity (CP) symmetry holds. The 1964 experiments, which cast doubt upon CP symmetry, meant that CPT symmetry could be saved only if when time flowed backwards, things adjusted in a way that cancelled out the CP symmetry violation.

Late in 1998 two groups, one from CERN and the other from Fermilab, reported observations that suggested that the rate of a particle’s decay is different from the rate of the same process done in reverse time. The former team found that the rate for antikaons transforming into kaons was a bit higher than for what would be the case in the time-reversed process, that is, kaons becoming antikaons.

The other group looked for a very rare, one-in-ten-million, decay of a single kaon into pairs of electrons and pions. In this case, time asymmetry reveals itself in a subtler way. Because reversing time also reverses a particle’s momentum, the team looked for time asymmetries by comparing the rates of some decays to others where the direction of the emerging particles looked as they would if time had been reversed. The rates differ by about 13%.

Both experiments record time asymmetry at about what is needed to compensate for the CP asymmetry. In other words, the CPT theorem still stands and time travel is still sheer fantasy.

We've all seen the Milky Way in its brightness during a dark summer night away from city lights. Some readers know that the Milky Way is a galaxy. In particular, it is a barred spiral though its bar is not as pronounced as that of NGC 1300 which is pictured below.

Models and observations of spiral galaxies show that supernovae, interstellar clouds that launch intense cosmic rays and other life-threatening phenomena are concentrated in spiral arms. This is one argument that has been used against evolutionists who admit that the sun and the earth have passed through several deadly spiral arms in their fabled evolutionary history. Accordingly, the earth can expect one lethal supernova explosion near it every couple of hundred million years. So why does life persist on earth?

Unfortunately for the creationist argument, two Russian astronomers have now provided evolutionists with an "out." Yuri N. Mishorov and I. A. Zenina published an article entitled "Yes, the Sun is located near the corotation circle." Their abstract reads as follows:

In other words, the earth is situated to within one part in 300 in exactly the right position to avoid ever entering a spiral arm. Just like a surfer skimming along the bore of a breaking wave, without danger of running into the wave or having the wave collapse upon him, so the sun "rides" the density waves which are the spiral arms. Of course, in a geocentric perspective, the Milky Way does the "riding," but the effect is the same.

The biblical impact is this: the earth was created for man, and God created it so that man could live upon it eternally without cosmic disasters. More specifically, this is just another example of the anthropic principle: that the testimony of the universe is that it was created for man.

By compiling all the solar wind data gathered in the space age, NASA scientists have concluded that even though the solar magnetic field is constantly changing, it always returns to its original shape and position.

"We now know that the Sun's magnetic field has a memory and returns to approximately the same configuration in each 11-year solar cycle," said Dr. Marcia Neugebauer, a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Current theories imply that the field is generated by random, churning motions within the Sun and should have no long-term memory. Despite this expectation, the underlying magnetic structure remains fixed at the same solar longitude."

"It's interesting that the solar magnetic field varies in strength and direction, but not in longitude," said Dr. Edward Smith, senior research scientist at JPL.

Fluids conducting electricity under the Sun's surface generate the magnetic field, Neugebauer explained, and the field's apparent memory is most likely caused by a structure and process occurring deeper inside the Sun than previously believed. "There may be something asymmetric about the Sun's interior, perhaps a deep-seated lump of old magnetic field," she said.

In four years of operation, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft has found 102 comets, making it by far the most successful comet-hunter in history. Calculations have shown that the latest comets discovered with SOHO are previously unknown (undiscovered) comets. SOHO has revolutionized solar science. It also revealed an amazing number of suicidal comets plunging into the solar atmosphere.

At left: Two comets head for a collision with the sun in this photo taken by SOHO. Comets which come close to the sun like these two are called "sun grazers." [Click on the picture to view the movie (917K, Apple .mov type).]

Like nearly all of SOHO's comet discoveries, the latest comet showed up in images from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. This is a set of coronagraphs that view the space around the Sun out to 12.5 million miles, while blotting out the bright solar disk with masks. LASCO watches for ejections of electrically charged gas from the Sun that threaten to disturb the Earth's space environment. As a bonus of unanticipated size, it also proved ideal for capturing objects falling to the Sun. Still pictures and movies from LASCO are freely available on the Internet, and even amateur astronomers have used them to discover comets.

Ten comets discovered by SOHO, including SOHO numbers 100, 101 and 102, passed the Sun at a safe distance. However, the rest of the SOHO comets vaporized in the solar atmosphere. Near misses are well known, and 100 years ago Heinrich Kreutz in Kiel, Germany, realized that several comets seen buzzing the Sun seemed to have a common origin, because they came from the same direction among the stars. These comets are now called the Kreutz sungrazers, and the 92 vanishing SOHO comets belong to that class.

"SOHO is seeing fragments from the gradual breakup of a great comet, perhaps the one that the Greek astronomer Ephorus saw in 372 BC," said Dr. Brian Marsden of the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. "Ephorus reported that the comet split in two. This fits with my calculation that two comets on similar orbits revisited the Sun around AD 1100. They split again and again, producing the sungrazer family, all still coming from the same direction." Their ancestor must have been enormous by cometary standards.

"The rate at which we've discovered comets with LASCO is beyond anything we ever expected," said Biesecker. "We've increased the number of known sungrazing comets by a factor of four. This implies that there could be as many as 20,000 fragments."

Life is perilous for a sungrazer. The mixture of ice and dust that makes up a comet's nucleus is super heated, and it can survive its visit to the Sun only if it is quite large. What's more, the strong tidal effect of the Sun's gravity can tear the loosely glued nucleus apart. The history of splitting gives clues to the strength of comets, which will be of practical importance if ever a comet seems likely to hit the Earth. Also, the fragments seen as SOHO comets reveal the internal composition of comets, freshly exposed, in contrast to the much-altered surfaces of objects like Halley's Comet that have visited the Sun many times.

Throughout the centuries, particularly since the invention of the telescope, observers have reported flashes, clouds, and sudden color changes on the moon. Most astronomers have, officially, been skeptical of these reports; but the latest series cannot be denied. During the night of 17-18 November of 1999, Dr. David Dunham, renowned for his work on occultations (where stars are eclipsed by the moon or planet), constantly monitered the dark side of the moon with photometric equipment. Observers around the world watched at the same time, looking for flashes of light caused by the impact of Leonid meteors hitting the moon. As reports came in, Dunham checked his data for confirmation and so was able to compile a prliminary list of six events. One surprise so far: the amount of impact energy converted into light far surpassed theoretical expectations; so far so, indeed, that some speculate that a piezoelectric effect may be the cause. (When certain crystals are struck, they emit electric current or light. This is the piezoelectric effect.) The brightest of the six flashes was of third magnitude, visible to the naked eye even through the night lights of a small city.

One of the most vexing evidences for a young earth is that if the earth were more than a few tens of thousands of years old, all the topsoil would have washed into the seas. But such evidence does not stand alone. Over great regions of the earth, and particularly in Australia, the land is flat, and in those regions, the index fossil "dating" system says that the surface is tens of millions of years old. Is this a problem for evolutionists? Most assuredly, for these regions should be deeply gouged into ravines by streams if they were all that old. Evolutionists have still not come up with a plausible explanation. Still they say that there is no evidence against them. Such blind, Kierkegardian faith!

"Professional astronomers never see UFOs," say the skeptics. Oh, really? When I was a graduate student at Case-Western Reserve University in the late 1960s, perhaps no professor was more dead-set against UFOs than was C. Bruce Stephenson. Since the astronomy program at Case was observational, we were regularly scheduled to observe with either of the two telescopes then in use at Case. One of these was a Schmidt-Cassegrain which was located east of Chardon, Ohio. (The location now houses the Cassegrain which was in East Cleveland when I was there.) A popular tale among the graduate students involved Dr. Stephenson and a student who had graduated a year or so before I arrived.

The story goes that after a night of observing the two spotted something at the end of the night. Rumor had it that it was a UFO, but Dr. Stephenson swore the grad student to secrecy and never revealed just what they saw. However, the graduate student was able to say they had seen something "strange."

Now we have a report of a sighting by another professional astronomer. This time it was Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. Tombaugh wrote in his journal:

NASA scientists taking a census of large asteroids in our solar system neighborhood have cut their estimate in half. The revised calculation comes from data gathered by NASA's Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System (NEAT) and published in the January 13 issue of the journal Nature. Until now, the population estimate of large, near-earth asteroids ranged between 1,000 and 2,000. The new observations have reduced that figure to between 500 and 1,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter.

The researchers used the computerized technology of the NEAT camera, which has been tracking near-earth asteroids and comets in 1995. (The new estimate is based on observations recorded between 1995 and 1998.) NEAT uses a charge-coupled device camera mounted on a 1-meter (39-inch) telescope atop Mount Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii. NASA's stated goal for NEAT is to find 90-percent of all large, near-earth asteroids by 2010. Presently the count stands at 322 large, near-earth asteroids. None of the asteroids observed thus far will hit earth anytime in the near future.

The past estimate relied on humans poring over photographic plates of the nighttime sky. The problem with that is humans can’t be sure of how many asteroids they were missing, because they can’t see faint objects. People's eyes tire, water-up, and so tend to overlook some objects.