A Third Of Texans Say Dinosaurs And Humans Coexisted
Does a third of the population believe that “The Flinstones was a documentary”? In a poll, one out of three Texans say that humans and dinosaurs lived together at one point. Oh, and, the majority say that humanity did not develop from an earlier species. The Texas Tribune reports:
Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
[Professor David] Prindle recall[s] a line from comedian Lewis Black. “He did a routine a few years back in which he said that a significant proportion of the American people think that the ‘The Flintstones’ is a documentary,” Prindle says. “Turns out he was right.”
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Did All Life Originate From A Proton-Powered Rock?
New Scientist writes on the possible origin of life on Earth:
The most counter-intuitive trait of life could be one of the best clues to its origin. At one time everyone assumed that cells got their energy using straightforward chemical reactions. However, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Mitchell argued, correctly, that life is powered not by the kind of chemistry that goes on in a test tube but by a kind of electricity; the energy from food is used to pump positively charged hydrogen ions, or protons, creating an electrochemical gradient.
Proton power drives not only cell respiration, but photosynthesis too: energy from the sun is converted into a proton gradient in essentially the same way as the energy of food. This suggests that proton power is no late innovation but evolved early in…
