More Amber news

 Ancient amber-encased pinecone contains sprouting seeds

Sprouting seeds have been observed in a pinecone that's been encased in amber for roughly 40 million years. Precocious germination is extremely rare in pinecones and researchers were surprised to see it on a fossilized specimen, as stated in Historical Biology.

 Full Story: KOIN-TV (Portland, Ore.) (11/16) 

Here is more news about the origin of Harvard and Yale and why they were founded:

 September 10, 1718: Founded in 1701 by Congregationalists who feared Harvard was straying from its Calvinist roots, The Collegiate School at New Haven, Connecticut, changes its name to Yale.

I want to add this one:

February 8, 1693: The College of William and Mary is founded in Williamsburg, Virginia. Originally intended to educate Anglican clergymen, it is America's second-oldest higher education institution (Harvard is the oldest).

Harvard founding

 September 8, 1636: Massachusetts Puritans found Harvard College, America's first higher education institution, a mere six years after arriving from England. Two years after its founding, the college was named after John Harvard, a learned English Protestant minister who had emmigrated to America and who helped to found the institution. On his deathbed Harvard bequeathed half his estate and his entire library (400 volumes!) to the fledgling college.

Harvard was founded in the image of Oxford in England to train pastors for early churches:

And today

The New York Times   (8/26, Goldberg ) reports that Harvard University’s organization of chaplains “has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.” Epstein, 44, “author of the book ‘Good Without God,’ is a seemingly unusual choice for the role.” He will “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus.” Yet many Harvard students “-- some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities – attest to the influence that Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.” Said Epstein, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.”

PRINCETON

 October 27, 1746: Scottish Presbyterian pastor and theologian William Tennant obtains a charter for the College of New Jersey, which is now Princeton. He had founded the school in 1726 as a seminary to train his sons and others for ministry. Presidents of the college later included Aaron Burr, Jonathan Edwards, and Reverend John Witherspoon, who led the school to national prominence (see issue 77: Jonathan Edwards).

CRYSTALS GROW FAST

 Pegmatite crystals grow at fast pace, study says

Pegmatite crystals can grow within days or hours -- much more quickly than previously thought, say Rice University scientists who studied crystals from a pegmatite mine in Southern California and created a formula for converting chemical evaluations into growth estimates. "While we didn't expect it to be that fast, we couldn't come up with a reason why it wasn't plausible," says Patrick Phelps, an author of the study published in Nature Communications.

 Full Story: United Press International (10/7)

 There goes another idea about the earth being millions of years old!

SCIENTISTS HAVE PROBLEMS

Here are a couple of stories from the internet that show the problems scientists have with their assumptions of an old earth. They have trouble even with what should be obvious.

Stone circle in Scotland not nearly as old as archaeologists thought

Archaeologists in Scotland have acknowledged that a stone circle they identified as 3,500 to 4,500 years old earlier this month is actually a replica of ancient circles and was built by a farmer in the 1990s. "It shows the human side of the job a little bit," said Neil Ackerman, an archaeologist with the Aberdeenshire Council, about the misidentification.

LiveScience (1/21) 

   

This story is so obvious that the fossil can not be millions of years old. Soft tissue could last maybe a few hundred years but not a hundred million. Why can't they see what is right in front of them?

Well-preserved hagfish fossil dates back 100M years

A well-preserved fossil of a hagfish that lived 100 million years ago has been found in Lebanon with soft tissue present, according to findings published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The find offers evidence that hagfish had their slime-producing defense mechanism back then, and it also helps scientists better figure out where the creature fits in among fish.

LiveScience (1/21) 

   

RESEARCHERS CAN'T BELIEVE IN THE FLOOD

Here is the latest evidence of a world-wide flood, but the researchers have to interpret from their very old age perspective.

Giant sea creatures that filled Earth's oceans for ages began dying off in vast numbers approximately 2.6 million years ago, and researchers say supernovas may have played a role. Stellar radiation from a string of nearby star explosions would have drastically affected the animals, likely triggering the Pliocene marine megafauna extinction along with climate changes at the time, according to findings accepted for publication in Astrobiology.

LiveScience (12/12)