BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Two recent scientific news reports pertinent to Catholic belief...

Evolution just got harder to defend
by Eric Metaxas

September 14, 2016 | 10:59 AM EDT

A new fossil discovery makes it even tougher for Darwinists to explain the origin of life.

There’s an old story about a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup. Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the buildup of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume a can opener.”

The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told — except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

A new discovery makes explaining even that first cell tougher still. Fossils unearthed by Australian scientists in Greenland may be the oldest traces of life ever discovered. A team from the University of Wollongong recently published their findings in the journal Nature, describing a series of structures called “stromatolites” that emerged from receding ice.

“Stromatolites” may sound like something your doctor would diagnose, but they’re actually biological rocks formed by colonies of microbes that live in shallow water. If you visit the Bahamas today, you can see living stromatolites.

What’s so special about them? Well, they appear in rocks most scientists date to 220 million years older than the oldest fossils, which pushes the supposed date for the origin of life back to 3.7 billion years ago.

This, admits the New York Times, “complicates the story of evolution of early life from chemicals ... .” No kidding!

According to conventional geology, these microbe colonies existed on the heels of a period when Earth was undergoing heavy asteroid bombardment, making it virtually uninhabitable. This early date, adds The Times, “leaves comparatively little time for evolution to have occurred … .”

That is an understatement. These life forms came into existence virtually overnight, writes David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views - “genetic code, proteins, photosynthesis, the works.”

This appearance of fully-developed life forms so early in the fossil record led Dr. Abigail Allwood of Caltech to remark that “life [must not be] a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing.” Rather, “it will emerge whenever there’s an opportunity.”

Pardon me? If life occurs so spontaneously and predictably even under the harshest conditions, then it should be popping up all over the place! Yet scientists still cannot come close to producing even a single cell from raw chemicals in the lab.

Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book Signature in the Cell why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical.

So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life.

Meanwhile Darwinists, faced with a fossil record that theoretically pushes the origin of life back further into the past, are forced to assume the metaphorical can opener. They just don’t know how these early cells came into existence, and the more we dig up, the more improbable — rather than likely — life becomes.

For them at least.

The following item is more 'technical' and we could all celebrate this indicator of successful therapy except that the stem cells used were embryonic, not adult, and one does not learn this until almost the very end of the article... Anyway, let us pray that parallel research with adult stem cells could also result in something similar.

First-ever quadriplegic treated with stem cells
regains motor control in his upper body

Sept. 23, 2016

For the first time ever, neuroscientists have treated a total quadriplegic with stem cells, and he has substantially recovered the functions of his upper body only two months into the process.

The Keck Medical Center of USC announced that a team of doctors became the first in California to inject an experimental treatment made from stem cells, AST-OPC1, into the damaged cervical spine of a recently paralyzed 21-year-old man as part of a multi-center clinical trial.

On March 6, just shy of his 21st birthday, Kristopher (Kris) Boesen of Bakersfield suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine when his car fishtailed on a wet road, hit a tree, and slammed into a telephone pole.

Parents Rodney and Annette Boesen were warned there was a good chance their son would be permanently paralyzed from the neck down. However, they also learned that Kris could possibly qualify for a clinical study that might help.

Leading the surgical team and working in collaboration with Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Keck Medicine of USC, Charles Liu, MD, PhD, director of the USC Neurorestoration Center, injected an experimental dose of 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’s cervical spinal cord in early April.

“Typically, spinal cord injury patients undergo surgery that stabilizes the spine but generally does very little to restore motor or sensory function,” explains Liu. “With this study, we are testing a procedure that may improve neurological function, which could mean the difference between being permanently paralyzed and being able to use one’s arms and hands. Restoring that level of function could significantly improve the daily lives of patients with severe spinal injuries.”

Two weeks after surgery, Kris began to show signs of improvement. Three months later, he’s able to feed himself, use his cell phone, write his name, operate a motorized wheelchair and hug his friends and family. Improved sensation and movement in both arms and hands also makes it easier for Kris to care for himself, and to envision a life lived more independently.



“As of 90 days post-treatment, Kris has gained significant improvement in his motor function, up to two spinal cord levels,” said Dr. Liu. “In Kris’s case, two spinal cord levels means the difference between using your hands to brush your teeth, operate a computer or do other things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, so having this level of functional independence cannot be overstated.”

Doctors are careful not to predict Kris's future progress.

“All I’ve wanted from the beginning was a fighting chance,” said Kris, who has a passion for fixing up and driving sports cars and was studying to become a life insurance broker at the time of the accident. “But if there’s a chance for me to walk again, then heck yeah! I want to do anything possible to do that.”

Because the window for performing the surgery was tight, everything needed to go according to schedule in order for Kris to qualify.

Once Kris made the decision to pursue enrollment in the study, dozens of doctors, nurses, rehabilitation specialists and others sprang into action. Because he would need to provide voice confirmation of his desire to participate in the study, Kris had to be able to breathe without a ventilator. Weaning a patient from assisted breathing generally is a three-week process. He did it in five days with the help of a respiratory care team. He signed the paperwork and began a week of assessments, scans and other pre-surgery tests.

In early April, a surgical team from Keck Hospital of USC carefully injected 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’s cervical spine. Nearly six weeks later, Kris was discharged and returned to Bakersfield to continue his rehabilitation. Doctors reviewed his progress at seven days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days post-injection, and Kris can look forward to detailed assessments after 180 days, 270 days and one year.

Rodney and Annette Boesen say they are amazed at the level of collaboration and cooperation that enabled their son to participate in the study. “So many things had to happen, and there were so many things that could have put up a roadblock,” marvels Rodney. “The people at Keck Medical Center of USC and elsewhere moved heaven and earth to get things done. There was never a moment through all of this when we didn’t think our son was getting world class care.”

The pioneering surgery is the latest example of how the emerging fields of neurorestoration and regenerative medicine may have the potential to improve the lives of thousands of patients who have suffered a severe spinal cord injury.

The stem cell procedure Kris received is part of a Phase 1/2a clinical trial that is evaluating the safety and efficacy of escalating doses of AST-OPC1 cells developed by Fremont, California-based Asterias Biotherapeutics.

AST-OPC1 cells are made from embryonic stem cells by carefully converting them into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which are cells found in the brain and spinal cord that support the healthy functioning of nerve cells. In previous laboratory studies, AST-OPC1 was shown to produce neurotrophic factors, stimulate vascularization and induce remyelination of denuded axons.

All are critical factors in the survival, regrowth and conduction of nerve impulses through axons at the injury site, according to Edward D. Wirth III, MD, PhD, chief medical director of Asterias and lead investigator of the study, dubbed “SCiStar.”

“At the 10 million cell level, we’re now in a dose range that is the human equivalent of where we were when we saw efficacy in pre-clinical studies,” says Wirth. “While we continue to evaluate safety first and foremost, we are also now looking at how well treatment might help restore movement in these patients.”

To qualify for the clinical trial, enrollees must be between the age of 18 and 69, and their condition must be stable enough to receive an injection of AST-OPC1 between the fourteenth and thirtieth days following injury.

Keck is one of six sites in the U.S. authorized to enroll subjects and administer the clinical trial dosage.

And a third scientific news report about water in some other place of our solar system - which could mean a possibility of some life form (living organisms based on carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as are life forms on earth)....

Hubble telescope finds more evidence
of water plumes from Jupiter's moon
By K. N. Smith

September 26, 2016

Hubble hasn’t found aliens on Europa, Jupiter's moon, but it may have found new evidence that plumes of salt water from the moon’s globe-spanning salty ocean can escape through cracks in its icy shell.

Using its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument, Hubble captured far-ultraviolet images of what could be geysers of water from beneath the surface, erupting in Europa’s southern hemisphere.

If the features in those images are really geysers, that could be very good news for future missions to Europa, providing an easier source of samples from Europa’s subsurface ocean and making it easier to search for signs of life beneath the ice.

Space Science Telescope Institute astronomer William Sparks and his colleagues borrowed a method from exoplanet research and applied it to a potentially habitable world much closer to home (in relative space terms, anyway - Europa is about 390 million miles away).

When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, astronomers can look at the very edge of the visible part of the planet, called the limb, to see what wavelengths of light from the star get absorbed by the thin band of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Because different chemicals absorb light at different wavelengths, that can yield clues about what alien atmospheres are made of.

In early 2014, Hubble looked for features along Europa’s limb that might absorb the sunlight reflected by Jupiter. Hydrogen and oxygen both absorb light in the ultraviolet wavelengths, so Sparks and his colleagues looked at Europa in the far ultraviolet. Hubble sent home ten images of Europa’s silhouetted surface, and features that might be geysers appeared in three of them.

“Anything that absorbs [light] will appear in our image. We presume it to be water vapor or ice particles because that’s what Europa’s made of and those molecules do absorb at the wavelengths we observed at, which is why we chose those wavelengths,” said Sparks during a press conference earlier today.


Hubble's view of huge plumes of water vapor in 2013, shown superimposed on a photo of Europa; artict's concept of a cross-section of Europa's crust and inner ocean. At its heart, this Jovian moon has an extensive ocean and possible undersea volcanoes.

This is the second piece of evidence for geysers on Europa, following a 2012 Hubble observation of hydrogen and oxygen in potential plumes coming from the same areas of the planet’s southern latitudes. Because Europa is tidally locked with massive Jupiter, it always shows the same face to Earth, much like our own Moon.

The Galileo mission, launched in 1989 and which arrived at Jupiter in 1995, did a single scan for plumes erupting from Europa, but came up empty. If the plumes are really there, says Sparks, they won’t exactly be the Europan version of Old Faithful; they’re most likely intermittent.

“It’s significant because previously there’s just been one piece of evidence that these things exist. Now we’ve got a couple more pieces of evidence that they exist,” said Sparks.

The plumes could become targets for a planned Europa flyby mission, tentatively slated for launch in the 2020s, which will carry a spectroscopic instruments from infrared to far ultraviolet, as well as instruments to measure the composition of samples – such as material from watery plumes. Thermal imaging will also allow the Europa flyby spacecraft to look for hotspots (or at least relatively warm spots) in the ice where plumes might erupt.

It’s possible that the mission could fly a pass, or several, through Europa’s plumes, much as the Cassini spacecraft flew through the jets of water erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Mission planners are still planning potential trajectories, and they’re interested in narrowing down which of the possible plumes might be the best target.

It’s unlikely that we’ll find life in those plumes, but the flyby mission could look for signs of organic chemistry that might provide a strong clue.

“Even if there is a small amount of biomass in the plumes as they start out from the ocean, by the time they get into space and the radiation environment of Europa at cryogenic temperatures, it’s not going to survive,” said Sparks. “We’d have to be looking for the remains of something that was once protected in the ice or under the ice.”

Of course, the Europa flyby mission, if it gets off the ground, won’t be a true search for life. The flyby will focus on determining whether Europa is habitable in the first place, in part because that’s the part scientists currently know how to do. Scientists have a well-established set of criteria for deciding whether a place is habitable, but they’re still debating what to look for to prove that life exists, or doesn’t exist, on another world.

As for whether there’s life in the plumes, “I would say the jury is out,” said senior Hubble project scientist Jennifer Weissman. “It really depends first on whether these plumes are actually there.”

And that’s still waiting to be confirmed. Sparks and his team were careful to point out that these observations aren’t definitive proof that the geysers are real, although they are compelling when combined with the 2012 evidence from Hubble.

The far-ultraviolet wavelengths are right at the limits of Hubble’s capability. The researchers say it’s likely that the features that showed up in three of the ten images are probably real, rather than some unexpected effect from the instruments, though they can’t completely rule that out. Repeated Hubble observations would help confirm that the STIS instrument is operating properly in the far ultraviolet, which would improve confidence in the observations.

“The other thing that would really, that could potentially nail it would be if somebody came in with a completely independent observing technique and the results were consistent,” said Sparks. Some teams are starting to look for other means of detecting plumes, but that’s probably a ways off.

In the meantime, Hubble observations may offer the best way to keep an eye on Europa and its potential geysers.

“When we cannot fly a mission up close, the next best thing is to use the Hubble Space Telescope and some of its unique capabilities to study Europa from afar,” said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Scientists hypothesize that below Europa's icy exterior, there's about 3 billion cubic kilometers of water sloshing around in a subsurface ocean. That's more water than we have here on Earth. And because life on Earth requires water, the Jovian moon is one of the top spots in our solar system where scientists would like to search for alien life.

But Europa's ocean is thought to be buried under about 62 miles of solid ice. Which is why it was so exciting, in 2013, when Hubble spied water vapor above Europa. This water vapor may be erupting in plumes from Europa's surface, and if those plumes are shooting up from the inner ocean, a spacecraft could potentially sample the ocean simply by swooping through the plumes--no drilling rig required.