Recent Comments

1. about 1 hour ago on Baby Blues

   You know what? You’re right. I apologize.

2. about 8 hours ago on Baby Blues

   Don’t be so hard on yourself, Wanda.

3. about 23 hours ago on Peanuts

   A barber shop and a car wash? What exactly did they learn?

4. 4 days ago on Baby Blues

   We need more cops like this.

5. 4 days ago on Luann

   Okay, maybe I over-generalized, but I said good things.

6. 5 days ago on Baby Blues

   $20, sure, but factor in the cage, toys, food, vet care, medicine, and cleaning, and the final cost comes down to a lot more than $20.

7. 5 days ago on Baby Blues

   In a weird way, that’s sweet. Poor Gecko!

8. 5 days ago on Baby Blues

   Sorry, got cut off. Anyway:

   Orders into classes, classes into phyla, phyla into kingdoms, kingdoms into domains, and domains into life. We don’t have all the pieces into this puzzle yet, but we know enough to determine that, for instance, humans, monkeys, apes, and chimps are all members of the primate order of the class Mammalia.

   DNA, the very fabric of what makes each individual organism unique, still carries the code of the species. Humans share about 99.9% of their DNA with every other human on Earth. This means that the genetic differences between any two people account for only about 0.1% of our entire genome.

   That 0.1% is responsible for variations of features like eye color, height, and susceptibility to certain diseases. These variations are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and are scattered throughout the genome, contributing to the genetic diversity among humans (Britannica). In a larger sense, humans also share roughly 98-99% of their DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives (Discover Magazine). We also share 85-90% of our DNA with mice (the DNA tests dot com).

   Through fossils, we can see visual proof of how the living creatures on Earth have changed, including humans. Humans (HomoSapiens-Sapiens) look different today compared to when the species first emerged in Africa 300k years ago (Zoe was off by 100k years, but she’s a cartoon character and nine years old, so I’ll let it slide). But as the world changed, so did we. Humans didn’t just appear. Neither did any other living thing. We came to be through a process that allowed life to adapt and fit in with the environment. These changes aren’t instantaneous but instead come out of a constant need that persists over a very long period. For instance, humans and other pirmates have opposable thumbs and large brains (relative to body size) that came out of the slow-moving processes of evolution as primates took on their roles in nature, and their places on Earth.

9. 5 days ago on Baby Blues

   Carbon-14’s half-life is 5,730 years. This is constant, because the half-life of a radioactive isotope is a fundamental property governed by nuclear forces, which are not affected by external factors like temperature, pressure, or chemical environment. Also, you can’t “carbon-date” rocks, as they were never organic. The reason some of these rocks from Mt. St. Helens are dated as old as they were is because it’s tricky to measure the age of young rocks. Volcanic rock lacks organic carbon, so other elements such as argon are used to measure volcanic rock. However, young volcanic rocks trap excess Argon, which can lead to artificially high age readings. The incorrect processes were used to age the rocks in that study, anyway. There are several methods to more accurately date rock. These methods include dendrochronology, half-life measurements using isotopes with much smaller half-lives, or tephrochronology.

   I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Geosciences. I am a Geographer by training (I chose that area of Geoscience), but I have a lot of friends from that program who are geologists by training. In Geoscience 100, one of the first things taught was that the Earth, as determined through multiple methods of dating and measuring, is 4.54 billion years old, with a margin of error of 50 million. Yes, 50 million seems like a large margin of error, but this means the range for Earth’s actual age is 4.49 billion to 4.59 billion. By comparing rock samples to samples of already-dated samples of rocks and fossils, geoscientists, paleontologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists have been able to, piece-by-piece, recreate the timeline of our Earth.

   Speaking of fossils, evolutionary biologists have been able to connect species together, do to similar features. They can see changes over time, as species adapt to their environments over time. Taxonomists group species into genuses based on similarities, same as with genuses into families, families into orders, [TBC]

10. 5 days ago on Baby Blues

    Oh, please! Hammie doesn’t wait for “excuses!”