Drug Resistant Bacteria-- Intelligent Design?

Here’s another thing I don’t understand about Creationism or maybe it’s Intelligent Design. Does God decide to make a bacteria species suddenly resistant to an antibiotic for a reason? And if he does—why? Why doesn’t he make us resistant to environmental pollutants like Dioxin? Seems like a better use of his time and a lot more helpful. Creating a nasty bug like MRSA, which can make visiting a sick friend in the hospital downright dangerous, is not nice.

Don’t we have enough problems?

Bacterial Evolution

Out of Creationist curiosity I took a look at the website Conservepedia. I was confused by a statement made as fact, but unfortunately not backed up by data, that evolution has never been shown in the lab.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I admit I am a biologist with considerable experience in microbiology, immunology, and virology. To say that evolution has never been shown in the lab is a bit startling considering that even the layman knows that bacteria easily mutate into antibiotic resistant strains. Labs are where these evolving bacteria are studied.

The very definition of evolution is the ability of organisms to adapt to a changing environment, i.e. developing antibiotic resistance, through mutation.

Am I missing something? Please explain.

Roses are Red, violets are blu...

Image Flickr Matt Denton

Have you ever wondered why most of us admire the beauty of flowers and even think they smell good? As a matter of fact some of us wear perfume made from the essence of flowers.

What makes this all so peculiar is that flowers and their scent's purpose is to attract insects-not humans.

Lookout-It's a Germ!

Image Flickr_Germ

TV commercials try to make us believe that the only good germ is a dead germ. According to them flesh eating, lung clogging, stomach churning germs are everywhere, on telephones, in kitchens, bathrooms and even on dogs, cats and canaries.

The facts are that 99.9% of germs, AKA bacteria, are harmless and without them life on Earth would not be possible. Nitrifying bacteria in the soil convert nitrogen into forms plants can absorb through their roots. Bacteria in our gut produce vitamins we need to stay alive. Harmless bacteria coat our skins crowding out bacteria that are harmful, to name just a few of the good deeds done by germs.

So take it easy with the antibiotic soaps, the sprays and cleansers hyped to sterilize everything in the house including the dog.

Large Hadron Collider

Drive along the two lane Route de Meyrin from Saint-Genes-Pouilly, France to Meyrin, Switzerland, just outside Genève, and you'll see a massive complex of buildings, looking out of place in the quiet pastureland and stands of trees, straddling the French-Swiss border (I haven’t actually be there: I Googled Earthed it). What you can’t see is the 27 kilometer circular tunnel buried deep below the complex. This is the site of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest machine built to discover the universe’s smallest particles and hopefully catch a glimpse of what the proto-universe looked like a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Working at the LHC will be 7000 particle physicists, half the particle physicists in the world.

Construction

The sheer size of the LHC is staggering, as are the tolerances to which its gigantic components are assembled. Components the sizes of small apartment houses are built to vary less than a fraction of a millimeter from specifications.

The business end of the LHC consists of twin beam pipes buried inside a 3.8 meter concrete lined tunnel circling under the French Swiss border at depths of 100 to 300 meters. Surrounding the two beam pipes are 9300 magnets, some weighing several tons. The magnets are super-cooled to 300 C degrees below room temperature with thousands of kilos of liquid nitrogen and helium. Super-cooling makes the magnets superconductors allowing massive magnetic fields-100,000 times as strong as the Earth’s-to be generated without loss due to electrical resistance. The enormous magnetic fields bend and accelerate streams of protons or lead nuclei to a hairs breath below the speed of light. These particle streams make the 27 kilometer round trip 11245 times per second, in a curve precisely matching the curve of the beam pipes. To prevent the speeding particles from colliding with molecules of air, air is pumped out to create a vacuum like that in space. In addition to the magnets which bend the beam around the beam tubes are magnets which pinch and focus the streaming particles tightly so as to keep the beam from touching the sides of the tubes. The streams of particles are so energetic they can punch a hole through a 30 meter thick chunk of copper. If they were to touch the tubes the high energy particles would destroy them.

The two beam pipes allow for two separate beams to be accelerated in opposite directions. At four places along the circle the counter racing beams cross and it is here that head-on collisions of particles occurs and it is at these crossing points detectors are located to capture data from the shower of exotic particles created. The energy released by the particles smashing into each other will generate tiny areas 100,000 times the temperature of the sun for minute fractions of a second.

Tens of thousands of computers around the world are connected in a grid allowing scientists around the world access to the Everest sized mountains of data collected.

Results

Scientists will be looking for particles that will reveal the mystery of gravity, dark matter and why matter has mass. Among these exotic particles they hope to find the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle theorized to exist, but as yet undiscovered because particle accelerators so far have not accelerated particles to high enough energies to produce them. The discovery of the Higgs boson will help fill in the blanks as to why matter has mass and particles of light called photons, do not.

Scientists also believethe massively energetic collisions will produce particles that can explain why gravity is so weak. I don’t know about you but I have never thought of gravity as weak! But, compared to say magnetism it is. Try holding a refrigerator magnet over a pin and see which is stronger, the force of gravity or magnetic force.

It is also hoped that the nature of dark matter will be discovered. There is too much gravity in galaxies to be accounted for by the matter scientists can detect. So, scientists conclude that most matter in the universe is invisible or dark matter.

Another question the physicists will ask-Are there more than the four dimensions we are familiar with-depth, width, length and time?

This is an amazing time we live in, to have the opportunity to witness clues to the secrets of creation, and maybe of time itself.

Note

The LHC is expected to be re-started sometime in November of 2009. The LHC was shut down by an electrical problem late in 2008.

Bee Smart

Reading time about 30 seconds

A scientist studying honey bee behavior decided to see just how smart bees are at finding a source of food. To do this he placed some sugar water in a dish and set it near a hive. Of course, the bees found it right away. He just wanted to give them the idea. Each day the scientist moved the dish containing the sugar water 10 meters or about 30 feet farther away from the hive. The bees proved to be very clever at finding the dish taking little time to find it even though it had been moved 10 meters away from its last position.

The experiment ended when the next time the scientist moved the dish 10 meters he found the bees waiting for him.

Zero Gain or Net Gain?

Reading time about 50 seconds

There has been a lot of talk about carbon dioxide lately since it plays such a large part in climate change as a greenhouse gas.

We hear about net carbon gain and zero carbon gain as applied to the burning of fuels which are carbon based, meaning the burning of material that was once alive, whether it is coal, natural gas, biodiesel or corn based ethanol.

The business about carbon gain or net zero carbon gain is all about whether the fuel burned has been stored in the ground as say coal or petroleum or recently grown like corn or swithchgrass.

If we’re talking about coal or oil then we are talking about burning a carbon fuel that was alive some time ago and grew by removing carbon dioxide from the air and then storing it upon being buried under sediments. When it is burned it adds to the carbon dioxide content of the air because it releases back to the environment carbon that has been locked away in the ground, so there is a net gain over what was there before.

If we are talking about burning a fuel that grew using carbon dioxide recently and is burned soon after it is harvested then all that is happening is that it’s burning releases back to the environment what it recently took out to grow and the net gain to the atmosphere is zero. It releases back to the atmosphere what it just took out, not what had been locked away in the ground.