Facts of Nature

Nature is the greatest proof of God's existence. "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him." (Colossian 1:16) . "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). Here are some amazing facts:

On a single antenna of ordinary June beetle, there are as many as twenty thousand olfactory pits. The bombardier beetle employed gas against his enemy centuries before the Oriental invented a stinkpot or man resorted to gas warfare. The dragonflies have eyes with as many as thirty thousand facets, to furnish the intense vision required in capturing darting, fast- flying prey..
When temperatures fall toward the freezing point, wise motorists put antifreeze in their radiators. Many wise insects do much the same thing, reports biochemist Fred smith of the University of Minnesota. What's more, their antifreeze is glycerol (glycerin), a chemical closely resembling the ethylene glycol that is the basis for many antifreeze brands. Working with Dr. Peter Dubach, Douglas Pratt and C. M. Stewart, Professor Smith was studying the hibernating larvae of wood-boring beetles, trying to isolate the enzymes that digest the cellulose on which the insects live. But when he ground up the larvae and analyzed the juice, he was surprised to find a considerable glycerol content. Since the active summer larvae do not contain glycerol, he guessed that the larvae possessed a mechanism that reacted to cold by producing glycerol to keep their tissues from freezing in the Minnesota winters. To check his theory, Professor Smith experimented on black carpenter ants, which are easy t collect in quantity. Hibernating adult ants proved to have as much as 10 per-cent glycerol in their bodies, but when the ants were gradually warmed up and became active, all of it disappeared. Chilling the ants for a few days at a temperature just above the freezing point restored the glycerol again. Ants of the same species found in warmer Maryland had no glycerol in them. But when taken t Minnesota they did as Minnesota ants do, secreting their personal antifreeze against the cold.
The cocoon of silkworm can be unreeled to provide a filament over two-thirds of a mile long. The spider is so well supplied with the silky thread for making its web that a scientist once drew out of the body of a specimen almost two miles of thread.
In South America is a curious little spider which has its home under the water. It forms a bubble about itself in which, like a diving bell, it sinks to the bottom of a pond or river. It will remain there for hours, living below, and yet breathing the air from above. When it returns to the surface it is found to be perfectly dry. Not the slightest moisture will have penetrated its capsule. It is in the water and yet separate from it, maintained by contact with the beyond.
The sun is a great power plant. If you were to mark off one square yard on the sun you would find that it is giving of 70,000 horsepower of energy continuously. There are a tremendous number o square yards on the sun's surface: more than 10,000 times the number of square yards on the surface of the earth. Suppose that we decide to buy the energy that the sun gives off for a period of twenty-four hours. Suppose we can buy this energy for one-fourt cent per kilowatt-hour. To pay for this energy in silver dollars would require enough money to cover the United States four miles deep. This represents a tremendous amount of energy. Yet when God created the sun, He had to put into that act of creation all of the energy that has come from the sun and all that which may yet to come from the sun. There is still enough energy in the sun to last for some thirty billion years.

The sun is like a vast hydrogen bomb burning slowly. Every second, 4 million tons of hydrogen are destroyed in explosions which start somewhere near the core, where the temperature is 13 million degrees Centigrade. More energy than man has used since the dawn of civilization is radiated by this normal star in a second. The earth's entire oil, coal and wood reserves would fuel the sun's energy out-put to the earth alone for only a few days. Tongues of hydrogen flame leap from the sun's surface with the force of 1000 million hydrogen bombs. They are forced up by the enormous thermonuclear explosion at the core of the sun where 564 million tons of hydrogen fuse to form helium. Material at the core of the sun is so hot that a pinhead of it would give off enough heat to kill a man 1 million miles away.

There is a fish belonging to the angler group that can puff itself up by swallowing water until its stomach is distended like a balloon. Presumably this tactic is to render it more difficult for a predator to swallow. The spitlure frogfish, as it is called, has an even cleverer device. On top of its head is a built-in wormlike appendage with a jointed base. When not in use it is rolled up to one side of the dorsal fin, but in action it is waved around so that it looks for all the world like a juicy fishworm. The moment a likely victim comes near to investigate, the fish swallows it in one king-size gulp.

The heart is a hard-working marvel. It can keep on beating automatically even if all other nerves were severed. And what a beat! It beats an average of 75 times a minute, forty million times a year, or two and a half billion times in a life of 70 years. At each beat, the average adult heart discharges about four ounces of blood. This amounts to three thousand gallons a day or 650,000 gallons a year--enough a fill more than 81 tank cars of 8,000 gallons each. The heart does enough work in one hour to lift a 150-pound man to the top of a three-story building, enough energy in twelve hours to lift a 65-ton tank car one foot off the ground, or enough power in seventy years to lift the largest battleship afloat completely out of the water.

Imagine a group of men, working entirely in the dark, constructing a building as complex as the American Empire State Building and, fitting it with central heating and a fresh-air system. This is what the termite, that incredible builder, does when it builds its home. In Africa, these constructions are so numerous that they transform the landscape. Each home has at its center the "royal quarter" where the Queen lives with her king. The Queen lays nearly 50,000 eggs a day and has a life span of ten years, but the population of each nest is controlled by frequent migration of the termites to find mates. The home maintains a temperature of about 86 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity at 98 per cent, with ventilation assured. How they manage to achieve this is a marvel of engineering. The walls are built up to 18 inches thick with cooling fins on the outside, each containing hundreds of air shafts. The hot, stale air inside the home passes along these air-shafts and goes out through pores in the wall. Fresh air is drawn to replace it.

To keep the air at the right temperature, hundreds of tiny workers in the air passages control the conditions by sealing and unsealing the many air shafts, according to the conditions of the temperature outside. Some of these structures reach 20 feet in height. We can therefore imagine what remarkable builders these termites are.

Our hours are nothing to the birds. Why, some birds work in the summer nineteen hours a day. Indefatigably they clear the crops of insects. The thrush gets up at 2:30 every morning. He rolls up his sleeves and falls to work at once, and he never stops till 9:30 at night. A clear nineteen hours. During that time he feeds his voracious young two hundred and six times. The blackbird starts work at the same time as the thrush, but he lays off earlier. His whistle blows at 7:30, and during his seventeen-hour day he sets about one hundred meals before his kiddies. Titmouse is up and about at three in the morning, and his stopping time is nine at night. A fast worker, the titmouse is said to feed his young four hundred and seventeen meals--meals of caterpillar mainly--in the long, hard, hot day.

Science tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction, only transformation. If God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute part of His Universe, doesn't it make sense to assume that He applies it also to the soul of man?--Wernher Von Braun.

There has been discovered in the forests of India a strange plant which possesses to a very high degree astonishing magnetic power. The hand which breaks a leaf from it immediately receives a shock equal to that produced by the conductor of an induction coil. At a distance of nineteen feet a magnetic-needle is affected by it, and it will be quite deranged if brought near. The energy of this singular influence varies with the hour of the day. It is all-powerful about two o'clock in the afternoon, but is ineffective during the night. At times of storm, its intensity increases.

Snowflakes have six sides. It is claimed there are no two snowflakes alike, yet all are hexagonal in shape. An eminent scientist, J. Wilson Bentley, devoted his life to the study of snowflakes. He photographed over 10,000 flakes. He found no two exactly alike, though all have six sides. He claimed that the entire countryside from Maine to California might be covered with snow a foot deep, yet no two flakes would be exactly alike.

The camel is enabled, by the peculiar construction of its stomach, to carry a supply of water sufficient for seven or eight days together. This power adapts it to the region in which it is found, and to the service of man in traversing the desert. It has, also, great acuteness of scent, and, when ready to fail through the weariness of a long march, will detect the distant stream or fountain. Then new vigor animates it, and, sniffing the air, it strides on till it can imbibe the refreshing waters.

"I am not so much of a farmer as some people claim." said Hon. W. J. Bryan in his lecture on "The Price of Peace." but I have observed the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight, and when you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight--when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God."

The seed of the globe turnip is abut one-twentieth of an inch in diameter, and yet, in a few months, this seed will be enlarged by the soil and the air to 27,000,000 times its original bulk, and this in addition to a bunch of leaves. It has been fond by experiment that it will, under fair conditions, increase its own weight 15 times in one minute. Turnips growing in peat ground will increase more than 15,000 times the weight of their seeds in one day.

Salt is a wonder. Salt is composed of two poisonous substances. How is it possible that salt, which is necessary to life, is composed of sodium and chlorine, either of which, if taken individually, would kill you? Water is a wonder. Its chemical formula is H2O. That means it has two parts of hydrogen for each part oxygen. Oxygen is flammable; hydrogen readily burns. unite hydrogen and oxygen into water and you put out fires with it!

A French scientist named Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, examining a wasp's nest in 1719, noted that it seemed to be made of a type of crude pasteboard. After further investigation he discovered that most of the material was obtained from tree fibers. As a result of this study the first successful production of paper from woodpulp was achieved. Yet God had instilled this ability in the wasp at the dawn of history.

Every one of God's works is in its way great. All angels & all men united could not make one grasshopper. 41. If you're an adult of average weight, here is what you accomplish in 24 hours: Your heart beats 103,689 times. Your blood travels 168,000,000 miles. You breathe 23,040 times, You inhale 438 cubic feet of air. You eat 3.25 pounds of food. You drink 2.9 quarts of liquids. You lose 7/8 pound of waste. You speak 4,800 words, including some unnecessary ones. You move 750 muscles. Your nails grow .000046 inch. Your hair grows .01714 inch. You exercise 7,000,000 brain cells. Feel tired?

There are some species of fish--most of them bottom dwellers--that have a most unusual development cycle, particularly as regards their eyes. The group includes halibuts, flounders and places. They pass their early life swimming like any other fish, then a remarkable change occurs. They turn onto their sides and swim that way the rest of their lives; hence they are known as flat fish. The most astonishing aspect of this change is that the eye on the under side moves to the top side of the fish's head and remains there so that it becomes known as the "eyed side" while the underneath is referred to as the "blind side."

Researchers Sarif Salem and Francis D. Hold of the University of Wisconsin made a three-year study and fond that one colony of ants moved fifteen tons of subsoil, building clusters of large mounds and burrowing five-and-a-half feet below the surface. The "deep ploughing" increased the nutrients, clay and organic matter of the surface soil.

Be encouraged by the example of the Allegheny ants, a common species in the eastern U.S., which help enrich forest areas by carrying tons of soil from below ground to the surface.

Scientists have estimated that throughout the earth 360,000 lightning flashes per hour occur. It is computed by General Electric officials that the average bolt has a voltage of 100 million, a current of 100 thousand amperes, and an energy of four kilowatt hours. Thus, one flash of lightning would keep any house lit for 35 years. And a large bolt of lightning has enough energy to lift the 51,821-ton ocean liner United States six feet into the air.

Moreover, by combining nitrogen and oxygen, lightning creates 100 million tons of plant food a year, raining down far more than is produced by all the commercial fertilizer plants.

The fact that adult salmon return from the ocean to the very gravel bed where they were hatched in some swift-flowing northern stream in order to reproduce before death, is fairly well-known. But not everyone realizes what is involved in their doing so. A salmon swims three to ten miles a day against the current for a total distance of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of miles to get back to his birthplace. The spectacular part of his return trip is when he encounters waterfalls that must be ascended. He has been observed swimming a sheer ten-foot waterfall in one leap. Higher falls can be conquered by a series of tall leaps from shelf to shelf for a total distance of maybe forty or fifty feet.

Sea herring, traveling in closely packed schools too numerous to count have a marvelous faculty for synchronizing their movements. Even when some floating obstacle compels a group to divide, with part of them swimming on one side and the rest on the other side of the obstruction, their rhythmic motion continues in absolute unison as if they were one instead of thousands. They coordinate their movements up or down, right or left, as if subject to a command control.

The dolphin has special membranes analogous to man's vocal cords. It can make a variety of noises such as chirps, pops, clicks, squeaks, groans, whines, and other sounds in frequencies from 3000 to 30,000 cycles per second. researchers say the dolphin can mimic human-created sounds such as laughter, whistles, and even word syllables in high frequency ranges. An electronic device, the sceptron, has been contrived to "memorize" sounds of the dolphins, to catalog dolphin-sounds, and record communication patterns. It is even speculated that the fish could ultimately inform man about such matters as missile cones falling into the sea, current temperatures, land formations, and so on.

To avoid using DDT and other pesticides, more and more U.S. communities are turning to nature for help. The latest to do so are Claremont, Calif., and Albuquerque, N. Mex., whose residents have imported thousands of ladybugs to control millions of sap-sucking aphids. Claremonters report that ladybugs are cheaper than chemical sprays: $ 85 for 375,000 ladybugs v. $ 180 for a chemical spray used in Claremont last year. Moreover, a single ladybug devours as many as 40 or 50 aphids a day. Ladybugs are also easy to handle. The gardener should first cool them in his refrigerator to make them drowsy, then remove them at sunset and spread them around. When the bugs awaken, they are hungry. They gobble away until most aphids are gone.

Pearls are delicate and require care. They must be worn frequently and close to the skin or they fade and die. This is perhaps because, as a product of the oyster, they are partly of animal origin. The most noted specimen was the famous "Theirs Necklace," of 145 finely graded rose pink pearls. When Madame Theirs willed them to the French Republic, they were placed in a museum and. never worn. In time, they lost their color and luster. A "pearlmother" was found for them, who fondled them and wore them publicly under guard, and their beauty returned. We are told that pearls must be worn against the human flesh to retain their life and luster. In fact, it is so important they be worn, that banks where pearls are stored hire girls for that purpose. The girls sit a specified number of hours and wear pearls which clients have left with the bank for safekeeping. These pearls are kept "alive" by human contact.

There have been a number of serious mathematical computations which have to do with evolution, and improbable to the vanishing point. Probably the best known case is the symposium on the Mathematical Challenge to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, held at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1966. It was there that a French mathematician told that when a computer was programmed to give the probability of an evolutionary advance, it jammed. The interpretation of this was that the probability was less than one chance in ten to the one thousandth power! In his closing remarks this man said, "Thus, to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current biology." Probability is expressed as a fraction and hence certainty is 1 and impossibility is 0. On this basis to be helpful to the evolutionists, the author assumed that the probability of evolution being true (if there were no gaps in the fossil record) as 999, which then makes the probability of creation the difference between this and 1, or .001. But there are at least 13 well documented gaps in the fossil record, and actually there are very many more. But again favoring the evolutionists by using this very conservative figure of 13, and putting these numbers in the formula, the result is that the probability of evolution being true is about one chance in 10 x undecillion [ 36 zeros]. Thus, even if assumptions are made favoring the position of the evolutionists, they cannot complain if it still comes out in favor of creation, which it does.