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I didn't know about this creation museum in Arkansas. It's small and nothing near the pizzazz of AIG's Creation Museum, but it's interesting to know about nonetheless. Supposedly the creators of the "Museum of Earth History" are planning to build a similar but larger museum in Dallas.

According to this article, Mike Huckabee "funded" the Museum of Earth History during his term as governor. Does that mean he privately donated to it or somehow sent tax dollars there? The latter doesn't seem very likely.

If you're in the mood to tolerate some anti-creation prejudice, here's a preview of what Time magazine had to say about the museum when it opened in 2005.

How's this for the great cause of evolutionary environmentalism: Some geologists from the University of Leicester are proposing that the earth has entered a new epoch of terrestrial history, moving us from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. As the name might imply, this newly proposed epoch is characterized by the supposed marks of man--the altered erosion and deposition of sediment (that means dirt), an upset carbon cycle that is promoting global warming, and a new rate and pattern of extinction among the world's plants and animals.

In old-earth chronology, the modern epoch, the Holocene, is the most recent in a long list of time periods spanning the earth's alleged four-and-a-half billion years of existence. The Holocene is said to have begun about 11,500 years ago and to have marked the rise of human civilization. In an old-earth timeframe, 11 thousand years is the blink of an eye--so it makes sense that an old-earth geologist would be worried about the changes happening on the earth in the last few millennia.

In the young-earth view, however, a few millennia is a long time. Creationists believe the earth was intended to be inhabited, and has held up fairly well under the "impact" of civilization. Although we oppose pollution and support conservation, we're opposed to the view that mankind is inherently a devastator of the planet. Humans are in a privileged position among living things, and wildlife does well when people are living with it in mind.

Remember all those reports after Hurricane Katrina about how global warming is causing more frequent, more powerful hurricanes? Well, never mind about that. At least that's what a new study in Geophysical Research Letters says, claiming that rising temperatures are creating wind shear that interferes with hurricane formation. (As you may recall, wind shear was blamed for the rather shy 2006 and 2007 hurricane season the U.S. experienced.)

Lead author Chunzai Wang said the study findings were based not on computer models but on observations. The study found that average wind shear increases about 10 miles per hour for every 1 degree C. rise in temperature.

The prediction is that increased warming will result in less hurricane landfalls in the U.S., but there is, of course, controversy here.

Elsewhere, NASA reports its astronauts were not drunk, Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo, a international genome project is launched, and a high school biology class cuts open cadavers.

This image of Mercury was taken just a few days ago by the Messenger spacecraft, as it passed within 124 miles of the planet's surface in a trajectory that will allow it to orbit Mercury in 2011. Messenger will be the first spacecraft to do so.

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

While Florida media has defaulted to asking the public for advice on covering the intelligent design versus evolution controversy in that state, Texas is hesitating to grant certification to the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School for their master's degree in science education. (ICR has recently relocated to Texas from California.) The commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Raymund Paredes, has been quoted as saying ICR's curriculum "doesn't line up very well with the curriculum available in conventional master of science programs here in Texas. I wanted them to either revise the curriculum or explain why it departed from the norm." I won't go out on a limb and call this challenge against ICR anti-creationist discrimination, but it is pretty suspicious. If anyone knows specifics about how ICR's curriculum "doesn't line up" (beyond challenging party dogma), I'm curious to know. Much as I hate to link you to such an anti-ID site as the NCSE, they have a good overview of this situation.

With all the Darwinism that creationists have to deal with these days, I wish they had could deal better with one other. At least two major disputes between creationists have been in the news in the past year. One was the ongoing tussle between AIG-U.S. and Australia's CMI, and the other, in the news this week, involves a 7-year dispute between creationist paleontologists over a particularly valuable Allosaur fossil. Tomorrow, Joe Taylor of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Texas will be auctioning off a large mastodon skull (bids start at $120,000) to help pay off $130,000 in damages a court has ordered him to pay for violating a written agreement made with the other parties to the Allosaur discovery.

As in many such cases, there are layers and layers to both of these disputes, which would ultimately be unprofitable to get into here. Conflict of some sort is inevitable, even among Christians. It would be presumptuous for me to make a judgment about who is right or wrong in these situations, but according to the Bible, someone in the church is qualified to arbitrate. Why bring everything into the news by allowing it to evolve into a lawsuit? Why discourage a generation of young people who might otherwise be interested in pursuing creation science work themselves? 1 Corinthians says, "The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already."

As a fellow creationist--one who is completely supportive of the missions of all groups involved--without any motive beyond love and a desire to see God's name respected, I can say this: We should have had the maturity to handle this conflict years before the secular courts became necessary. I am ashamed, not that we have conflict, but that it seems no one can resolve it.

Outside Protestantism: Pope Benedict XVI cancels a speech after his scheduled visit to La Sapienza university in Rome is protested by faculty and students. But is this really about the pope's comments on Galileo, or about anti-creationism?

 This fascinating image, taken by Hubble, shows not two but apparently three galaxies perfectly aligned in space (from Earth perspective). The galaxy in front is gravitationally bending the light of the two galaxies behind it, creating a ring of light known as an Einstein ring--although in this case there are two rings, making this the first discovery of a "double Einstein ring." Astronomers say the odds of three galaxies occurring in alignment is "more unlikely than winning two consecutive bets in a single number of roulette." Having never played roulette, I can't quite imagine how rare that is, but it sounds really rare. . .

 If I'm not mistaken, Einstein's model of space--which predicted large masses like stars would "warp" space and bend light--was tested during a complete solar eclipse. It was found that the sun did indeed bend starlight around its edges, making the stars appear in a slightly different position than they really were. The same phenomenon is happening to these galaxies, and thus, I presume, the name "Einstein ring."

 If my understanding is correct, this particular row of galaxies wouldn't appear aligned from another point in the universe--demonstrating again that we do live, as a couple scientists have put it, on a "privileged planet."

Also: Egypt--that is, Zahi Hawass--wants to copyright the pyramids. Don't you have to be the creator of a work before you can copyright it?

Image by NASA, ESA, R. Gavazzi and T. Treu (University of California, Santa Barbara), and the SLACS team 

Answers in Genesis has launched their new, completely free, online technical journal, Answers Research Journal. The first volume focuses on microbes and models of pathogens that fit a creationist context. There is also an article dealing with the rapid formation of granite.

The chief editor of ARJ will be Dr. Andrew Snelling, with a Ph.D. in geology, who was also a founding editor of the Australia-based creationist journal, Journal of Creation (previously TJ).

It'll be interesting to see how ARJ grows and develops in the future as working creationists contribute their ideas in peer-to-peer format. The journal should be a great contribution to what Journal of Creation and a few other scholarly publications are already producing, giving creationist ideas a chance to stretch themselves, to challenge and to be challenged.

Are you a creationist with scientific credentials? Maybe you should consider submitting a paper. 

One of the biggest stories over the weekend was the discovery of a baby wooly mammoth found frozen in Siberia. Dug up by an unlikely paleontologist--a reindeer herder--the mammoth is on display in Japan and is being tested for clues as to how it died. By sampling tiny air bubbles in its lungs, Japanese scientists hope to discover what the atmosphere composition was like when the mammoth froze--which would offer insight into climate change over historic time.

Speaking of Japan, a tiny island (actually a tuft of rock) off the coast of Hiroshima seems to be literally going to pieces. The cause? Small crustaceans locally known as nanatsuba-kotsubumushi are boring by the millions into the rock. As the oval invertebrates carve out nests in the island, the rock succumbs easily to wind and erosion. Although the island, named Hoboro, was recorded to be 72 feet high in 1928, it now stands pitiably at 20 feet.

In Central America three new salamander species have been discovered, and you can view photos here.

"A cheerful heart is good medicine," and research continues to support Solomon's conclusion. A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people in happy moods had lower average levels of cortisol--a hormone thought to contribute to high blood pressure and suppress the immune system. Among happy women, the study found lower levels of two proteins that accompany inflammation throughout the body. So, as Jesus said, "Don't worry." Keep a cheerful heart and it may just improve your health.