CREATION MOMENTS: 1.8.22

When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous robot stories, we all thought we knew what robots looked like. They looked like us. Indeed, many of Asimov’s robots began to look indistinguishable from human beings, such as the iconic R Daneel Olivaw, who partnered with detective Elijah Baley in the sci-fi crime novel. The Caves of Steel.As real-life robots began to appear in industry, making cars and operating other machinery, they did not look quite so anthropomorphic. Now in the 21'st century, self-mobile robots are not necessarily built to walk like people. For example, we have already seen tiny flying robots about the size and shape of a cockroach – and liable to be just as beloved! A more recent robotic development has seen soft robots built to imitate jellyfish. Two layers of elastic polymer are joined – one stressed and one unstressed. Between the layers, air can be pumped, reversing the stressing and enabling the robot to swim through water. A third stress-free layer provides direction, and the whole machine is able to lift and carry fairly large cargos. The video accompanying the research shows strips of this robotic material being used out of water as a prehensile grip that would have sensitivity approaching that of human hands. As with all new technologies, it is to be hoped that good uses are found for it. God has given us dominion over this world, and technological developments, such as the soft robot, are methods by which humans can operate under this divine mandate. ---------------------- In the early 1960s, some unusually blue star-like objects were observed in the universe, giving out radio frequencies along with visible light. There were a number of them. Through telescopes, they appeared to have fuzzy boundaries. They were given the name Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources – and this was quickly abbreviated to quasars. Another odd feature of these objects was the existence, in their spectra, of emission lines, similar to those of stars, but at the “wrong” frequencies. The emission lines in normal stars were known to be due to hydrogen, but the lines in the quasar’s spectrum had a wavelength about 15% longer than that of hydrogen in other stars, or in the laboratory. It was eventually realized that this effect must be due to red shift – but a red shift bigger than anything that had previously been seen. An application of Hubble’s Law – which shows that the red shift is proportional to the object’s distance – showed that the quasar 3C 273 was over 2 billion light years away and was therefore over 100 times more luminous than typical stars within the same cluster. The existence of such amazing objects once again underlines for us how true it is that the heavens declare the glory of God. So many objects have now been discovered that astronomers give them numbers like 3C 273. How interesting it is, then, that the Bible tells us that God knows the actual name of every single astronomical object! Prayer: Lord, I sometimes look up at the heavens in amazement and awe because You have numbered everything there and given every object a name – because You made them all. Amen. ------------------ Genesis 1:11 “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” One of the criticisms of solar power is that it is so variable. Clearly, a solar plant is going to produce no energy at night and an inadequate supply when the sky is cloudy. On the other hand, a suitable size plant could over-produce when sunlight is intense. Plants have a similar problem. The rapidly changing incidence of sunlight on their leaves could, conceivably, cause problems within the plant. However, researchers have discovered that plants have mechanisms to cope with these variations, and one such mechanism could answer the old question: “Why are plants green?” Plants produce high energy carbohydrate molecules from water vapor and carbon dioxide by the well-known process of photosynthesis. This endothermic reaction requires the input of energy in the form of light, and the reaction is catalyzed by the green dye chlorophyll. What many of us have not considered is why chlorophyll is green. White light is a mixture of all three primary colors – red, green and blue – which have increasing frequency and, hence, increasing energy, in that order. The remarkable thing about plants, therefore, is that they are absorbing light energy only at either end of the visible spectrum while rejecting – and reflecting – the middle of the spectrum, which is green. Researchers have shown that this selective absorption of certain frequencies minimizes “noise” and, therefore, enables the plant to cope with rapidly changing conditions of sunshine. God has made plants with a truly remarkable mechanism for growth. Prayer: Thank You, Lord, for Your amazing provision for everything that You have made. Amen. --------------------------- “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. (Deuteronomy 4:19).It is over half a century since human beings first walked on the surface of the Moon. With the passage of time, and the advent of missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the ever-popular Mars probes and rovers, one might have thought that there was nothing new to learn about the Moon. So listeners might not have been aware of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009, and still giving useful data a decade later. It had been thought that the Moon did not have a plentiful supply of metals. This is because of the deep-time theory that the Moon was formed when a Mars-size planet struck the Earth about 3.9 billion years ago. This would have explained the paucity of metals on the Moon. But radar analysis by the LRO of dust at the bottom of lunar craters shows a much higher concentration of metals than previously thought. Indeed, it now appears that the Moon’s crust has a higher concentration of metals than that of the Earth. This is a severe problem for the prevailing deep-time theories on how the Moon was formed. The traditional evolutionary theory is designed to explain how an Earth, formed from gravitationally aggregated dust, could have developed its layers of crust, mantle, and inner and outer cores. Creationists do not have such a problem. The Bible makes it clear that God made the Earth on Day One, while He made the Moon separately three days later. Prayer: Lord, You confound the opinions and schemes of people who refuse to acknowledge You. Yet, Your power has been evident from creation in the things which You have made. So we praise Your Name. Amen. ------------------ “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” The old vaudeville song goes: “Where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile? Isn’t it a funny one or just the proper style?” One very unusual caterpillar seems to wear not just one, but a whole set of hats on its head. This so-called Mad Hatterpillar – the larva of the moth Uraba lugens – has to shed its exoskeleton as it grows bigger. However, it unusually retains its old head when it sheds an exoskeleton and appears to wear it as a hat. This strange behavior is repeated at each shedding so that, prior to cocooning itself into a pupa, the hairy caterpillar has a number of old heads on top of its living head as a stack of bizarre hats. The caterpillar molts 13 times on average but only retains heads after the fourth molting, so the final head or hat count can be as much as nine! The bizarre headwear appears to be a method whereby the caterpillar deters predators. The caterpillar, which is a resident of Australia and New Zealand, is also known as the gum-leaf skeletonizer. This is because of its voracious appetite for the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, which it strips down to its veins – an attribute not designed to endear the caterpillar to lovers of koalas, for whom the gum-leaves are the principle source of food. However, the strange caterpillar is yet more evidence of the incredible design attributed to our Creator God. ----------------------