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The New York Times, Ireland On-Line, Reuters, and the Houston Chronicle have the story.

 The Mayor of New Orleans reports that thousands could be dead.  My heart goes out everyone there.

The New York Times has reported on a poll released yesterday (August 30th) by the Pew Research Center For the People and the Press.  The poll says, in short, that the majority (64%) of Americans want creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools.  Fully 36% favor replacing evolution with creationism.  Wow.  And while about half of those polled believe "humans and other living things have evolved over time," many of these still think public schools should present Creationism as well.

All the evolutionist scientists out there will at this point be crying, "Foul!" and arguing for the academic ignorance of the American public.  Does the American public care?  Apparently not.  The poll finds that only one-fourth of these good folks think scientists should have the primary say in how evolution is taught in schools.  41% think parents should have that advantage.

 The report also notes that Americans may be a bit confused over the terms "evolution" and "creationism."  I can understand why this would be the case, because "evolution" can mean big-bang to microbe to modern man, or it can mean wolf to bulldog.  Almost all creationists believe that a limited form of evolution takes place through natural selection, but not all of the public realizes this.  However, in terms of public school curriculum, the public most likely has origins, not modern natural selection, in mind.

Another interesting point is that while evolutionists were clearly more likely to cite "education" as the most important factor in developing their opinion of origins (creationists cited religion), they were much less likely that creationists to express confidence in their views.

Does that mean a lot of people believe in evolution without knowing how it's possible? 

This just in:

After years of worry over the effects of man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) on the ozone layer, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study has confirmed that the ozone layer decline has stopped declining.  While not necessarily back to its old self, scientists suspect that the ozone layer will begin to thicken again over the next several decades, thanks, they say, to such measures as the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which by international agreement has limited the amount of chlorine and bromine gases released into the atmosphere.

Ozone, or O³, is a molecular bond of three oxygen atoms that forms (and breaks apart) naturally in the atmosphere, and also at Kinkos near the Xerox machines (you'll notice that fresh "copier" smell).  The ozone layer blocks harmful UV radiation from the sun and fluctuates naturally through "complex chemical processes," as the NOAA puts it.  Whether natural processes have influenced the recent decline and stabilization of the ozone layer, and not just CFC's, is debatable.

Courtesy NASA-GSFC. Data from NOAA GOES. 

 And this one shows you exactly what region the eye of the storm is over:

Courtesy NOAA. 

 Good photos hereand here, and you can read a news blog of Katrina developments here, or get a more personable report of Katrina's poundings here, where Jon Donley blogs live from a flooded New Orleans.

U.S. scientists have found a gene that controls aging in mice.  They're calling this gene "Klotho," after the Greek goddess who spun the thread of life.  By "boosting" this gene, these scientists were able to cause mice to live naturally for 3 years instead of 2, and so of course everyone's anticipating the finding of a similar "Klotho" gene in humans.  Don't freak out though, a society of 200-year-old people doesn't appear to be in the near future;  the Klotho aging boost only seems to work well on male mice, and these little Methuselahs are much less fertile than normal. 

The prospect of a genetic control on the aging process is welcome news to Biblical literalists (such as myself, I'm proud to admit) who entertain the thought that the ancients--meaning those who lived 4,000 or so years ago--lived much longer than we do today.  History records the first humans as having average life spans of eight or nine hundred years.  Of course the famous Methuselah holds the record at 969.  After the global flood life spans began to significantly decrease.  Now we're lucky to nail one hundred.

I'm back in the saddle after being out of town (and away from my DSL) for almost a week.  My inbox greeted me with the following headline:

Godless Hollywood? Bible Belt? New Research Exploring Faith in America’s Largest Markets Produces Surprises

And a surprise it was.  This new report by the Barna Group reveals some unexpected statistics, such as the 22% of Little Rock, Arkansas residents that met survey criteria for "evangelical Christian," the highest percentage of any U.S. city.  The cities with the lowest percentage of evangelicals were Salt Lake City, Hartford, and Providence.
Even more boggling is that Los Angeles has the largest population (though not the highest percentage) of evangelicals and "born agains" of any U.S. metropolitan area, contrary to stereotypes.  The state of Alabama seems to have the greatest proportion of evangelicals, Connecticut the least.

All the evidence points to a high proportion of evangelicals and "born agains" in the southern Mississippi River basin area; specifically the states of Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  The polar opposites are northeast states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.  In Massachusetts, Connecticut and Washington, one out of every six adults are atheist or agnostic, double the national average.

It's an interesting pursuit to try to understand how this landscape of beliefs came to be.  In the Bible we find a similar situation of geographically influenced convictions when in Revelation Christ commends or rebukes the church of each city, based on their spiritual integrity, or lack of it. 

The Barna report was based on an astounding 24,000 interviews.  Interviewees were not asked to describe themselves as evangelical or born again; instead these terms were given to interviewees whose responses to a specified list of questions qualified them for the description.  You can get more details at the above link.

Researchers have just figured out that you can inexpensively slow down and speed up light signals in an optical fiber--a discovery that may manifest itself in improved fiber-optic communications.  Light signals normally travel at 186,000 miles per second, and in order to be stored or routed they must be converted into slower electrical signals, an expensive process.  A cheap technology that could slow light down might eliminate much of this conversion.

For all you lovers of herbal health products:  A scientific study has confirmed that the plant butterbur (Petasites hybridus) is as effective as a common antihistamine (Telfast 180) at treating hay fever (intermittent allergic rhinitis, or IAR).  Butterbur is also said to be useful for bladder control and the prevention of migraine headaches.


I'll be out of town for a few days, so posting may be a bit intermittent.
Meanwhile, buy your butterbur here.

There is a new tactic challenging Christianity in the 21st century.  It's not the creation and evolution debate--you already know about that.  Everyone saw that coming decades ago.
This challenge comes from humanist scientists who (seemingly) care very little about the past, ancient or recent.  They see the future.  They see the future in the palms of their hands, if you'll pardon the vagueness.

The challenge is bioscience.  It's about stem cells and cloning, genes and modification, embryos and organs.  It's secondarily about medicine, about how your children and grandchildren will be treated--or not treated--and where their treatment will come from.  It's primarily about ethics, whether mankind should conform science to a rule book, or whether the new age of gene science has freed us from those moral codes that peoples before us followed in ignorance.  Humanist scientists say the latter.

I'm here to tell you that if you're a Christian, you shouldn't be afraid.  Here's why.

The dilemmas 21st century Americans are faced with are not new.  Don't get me wrong; the technology is new, but not the ethical situations.  The ancients were confronted with the same ethical choices you and I are confronted with. 
Such as:  Is it better to leave an old person to die or keep treating him?  Is it right to allow a mentally deranged person to live?  Or someone with a painful, terminal illness?  Is there a "quality of life" threshold that all babies should meet?  Is disposing of an infant ethically as wrong as murdering a citizen in good standing?

The beauty of moral rules is that they apply in every situation.  Even when our feelings tell us otherwise.  Even when it seems like the choices in front of us are equally bad, moral law still applies.  The question is where you derive your moral law.

This is your good news, Christian.  Your moral law is established by the only God, sole Creator of space and earth, and everything in them.  He who designed life has told us how to treat it, and what to do about the problems we face.  This moral law was given to Adam, to Noah, and to the nation of Israel, specifically.  But since the God of Israel is the God of everyone, His moral law applies to everyone.  And if you have a Bible at home, you can learn all about it, if you care to read it.  Many people spend a lot of time talking about what they dislike about God and Christianity without honestly researching either.  [Our greatest freedom, by the way, is found in good law.  The United States was founded on good government, law, and constitution--and earned a reputation as the freest nation on earth]

I can't write out an expose' of God's moral law right now; but I could whet your appetite.
Rule #1  Mankind must obey his Creator's revealed law, or painful consequences will follow.   A silly way of saying it, I know, but true nonetheless.  As far as I can tell this principle is the first we encounter in the Bible.  It occurred in the Garden of Eden, Genesis 1-3, when God warned Adam that if he ate the forbidden fruit he would die--a foreign concept to the new human.  As we all know, Adam did eat the fruit, lost his immortality, and was cursed with pain, hardship, and death, along with his wife, the serpent, and all of creation.  This is the first of the laws and curses recorded in the Scripture, which you should regard as a historically factual.  As Scripture continues, there are more laws and more consequences spelled out.  You'd be wise to investigate them, if you haven't.

Because we have the Creator's Guide to Life, we don't need to be afraid of anything the future brings us.  God knows the future, and if we had needed more guidelines to deal with the issues at hand, He would've included them.  But He has already included all the rules we need.  We just need to apply them. 

God made DNA, made embryos, made sexual reproduction, and via the curse, made sickness.  He is the author of cellular research, of space science, of nanotech.  Our discoveries don't scare Him.  He is an awesome God.  That's why God isn't afraid of science.  So I'm not either.