Todd's Blog

Just a quick note to ask for your support.  If you've enjoyed my work or the work of Core Academy, please consider a last-minute gift for 2020.  We're still looking for about $8,200 (we've had a few contributions since I made this video). Whatever you can do for us, we greatly appreciate.  You can give by clicking that donate button at the bottom of this post.   Thanks! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

In just a few days, 2020 will be a memory, and I'll be glad for it.  COVID will still be a threat, but vaccinations should go a long way to dulling its impact.  Life should return to something resembling normal by summer time, I hope.  The sting of loss will linger for years, decades even.  But the present pain will be over.  I am thankful. Meanwhile, Core Academy still has $11,000 to raise to end the year entirely in the black.  I realize it's a lot to ask, and I want to be realistic about it.  I also know that God's not broke, and he's promised  to provide our needs.  Sometimes that means the miracle of last-minute donations, and sometimes that means providing in other ways.  I'm ready for whatever he wants, and I'm always grateful for his provision. If you'd like to be part of that last minute miracle, you can click that Donate button below, or visit coresci.org/donate to find out how to donate in other ways.  Thank you. Feedbac...

This has been a grueling year.  As I write this, I have a friend who will very likely spend Christmas in the ICU from a combination of COVID and pneumonia.  Nearly a third of a million Americans are dead from this virus, and the global death toll just passed 1.7 million.  That’s a lot of suffering for one year.  Along with all the direct impact, the public efforts to cope with the virus have caused their own chaos.  Jobs were lost.  Countless small businesses were destroyed.  Study after study reported a massive increase in mental disorders, from garden variety anxiety to addictive behaviors to suicidal ideation to the trauma of domestic abuse.  Infected or not, our entire culture suffers from this pandemic. Neuroscientists have made a lot of strides over the past century, and we know more about the biochemistry of mental disorders than we ever have before.  Effective medications and treatments have been discovered and developed that can help...

In 1972, an excavator working in the Bulgarian city of Varna on the western shore of the Black Sea unearthed some metallic artifacts while digging a ditch.  He saved the item in a shoebox and later showed the dirt-encrusted pieces to a former teacher, who alerted a few archaeologists about a “treasure.”  Despite their skepticism, the archaeologists came to look at the objects and were astonished.  The objects were true archaeological treasure.  They were all gold, more than two pounds of gold!  We now know that these were the first pieces of the oldest collection of worked gold ornamentation ever discovered. The excavator showed the archaeologists where he found the objects, and the archaeological excavation soon began.  The source turned out to be an ancient cemetery with about 300 graves dating from the earliest known farmers in Europe.  More than 3,000 gold objects were taken from just 65 of those graves, all of them either graves of male skeletons ...

It’s said that no two snowflakes are alike, which as far as we know is mostly correct, but it belies the simplicity of the crystalline structure of snow.  For example, snowflakes are always six-sided, and the branches appear at regular angles.  The temperature and humidity of the cloud determines the growth of the crystal, which in turn determines its form.  Only at certain temperatures do you get what physicists call plates, those flat flakes with six spokes radiating from the center.  Equally likely are needles or columns, in which the snowflake grows up the axis of the crystal’s center rather than radially outward.  A single snowflake is technically clear, but the facets of the crystal surface reflect light when observed from the correct angle, giving a mass of snowflakes the appearance of white. Growing up in rural Michigan, I was very familiar with snowfall in my younger days.  Besides just the possibility of canceled school, my family loved a good sno...

The northern winter is dark.  There’s nothing particularly special about it.  The darkness simply intrudes on the day, and the nights grow long and cold.  The winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, halts this advancing night.  The days then get gradually longer until the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. During this annual march from solstice to solstice, the careful observer might notice that the sun’s circuit across the sky also changes.  In the northern hemisphere, the sun rises and sets toward the south in the winter and toward the north in the summer.  Everywhere on the earth, the sun rises due east and sets due west on the equinoxes, the two days every year when the day and night are equal. People have known about this annual progression of the sun for millennia.  The stones of Stonehenge are famously aligned to the solstices, and the even more ancient mound of Newgrange in Ireland has an entrance aligned with the winter solst...

As far as we can tell from historical records, Christians didn’t set aside a day to commemorate the birth of Christ until several centuries after his death.  Scholars are divided on just why December 25 was chosen for this day.  Some think it relates to the prophecy of Malachi, “For you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (4:2, ESV).  To remember the birth of the “sun of righteousness,” Christians chose the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the day on which the sun’s light begins to grow in the annual calendar.  The Roman calendar placed the solstice on December 25, and that date hasn’t changed, even though the solstice has. Still other scholars suggest darker roots.  In A.D. 274, Roman emperor Aurelian set December 25 as a feast day to the god Sol Invictus, the “unconquered sun,” and some scholars think Christmas was just a way to Christianize this pagan festival.  The evidence is scant enough th...

Merry Christmas, everyone!  I’ve written a collection of Christmas meditations that I’m going to post here beginning tomorrow, one ever day through Christmas day.  If you are a reader that enjoys scientific commentary or analysis or you just want to know what we’re up to at Core Academy, these meditations will be a little different.  I hope you’ll indulge me. If you’ve read my book The Quest or my booklet Day by Day , you’re already familiar with my style of combining thoughts about creation and scripture and Jesus Christ in hopefully a unique way.  That’s what I’m going for here, but I’ll be focusing on various affectations of Christmas.  This will be different.  They might not make you jolly, but I hope they’ll make you light and full of hope.  It’s been a rough year, and we could use some hope. I also need to remind you that Core Academy is having a special matching gift campaign through Christmas Eve.  Here, I'll let me explain it. Right now,...

Here's a quick update on what's going on at Core Academy. First up, we've got another installment in the Ask a Creationist series on Evidence Against Evolution.  Remember I'm not going for a knockout here.  I'm looking at the curious and inconsistent bits of data that might lead us to a better understanding.  I'm also trying to deal with those who claim that I think all the evidence is consistent with evolution, which is both wrong and incoherent.  Enjoy! Last year, I did a few videos about hominin fossils that I called "Fossil Focus."  Here's a new episode all about the skull KNM ER 1470, which has sometimes been included in Homo habilis  and sometimes not.  Check it out right here: Word came this past weekend of the passing of Henry Morris III, son of the Henry Morris who co-authored the ground-breaking book The Genesis Flood  and one-time CEO of the Institute for Creation Research.  My condolences to his family and friends.  You can r...