The amazing giraffe’s neck: proof of a great designer!

By Andrew Miiller

Stop for a moment and think about your heart beating in your chest. Every time it beats, two to three ounces of blood are pumped into your arteries.

Now, imagine what would happen if your heart started pumping 6 to 9 ounces at each beat. Your blood pressure would triple. The increased pressure on your arterial walls would first cause you to feel dizzy and nauseated. Soon your vision would blur, and you would develop a splitting headache. A spike in blood pressure this high would likely rupture the capillaries surrounding your brain, causing immediate death. Whoa!

Thankfully, our hearts are not strong enough to maintain a blood pressure that high.

Giraffes, on the other hand, have a blood pressure two to three times yours. Their blood pressure has to be this high in order to move enough blood from their hearts up their 8-foot necks and into their heads. That’s why a giraffe’s heart measures 2 feet long, weighs 24 pounds, and pumps 16 gallons of blood every minute.

A problem arises, however, when the giraffe lowers its 96-inch neck to take a drink. As the giraffe’s heart works with gravity instead of against it, a tsunami of blood rushes down the giraffe’s neck straight into its head, causing the capillaries surrounding its brain to literally explode under pressure—or at least, that’s what would happen, were it not for five blood pressure regulation systems installed in the head and neck of giraffes, all working in perfect harmony to keep the giraffe alive.

Trying to describe how these systems came to exist via natural selection poses a major headache for evolutionists.

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By Ryan Malone

Can Mozart make you smarter? Well, that’s what researchers at the University of California-Irvine asked back in 1993. The answer?

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky gave preschool and college students standard tests of spatial reasoning (being able to turn an object in one’s head or to imagine how pieces of a shape fit together). The tests were given after the students had experienced three different conditions for ten minutes: one condition was silence, one was listening to a relaxation tape, another was listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. Performance on the post-Mozart spatial tests were significantly better.

But, of course, not all scientific experiments are reliable. Every experiment must be proven over and over before it can be accepted as fact. So in 1994, researchers at the University of Auckland examined the effects of listening to Mozart contrasted with other types of music or silence. Seventy-nine college students were divided into three groups. One group listened to Mozart (the same piece used in the ’93 study). Another listened to silence. The third group listened to a piece by Philip Glass—a composer of music based on endless repetitions of patterns. The two latter groups showed no significant increase in spatial IQ. But the Mozart group did!

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By Joel Hilliker and Brad Macdonald

At the beginning of The Missing Dimension in Sex Herbert W. Armstrong brings the reader up to speed with the advance of the “new morality,” and the disastrous affects it was having on the Western world. Nearly three decades later, the armies of the “new morality” have intensified their assaults and new depths of degradation have been reached. Since 1981, the most alarming and dangerous onslaught has been the emergence and widespread acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle into mainstream society.

Nothing illustrates this better than the “Day of Silence.” This past Friday, hundreds of thousands of adolescents from more than 6,000 schools across America refused to speak—some all day, and others for partial periods—to protest the alleged harassment of and prejudice and discrimination against students who identify themselves as homosexual, bisexual or transgender.

The Day of Silence is organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), one of the most powerful and well-funded homosexual activist groups in America. GLSEN’s involvement speaks volumes about the true nature of Friday’s Day of Silence; it has very little do to with bullying and harassment, and everything to do with promoting the homosexual lifestyle in the impressionable minds of adolescents. Friday’s cunning assault was designed by liberal activists to not only arouse sympathy for the homosexual cause, but also to teach children that homosexual conduct is perfectly normal, completely safe and an absolutely acceptable form of sexual expression.

Did you participate in the Day of Silence? Should you have?

The promotion of the homosexual lifestyle is one of the most far-reaching and extreme forms of the “new morality.” Homosexuality is now out in the open. Most everyone is perfectly okay with it. You may see couples at your school, or have a homosexual teacher—maybe even some of your classmates are homosexual. It is everywhere!

How should you handle that?

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Moses and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea channel—on foot—during the Days of Unleavened Bread. What does that awesome event mean for you?

By Philip Nice

Egyptians. The word burned through their ranks like wildfire.

More than 2.5 million people massed in 13 tribes camped under the shadow of the rocky and foreboding Pihahiroth Mountains. This teeming sea of people had just experienced a liberation so phenomenal that many still couldn’t believe it was happening. In living memory, they had known nothing but oppression under a harsh, discriminating regime that squashed freedom, especially freedom of religion, and crushed them under grinding slavery.

But in just a few months the national economy, the vaunted religion and the evil despot of the world’s most powerful state were broken. The agriculturally and religiously vital Nile River became blood; frogs, lice, locusts and other insects, all symbolizing pagan gods, infested fields and residences; and other unnatural disasters wracked the nation until finally the honored first-born Egyptian children, as well as beasts, suddenly died all in one night.

Then, the humiliated Egyptian dictatorship finally caved in. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people packed up tools, clothes, livestock, cookware filled with unleavened bread, and valuables presented to them by Egyptians and flowed out through the streets and past houses, businesses, plantations, temples, palaces, sky-scraper pyramids and broad fields decimated by the God of Israel.

And one man had prophesied it all.

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Question: I am a 16-year-old girl and have a real problem with my mother. She won’t let me wear outfits that are in style. She says they’re immodest. Most girls at my school can wear just about anything. If I wear the clothes my mother wants, I will look old-fashioned.

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If you ever feel tempted to start abusing alcohol, consider these facts:

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By Ryan Malone

“Don’t touch that!” the mother screams as her young boy reaches for the hot stove top.

Does the boy satisfy his curiosity? Or does he heed his mother?

Well, if the mother has taught him well, he obeys her and avoids a burn. If not, he relies on experience to be his teacher. And, sure, he would learn from such an experience-perhaps never touching a stovetop again. But, why should he have to learn that way?

Good question.

In fact, why should anyone have to learn that way? Let’s turn that question on ourselves.

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By Stephen Flurry

Nine years ago, on April 20, 1999, two high-school seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, traipsed through their high school in Colorado, firing semi-automatic rifles and detonating pipe bombs, hooting and laughing as they went. By the end of the suicidal massacre, hundreds of teenagers had witnessed the bloodiest school shooting in America’s history. Twelve students and one teacher were killed. Since then, there have been over two-dozen school shootings in the United States. America’s schools—”safest” not excluded—are becoming battlefields. And many people, teens included, are asking why? Who or what is responsible?

Video games? Violence on television? Divorce? Music lyrics? Neo-Nazi literature? Poor grades? Being picked on?

While these may be contributing factors, they still do not get to the heart of the matter.

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Question: Sometimes I have trouble getting along with other kids my age. I think that this is due to different personalities. How can I get along with different personalities?

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By Michael Dattolo

“To build a flying machine,” declared a confident New York Times editorial on Oct. 9, 1903, “would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians from 1 million to 10 million years.”

Less than three months later, Wilbur and Orville Wright would prove the New York Times wrong.

Dec. 17, 1903, was a cold and windy day in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Only five people turned up to watch, and even fewer expected the Wright brothers’ awkward-looking contraption would actually fly. Three days earlier, their first attempt had failed, damaging several parts of the aircraft. Now, repairs completed, Wilbur Wright, the older brother, started up the engine and Orville climbed onto the 750-pound Wright Flyer.

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