Water. We drink it, we generate electricity with it, we soak our crops in it, and we crack it to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Its uses are almost uncountable. The history of Mankind begins with water, and could not continue without it. In our comparatively wealthy Western world, we think nothing of turning taps on, while in other countries a day's journey to a well brings back one small container of the precious liquid.
But what is water? The encyclopedia tells us that it is an oxide of hydrogen, and that it has no colour, no taste, and no smell. It is a combination of two gasses. It makes up 60-70% of our body. Roughly half of this amount is in our cells, a quarter elsewhere, and the remainder in tissues and blood. If we lose just 3 or 4 litres we start to have hallucinations, and a loss of about 10 litres means death. In a hot environment most humans without water last only 2-3 days.
About 70% of the Earth's surface is water, most of which is undrinkable, but a cycle of evaporation and condensation ensures a steady supply of fresh, clean water to much of the world's land. What does not fall as rain, comes down as snow and compacts as a storage supply of ice, which slowly melts and feeds streams and rivers through dry seasons.
As a liquid, water is almost impossible to . . .
Wonders of Creation
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Have you ever followed a bee around the garden, watching it enter flowers and lick up the nectar? Many flowers need bees for pollination, and bees need the flowers for nectar. These two creatures, plant and animal, need each other, and both would die out if it were not for the mutual services of the other.
The whole planet's biosphere is designed in this way, in a maze of complicated interactions, like one enormous machine. ?Biodiversity?, or 'the web of life? are names given to this interlocking interdependence, yet how many people consider its origin? Plants ?fix? nitrogen from the air, and add it to the soil; bacteria decompose humus, along with the help of worms and other recyclers of plant material. Humus feeds the plants, which also provide shelter and food to other creatures. Even the humble fungus is crucial to the planet's health.
Mycorrhizal (my-cor-rize-al) fungi have a mutually beneficial relationship with plants. As many as 90% interact with either general fungi, or specialized fungi. These fungi enable plants to obtain nutrients that would otherwise be insufficiently available ? the plants in turn provide carbohydrates for the fungi.
Because each plant or animal supplies . . .
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Where did life come from? There are only two main views: the Biblical (Creationist) view and the ?natural? view (Naturalism or Evolutionism). The Biblical explanation describes just the ?bare bones? of the event. God spoke and life appeared. The naturalist explanation is a long-winded theory with many variations, many assumptions, many leaps of faith, and absolutely no evidence.
It is universally agreed today by all mainstream scientists that life comes only from life. It was once thought that flies were spontaneously generated by dead meat, but observations soon proved that flies come only from flies. This of course begs the question as to where the first flies came from, but the naturalist leaps in here and says ?first life? came from non-living chemicals, and that eventually out of that flies formed millions of years later. Just how this happened is never convincingly explained.
Francis Crick, an evolutionist who shared a Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA could not believe in spontaneous generation of ?first life? on Earth, so he proposed that life came to Earth from outer space ? but this only shifted the problem one step further away. How did ?first life? appear somewhere else? There is no known mechanism in chemistry whereby non-living elements can form a . . .
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Suppose someone built a car with everything as it should be, but instead of the usual tyres, they filled the inner tubes with concrete, or left out the steering wheel. The car would still go, but it would not be very efficient. Just one change to one significant variable would spoil the performance of the whole machine.
In a similar way, if there was any significant alteration to any of the mechanisms which comprise our galaxy, or our solar system, or our planet, or our environment, or our own bodies, we would be either dead, or hovering on the brink of extinction. Let me explain, what I mean in layman's terms.
The speed at which our galaxy turns is important. Any faster or slower and catastrophe would soon follow. The fact that our sun is a medium size and very stable is also important. Many stars emit huge solar flares, but ours doesn't. We also whiz through a very empty, and therefore safe area of the galaxy.
Our Earth has a tilt of exactly the right angle. This ensures seasons, which bring warmth periodically to the surface, and also help the oceans circulate. The circulation of water is important for all life, as it carries oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the planet, and also mixes fresh with salt, and cold with warmer waters. The spin of the planet is . . .
In a similar way, if there was any significant alteration to any of the mechanisms which comprise our galaxy, or our solar system, or our planet, or our environment, or our own bodies, we would be either dead, or hovering on the brink of extinction. Let me explain, what I mean in layman's terms.
The speed at which our galaxy turns is important. Any faster or slower and catastrophe would soon follow. The fact that our sun is a medium size and very stable is also important. Many stars emit huge solar flares, but ours doesn't. We also whiz through a very empty, and therefore safe area of the galaxy.
Our Earth has a tilt of exactly the right angle. This ensures seasons, which bring warmth periodically to the surface, and also help the oceans circulate. The circulation of water is important for all life, as it carries oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the planet, and also mixes fresh with salt, and cold with warmer waters. The spin of the planet is . . .
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If you are reading this, you are intelligent. You can also be assured that the writer of this item was not a machine. Not many years ago, many of the pioneers of artificial intelligence would have been disappointed to read these introductory words, because it was their hope that by now machines would have been able to read and write articles, but such an event is still a long, long way off. Intelligence is not as easy as it sounds.
When computing machines were invented, mechanical at first, and then digital, the idea gradually developed that one day a machine might be made ?in the image of man?. Science fiction picked this up and ran a long way with it, but so far the reality is nowhere near the crazy robots and egocentric computers of the movies. Just because a computer can play chess, does not mean it knows what it is playing, or even cares.
One of the early models for ?intelligent machines? was based on simply building a matrix as complex as the human brain. Some people thought that it was all a matter of quantity ? if you packed enough circuits into a computer its mass would provide enough complexity to produce intelligence, but of curse this does not happen. Models were also developed which . . .
When computing machines were invented, mechanical at first, and then digital, the idea gradually developed that one day a machine might be made ?in the image of man?. Science fiction picked this up and ran a long way with it, but so far the reality is nowhere near the crazy robots and egocentric computers of the movies. Just because a computer can play chess, does not mean it knows what it is playing, or even cares.
One of the early models for ?intelligent machines? was based on simply building a matrix as complex as the human brain. Some people thought that it was all a matter of quantity ? if you packed enough circuits into a computer its mass would provide enough complexity to produce intelligence, but of curse this does not happen. Models were also developed which . . .