WISE MAN OF NEANDER

Here he is, rearranged!...THE original ‘Mr. Neanderthal' discovered in 1856 by quarry workers in the Feldhofer Cave off the Neander Gorge, 13 km east of Dusseldorf, Germany. 
Pioneer Joachim Neander (1650-1680) settled in this tal (or valley), hence ‘Neandertal’.

Similar skeletal remains have been found across Europe, Middle East, West Asia and North Africa since then (with the same average height as modern man!), so paleontologists have given these 'cave men' the fancy handle: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, which actually means: 'wise man of Neander'. 

We’re supposed to be a lot wiser so we now get the distinction of: Homo sapiens sapiens.

We are told that these people hail from the Late Pleistocene period and have been extinct for at least 33,000 years. Check out the ‘scientific evidence ' for this claim yourself but be sure to omit the imagination, artistic license, bias, prejudice....

The Neanderthal was at first portrayed by the media as an ignorant, brutish caveman but further digging has revealed that these people used stone tools, controlled fire, crafted hunting implements, used cooking utensils, wore jewelry and cosmetics, appreciated ornaments, buried their dead, played musical instruments, used symbolism, even had superglue..... - add a canoe and it could be a modern day camping ground!  
After all, if your family has been scattered by language confusion (Babel in Genesis 11:9) and is forced to make a new start in a foreign land, with only the clothes on your back and a few portable implements, where would you take shelter during an ice age?.....in a cave?

“Oh, but these relics uniquely exhibit occipital buns, prognathism, rachitis, supra-orbital tori, taurodontis…..”                                                                            

Well professor, we live in the real world, not academia, and we can walk down the main street any day of the week and see all of that in people with different shaped skulls, or protruding jaws, or bent leg bones, even elderly folk with prominent brow ridges and we might even see fused teeth.  (We have even had, not one but two, dear old neighbours with spinal deformity, forcing them to virtually walk like your stooped ‘knuckle-walkers’!)

So why this article?  Harvard scientist George Church is reportedly flagging the opportunity for a woman to be impregnated with a cloned Neanderthal embryo.                                  

Can DNA survive 30,000 plus years?  Who cares?                                             

If you look up ’Neanderthal’ in any reputable dictionary you will find the word before it is: ‘Nazi’ - the Homo sapiens sapiens who experimented on the defenseless innocent – and largely got away with it.                             

On behalf of IOPNA readers, what we do not want to see is an innocent cloned child used as a guinea-pig in more ‘scientific’ child abuse.

Acknowledgements: 

Dr. Carl Wieland, One Human Family, Creation Book Publishers, Atlanta 2011 

Philip Bell, Apemen: Missing Links & The Bible, Creation Ministries International  

Photo credit: donsmaps.com

Brave new world of Uranus

Hey, this gaseous planet sure looks different! It even behaves different.

Here's Uranus rolling along like a bowling ball (97.77 degree tilt) in a nearly perfect orbit of the Sun, taking 84 years. 

At the same time, all of its 27 moons and 13 rings orbit around its tilted equator.

What else can the astro-physicists tells us about this blue-green beauty?                            

It’s cold of course (-215 degrees C), there’s a lot of hydrogen, helium and methane, it has gravity and a magnetic field, and takes only 17.2 hours to spin.

It wasn’t until 1948 that Gerard P. Kuiper discovered its moon ‘Miranda’, named after the beautiful daughter of Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Tempest’.  What did she have to say about her sweetheart? 
“O brave new world that hath such creatures in it.”

                                              

Well we didn’t know about this ‘new world’ until William Herschel was in his front garden on 13 March 1781, looking through his telescope at stars in the Gemini constellation.
By mistake he found the 7^th planet, Uranus, which turns out to be 19.18 times further from the Sun than Earth: very close to where Titius and Bode said it would be, 9 years earlier!

Uranus is unique but what an odd creature Miranda is –

·       partly smooth

·       partly rugged - canyons 80 km wide and 20km deep, cliffs at least 10 km high

·       partly ‘painted’ with a brush?

·       plus concentric grooves and even racetracks!

Why?  No-one knows, but it sure looks like my granny didn’t invent patchwork for her quilts – 

Someone else thought of it before her.

By the way, if you’re looking for Uranus today it is in the constellation of Pisces, in Australia’s north-western evening sky.

Acknowledgements:
wikipedia.com 
Spike Psarris, Our created Solar System, www.creationastronomy.com 
Photo credits: NASA / Erich Karkoschka, University of Arizona                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

'A Bob each way' on Palestine

IOPNA's first current affairs bulletin -

Last Friday (18^th), Australia and Britain issued a joint communique calling on USA to make more of an effort in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.  Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Carr has yet to face the electors in a federal election but he would be well aware everyone is tired of this conflict, having lost our own soldiers on this patch of dirt during the ~3,300 years of warfare since Moses and his rellies moved in out of the desert. This follows Prime Minister Julia Gillard being forced to agree to Australia abstaining from voting at the United Nations on the successful move to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state.   

Why has ‘Palestine’ been so sought after? 

It is the hub for Africa, Europe and Asia. 

So......who are the Palestinians anyway and are they entitled to any of this land?

Every empire in history that has tried to possess this land has collapsed - Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome.....and in recent times:

1917                 Britain issues Balfour Declaration: (but ignores it in 1939)                                                           "...the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people..."                                           

29 Nov 1947   Arab states reject the United Nations partitioning between Israelis and Palestinians                                            

14 May 1948   United Nations General Assembly recognise the State of Israel !

15 May 1948   Next day: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq & Jordan attack Israel (virtually defenseless) resulting in Jordan losing territory!

5 June 1967    Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq again attack Israel, resulting in Israel gaining Sinai, Gaza and West Bank.                                                        

6 Oct 1973      Only 6 years later, Egypt and Syria attack Israel on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement)                                                 

March 1979    Camp David peace talks result in Israel withdrawing from Sinai.                                                   Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat assassinated in 1981.

Sept 1993        Oslo peace talks between Israel and the PLO. Israel recognises PLO and starts withdrawing from Gaza and some of West Bank in 1994. 

4 Nov 1995     Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin assassinated.

We’re playing for keeps here. Obviously the Arabs want it all and anybody who dares compromise over this land seems to pay dearly!

So what does the Bible (the Jewish sacred Tanakh) tell us God has to say about it?

"The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine..." Leviticus 25:23

"A land for which the Lord your God cares; the eyes of the Lord your God are always on it..."           Deuteronomy 11:12

"To your descendants (Abraham's) I will give this land." Genesis 12:7                                    

Abraham only ever owned a cemetery - so out of his 8 children, which one(s) will benefit?

Not Ishmael (Gen 21:10), nor Keturah's 6 children (25:5-6) but Isaac (26:3) is the only son God recognises. (22:2) 
Then its grandson Jacob's turn (28:4) and confirmed by God: 
"Israel shall be your name....The land which I gave Abraham and Isaac I give to you; and to your descendants after you I give this land." (35:10-12)  
What does 'Israel' mean?  ‘Prince of God’ or ‘Ruling with God’

So the Bible says Jacob (Israel and his weird family) gets God’s land and gets to rule with God!

Here is the land description:                                                           

"...from the brook of Egypt (Wadi el Arish) to the great river, the River Euphrates..." Genesis 15:18 and detailed in Numbers 34:1-13                                 

Deut 1:7 & 11:24   Josh 1:4           Psalm 105

Meanwhile, Isaiah 18 tells us what God is now silently doing:                                        

"I will take My rest, and I will look from My dwelling place like clear heat in sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest." - while a far-away superpower with African connections (guess who!) and with its clattering wings (!), sends its ambassadors by warship to this powerful nation that everyone's wary of.

So far Israel’s victories against overwhelming forces have proved miraculous. Is there really a God out there who helps them? Why not just do it Bob’s way, leave God out of it, and have a ‘bob each way’ for a win-win by dividing up the land as in Daniel 11:39 and Joel 3:2?....or will that be a lose-lose?  

Acknowledgements: David Wroe & Ruth Pollard, SMH, Jan 19/20 2013 

Image credit: Lt. Horsemen / iancoate.com

Relax...we're lithium powered

Let’s take a look at LITHIUM but first of all make sure you find it on the Periodic Table of Elements – that brilliant arrangement by Dimitri Mendeleev and Julius Meyer that they taught us about in college.

Lithium is the lightest metal, first discovered in petalite by Swedish chemist Johann August Arfwedson in 1817. It is even the lightest solid element - half the weight of water and even lighter than carbon, nitrogen and oxygen! It is so reactive that it does not occur naturally despite comprising 0.002% of Earth's crust and makes for a powerful source of energy (600-2000 watt hours per kg) in batteries, unfortunately sensitive to excess current flow and air pressure changes. No wonder lithium batteries are used in computers, smart phones, electric cars…

What about aircraft?  The stairway says it all: "Next time...Relax (before you fly)" as it assists passengers off this Boeing 787 Dreamliner after its emergency landing with burning lithium-ion batteries. Fortunately there have been no mid-air catastrophes and Boeing must now find out how to control volatile batteries that start melting at only 135 degrees C and releasing oxygen at 200 degrees.

So if Lithium doesn’t occur outside a factory, where do they find it? 
70% of the world’s deposits are believed to be in South America’s lithium chloride, with 50% in Bolivia’s Salar De Uyuni – a 10 billion ton salt lake over 10,580 square kilometres and 3,656 metres above sea level.                            

With lithium used in radiation detection, nuclear fusion, batteries, ceramics,                       enamels, optics glass, lubricants, rubber, dyestuffs, paint, dehumidifiers, CO2 scrubbers, welding flux, bipolar medication….and even backyard ‘ice’ labs (for dreamliners) – is it any wonder these deposits are being eyed off!

Just by the way, who designed elements like lithium in the first place, that Mendeleev & Meyer were able to neatly table for us?

Acknowledgements:

upi.com                                                                                        

dailymail.com                                                                      

foreignpolicy.com                                                                               

World Book 2005                                                                                       

mpower.com

Photo credit: smh.com.au

SPIDER SILK

How would you like to find this critter under the stairs on a dark night?

Puppet maker Bryony Anderson cleverly crafted her 'Salvage Spider' from discarded teddy bears, even using their innards to handspin 205 metres of web 'silk' for this Garden Orb-weaver (Araneus transmarinus). These non-venomous garden spiders take 1 hour to build a new web every night, making about 100 in a lifetime and eating the old webs as they go.

As for the real protein silk, a spider’s glands produce six different types, often more than two at a time, which can be blended for at least seven different uses!...

• dragline, web rim and spokes
• scaffolding
• capture of prey
• egg cocoon
• wrapping prey or sperm distribution
• sticky globules
• web connections

The silk is produced from a panel of spinnerets (spigots & spools) at the rear of the abdomen and drawn out by the hind legs. (Some spiders then comb superfine silk into ‘hackled bands’ using the hairy calamistrum on these legs. Adventurous youngsters even go ‘ballooning’ with gossamer.) 

In fact, 1 teaspoon of spider silk is sufficient for 1 million webs!

Now here’s the clincher – a young spider is never taught how to produce and use the strongest of natural fibres, while scientists remain baffled how pulling this stuff hardens it to become stronger than steel!

Just by the way, can you see any design in a spider making its web?

Acknowledgements:

Bryony Anderson, Densey Clyne et al, Pappinbarra NSW 

howstuffworks.com 

wikipedia.org 

B.Taylor, J, Green, J.Farndon, Big Bug Book, Hermes House, London 2010

Photo credit: orb web / fleetpond.wordpress.com

POOCH'S PEE-MAIL

Did you hear about the police dog that wouldn’t leave a patch of lawn overlooking an area being ‘swept’ before a visit by Queen Elizabeth II?  Shovels were fetched and a small rock was found 60 CM DOWN, that still carried minute traces of gelignite from quarrying!

What about the search warrant where a police dog kept worrying a large LPG bottle in use for cooking? The stove had to be turned off, the gas was released, and rifles were found concealed INSIDE the bottle!

Dogs can also detect lost people, bombs, drugs, scat, money, imminent epileptic seizures and tornados, melanomas, and of course ‘pee-mail’….at least 10,000 times better than us!

Let’s see if they are just more in tune to smells because of their poor eyesight or whether they are uniquely designed for it….                                                              

Each nostril of a dog can be independently wiggled as it assesses the air intake to give directional signals to a brain 1/10 the size of ours but with 40 times more dedication to smell analysis.  12% of the air inhaled for respiration is diverted to smell detection (olfaction) where it passes over bony scroll-shaped plates (turbinates) containing up to 300 million scent receptors (we have only 5 - 6 million) over an area 60 times larger. The exhaled air is then swirled out though slits in the sides of the nose so as not to confuse the air intake.

It doesn’t stop there. Puppies blind at birth, have heat detection (for finding mum) that switches off with adulthood when a distinct part of the brain will rely on Jacobson’s organs to detect pheromones for sex communication.                                                

Your already know your dog is special and just as unique as you….your dog’s clammy nose-print is as unique as your fingerprints!….but that’s another story.

Can you see any Master Design up the nose of man’s best friend??

Acknowledgements: 
Sgt. Bill Davidson (ret’d), Wintergarden Men’s Coffee Club, Port Macquarie NSW                                                           pbs.org
Photo credits:
Bloodhound / care2.com
Pee-mail / flickr.com