science

Could you even imagine a sports car with such a powerful, finely tuned rotary engine, whose rotor, drive shaft, and subunits work together so smoothly, that the engine can hit 42,000 rpm and achieve 100% energy efficiency? Well, no… as amazing as cars are these days, the best redline at 10,000 rpm and achieve below 50 percent energy efficiency, meaning that less than half of the power produced actually propels the car. The rest is emitted as wasted heat.

I’m unapologetically Protestant but, as I’ve said for a while now, our Catholic friends have long led the way on many bioethical issues like abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. For example, back in 2008, the Vatican released a document called “Dignitatis personae,” which said that “The desire for a child, while good, cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.”

“Any person could be attacked at any minute,” said a surfer who spotted a great white shark off Cape Cod. Researchers have identified at least three hundred of the huge predators in the popular area.

In the 1998 movie “Armageddon,” the Administrator of NASA, played by Billy Bob Thornton, informs the President that a huge asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. The President then asks, “Why didn’t we see this coming?”

A University of Chicago Ph.D. student recently defended a dissertation in which he asked thousands of biologists when life begins. A large majority of the biologists he surveyed, even those who are committed to the pro-choice position, said human life begins at conception.

Let’s start with the good news: according to the Wall Street Journal, scientists have not identified a single asteroid that will collide with our planet within the next century. Now to the bad news: hundreds of thousands of near-Earth asteroids have not been identified.

Imagine you’re a college student, and your professor claims that science has disproved the idea of God, of the soul, of ultimate meaning, and of truth. What do you say to that professor?

Is there life on Mars? NASA’s Curiosity rover found what the New York Times calls “startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air” last week. As the Times explains, this type of gas on Earth is “usually produced by living things.”

Every Johnny Cash fan remembers that song, “A Boy Named Sue,” about a young man’s quest to find his dead-beat dad and punch his lights out for giving him a girl’s name. Well, in a completely unrelated factoid, “Sue” is also the name of the Chicago Field Museum’s famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, one of the largest ever unearthed.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God’s commandment to Israel could not have been clearer, but for Israel, keeping it was not so easy. Each time God’s people turned to “other gods” like Baal or Molech—despite the dire and repeated warnings by the prophets—the result was disaster.