iPad

While not exactly a fan of Apple's marketing methods and ego I do appreciate that they make good products.

I'm just not sure about the iPad. Yet.

In the meantime you can decide for yourselves...

The iPad - watch more funny videos

Reviewing Interpretations

The BioLogos Foundation has a fascinating paper online by the historian Mark Noll examining the the growth of a literal reading and interpretation of the Bible over time throughout American history. Of special interest is how it was both a product and a shaper of that country's society and culture right up to the infamous 'Culture Wars' of the present - which has ultimately resulted in that view spreading and coming to dominate in many parts of the Church around the world.

Interestingly, that while understandable within the particular context it developed in, this interpretation appears to be in marked contrast to the the more comprehensive viewpoint that developed in European theological circles during the same period which made use of the developing tools of historical and literally criticism alongside theological consideration. This allowed a much richer and more able interpretative methodology to develop.

It is however the American model of interpretation that has come to dominate worldwide especially in the Western Church. Viewed historically this is not necessarily due to any particular superiority of one view compared to the other, but rather more to do with changes in global society as America's position as a world leader in multiple arenas in general developed as Europe's began to fade.

Well worth a read for anyone interested in Christianity and culture or history.

The Known Universe

Thanks to the American Museum of Natural History (and NASA Astronomy Photo of the Day for the pointer).

Smart Fish

Stingrays use tools and are capable of problem solving.

Article / Paper.

Awesome.

Integrating the Church and the Future

As many folk know I have an interest in the interaction of Christianity and emerging discoveries and technologies, specifically those that might reshape our thinking of life, spiritual and physical. I believe that these are important issues for the wider Church to begin considering outside of purely academic circles as they hold great potential to become pastorally and community relevant issues over the coming decades and centuries.

If we in the Church are to avoid our usual performance of unthoughtful reaction to novel situations rather than undertaken proactive prior consideration then we need to consider these issues more actively. We need to take responsibility for training Church leadership and members adequately so that we do not just solely default responsibility for such topics onto either academic theologians (to whom the Church needs to learn more from and appreciate more) or into the hands of agenda driven public Christian pressure groups (to whom the Church tends to turn to at present for expert opinion rather than actually to experts themselves).

Unnecessary and negatively framed past performances (genetically modified organisms, reproductive technologies, stem cells, etc) and the subsequent public dismissive reaction has driven deeper a division between the Church and the non-Churched in general.

This has two undesirable effect. Firstly it hampers the spread of the gospel through Christian living and direct evangelism as the Church becomes unreasonably out of step with the society around it. Not for good or responsible reasons but simply out of an effort to be different as being different is often equated with being more 'Christian' than norm of society about us. It also diverts efforts to live out of Kingdom values by the Church by unnecessarily diverting resources and support away from technologies that can be of great benefit to both people and the planet. I think the Church does have genuine and valid statements to make on these issues and they often can be in apparent contrast to secular thinking. However too often we make statements and form policies and attitudes not based on sound theology or informed understanding but simply for the sake of being collectively different or out of a fear of the unknown.

Over the next few years I aim to deliberately be thinking more of these issues through and writing about them here as well as perhaps more formally elsewhere. I would also like to think (hope!) I'll have time to intentionally raise these issues more in Church circles as well.

To help frame my (ambitious) thoughts I have decided to focus in on a few areas. Some of these have been discussed in various parts of the academic literature before but there is still a low public awareness of the very interesting discussions and conversations going on around them.

1. The Future Community of Believers - Some generalised thinking on the composition of the Church as the beings making up the society around us may diversify and expand beyond current public expectations. How do we worship, learn and support each other together when we may communicate, sense and experience the world in radically different ways?
2. The Nature of Sin and Redemption Applied to Non-Human Intelligences - At the heart of the Christian story of God, humanity and creation, but how do we apply that story beyond solely the human entity?
3. Physical Immortality and Eternal Life - How do we relate the results of life extension technologies and possible physical immortality to Christian thinking on the Resurrection of Christ and the Saints? How could this effect our understanding of the Restored and Redeemed Creation of the End Times?
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Christian Thinking on Gender - How do we integrate artificial lifeforms into Christian thinking on gender and gender roles when gender is not applicable to AI? How does thinking on AI and gender effect our current thinking on gender in humanity?
5. The Human Race Beyond Earth - How do we construct a functional galactic Church community when humanity begins to expand off-world and beyond the solar system? How do we apply principles of stewardship and environmental responsibility throughout the arena of space itself?
   
6. The Redeemed Universal Creation - What does it mean for Creation to be redeemed and restored in light of the modern 'expanded' understanding of the physical universe? What does it mean for extraterrestrial life (intelligent or not) to be included in this restoration?

Although these are indeed fairly novel examples to be thinking on I think that's actually constructive to do so for the many situations we face today as well as being prepared for tomorrow. It should also be fairly obvious from that list that there are a number of areas relevant to discussions going on at present in the Church. Even consideration of these topics as thought experiments may have some immediate application to those discussions.

I've found that it is often when you push an idea or thinking on a topic into untapped limits of thinking that you can gauge more fully whether that idea really does hold truth in the arenas you are already comfortable with it in. Since we are called to gladly pursue truth and right understanding as part of our mandate as co-creators in this universe I think it is certainly useful and wise to test our ideas to their limits, reforming them as necessary. If our conclusions have practical application as well at some point then even better.

Should be fun!

Art Science Online

One of the final year students in my department clearly has too much time on his hands as he has been finding time to surf the web. Bad 'David' as we shall call him.

Still, they are nice finds:

Captured Lightening over at the Telegraph website


and Complexification

Loving Intelligent Design

Looking at my blog stats its been nice to see that some folk have been taking the time to read through my (long) post on creation and intelligent design (ID) last weekend. I don't particularly find discussion of these topics interesting as they seem to continuously retread old ground and go round in circles while also providing some of the best examples of Christians being unchristian to one another, but sometimes you do come across some good writings on the topic that are worth bringing to wider attention.

I am therefore more than happy to highlight the following three blog posts over on Thomas Jay Oord's blog. He approaches the topic as a non-scientist but also as a professional theologian and I think he has some fresh and honest insights on ID and Christianity because of this.

A Theologian Evaluates Intelligent Design - Part 1 of 3

He discusses what he likes about both ID and the movement that drives it forward in Christian circles. I have to say I agree with most of what is said here, but I think we would both conclude that the positives mentioned here are not only non-exclusive to IDers but rather should be universal amongst all Christian theists.

A Theologian Evaluates Intelligent Design - Part 2 of 3

Some good thoughts that touch on a variety of issues on why he doesn't like ID ranging from both the basic science involved to the other areas such as school education that ID deliberately seeks to play a strong role in.

A Theologian Evaluates Intelligent Design - Part 3 of 3

He echoes many of the same thoughts that I have had on the inconsistency between creation involving ID and the nature of God's creativity as portrayed throughout the Bible. However what he also says and what I really like is he relates this back to other aspects of God's personality and nature such as His unconquerable love and respect for creation and His timeless desire for relationship with free individuals within it. Great stuff.

Please have a read through of the links above - they are an extremely wise and gracious collection of thoughts on this topic and highly recommended.

War for Cybertron

I'm not a big gamer but I like a lot of the visuals and concepts in this... the various scales of the characters, the functional nature of the environment (blast shields and roads constructed as needed by users for example) and just the sheer otherness of the non-biological landscape. Great stuff.

More Transformers: War for Cybertron Info

Wow

Fresh images from the repaired and upgraded Hubble Space Telecope showing a starscape containing some of the oldest galaxies ever imaged.

Mind the Gap

Over the last year or so I've been thinking about the history of science and discovery that over the last few centuries seems to have accelerated. In that time our understanding of the universe and what there might remain to be discovered (usually a bad move as something new and interesting tends to always be cropping up) has radically altered. Alongside this I've also been reflecting on God's participating activity within the universe and how that reflects His character and interest in humanity.

Through the means of scientific investigation and exploration we've known for centuries now that atoms and molecule self-assemble guided by the laws of electromagnetism. Since the middle of the 19th century we've also catalogued and understood the development (the self-assembly) of life through the large-scale statistical laws of natural selection. In many ways this self-assemblage carries on up to the universal scale through the development of planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies. At all these scales creation builds itself. That we can put together a working model of this is frankly astounding and would have been unbelievable only a few short centuries ago.

It is important however to note that the natural processes doing all this creating (including we humans) are themselves doing it both blindly and randomly. That is that the various components of creation do not have prior knowledge of their end state or concious awareness of the journey towards it. They are united under a common framework of universal laws and mechanisms of operation and selection rather than simple chance alone.

This is why many atheists cannot see evidence for a guiding hand in specific creative events or objects that some Christians declare must be related to direct actions of God - evidence of purpose in this form given by non-natural organisations of matter is simply not present. For the Christian theist however we must believe that God is active in the universe in some shape or form if we are to hold fast to the Creator God put forward in the Biblical text.

However we need not subscribe to the direct interventional activism of God that these Christians see as necessary (although not actually necessary) for God to be Creator. This viewpoint of direct part-time interventionism as a necessity for God to be Creator is what brings about much of the modern cultural conflict between an understanding of a supernaturally mandated creation and the appearance of that creation which is sufficiently explainable physically through natural processes only.

Rather to credit rightly both the Biblical and scientific stories we encounter we must be forced to subscribe to a far more glorifying, widely inclusive, form of God's action in the universe. The vision of God's action in the universe presented in the Bible encompasses both special cases of personal interventions in history (the healing miracles of Jesus as an example) but also a continuous, universe wide and conscious creative action by God. In the Biblical view of a God who is Lord over all of creation all occurrences are in some way dependent upon and caused by His direct will, love and permissioning. Under this viewpoint the entirety of the operation of the universe itself becomes the expression of God's will for it. Instead of tweaking things here and there everything physical becomes a part of God's intentions. The universe itself, its ongoing existence, in all of its fresh and creative glory becomes the continuous gift of God to entities within it capable of knowing, responding to and worshipping Him.

There are however some regions of our understanding where we are not so clear on the exact details yet. Examples of these so-called 'gaps' include a scientific understanding of conciousness and of the origin of DNA. This second gap comes at the scale of DNA, the molecule that tells our component molecules and atoms how to assemble into our physical bodies. Because of this we also don't have a complete theory of the origin of life on Earth although we do have several interesting leads. This is important because our physical bodies are a vital piece of who we are and who we can be in terms of being able to relate to God in the way that He has intended. It is important as we are very clearly composed of and operated by a consortium of non-living molecules and atoms.

This is a gap of knowledge that a primarily religious movement, popular amongst some Christians, known as Intelligent Design (ID) has attempted to exploit for cultural and political gain. In the scientific community there is the expectation that this gap in our knowledge will potentially close in time as our understanding of creation progresses as have other 'gaps' in our past knowledge. To the advocates of ID however the origin of DNA presents physically insurmountable problems. This they say is due to the highly complex nature of the DNA molecule. Although DNA is indeed acknowledged by the scientific community to be complex and its exact origins are a problem yet to be completely solved, ID advocates argue that it is so complex that its assembly by natural processes is too improbable to have been accomplished by solely natural processes. This they argue means that there must have been a seperate external intelligence involved at some point whom assembled at the very least some key components of some sort of 'basic' DNA from which evolution through natural selection then acted upon in a independent natural way to create modern DNA and life today.

The external intelligence of course is never described or named as God as the ID movement likes to present itself to the public as a strictly scientific endeavour. However the intelligence proposed must have a supernatural nature (i.e. a non-natural explanation) at some point as the ID position must by default argue that any natural intelligence itself must have had to have had help forming itself at some point along the way. Of course not mentioning God by name is also coincidentally helpful in attempts to have ID labelled as science and not religion in schools and the courts. Funny that.

From scientific and theological perspectives there are a number of problems with this line of thinking however.

The first is that ID is relying heavily (almost exclusively) on mathematical modelling to prove its case. To do this it must also advocate that modelling is a superior position to actual real life observation and experimentation of the physical systems involved - the primary tools of scientific discovery. Although modelling is a valuable tool in many aspects of scientific research it must bow to reality as observed via experimentation and observation. Time and time again these come out either in support of evolution (which of course doesn't invalidate ID itself) or actually invalidate ID's 'predictions' (which does invalidate ID). Other mathematical modelling techniques have been investigated that support evolution, techniques validated by the actual physical biology involved.

The second is that by claiming that the 'gap' of our understanding of the formation of DNA is equivalent to there never being even the potential of a discovery (or several) that fills that gap is incorrect. One is not the same as the other. Once we didn't know how the Sun could be so hot as all we knew about were chemical reactions. Now that we have discovered and understand nuclear reactions we do understand what keeps the Sun so hot. New discoveries close gaps in our understandings. There is no reason to think our understanding of DNA formation is any different.

Indeed we already know that viruses undergo a form of natural selection during replication allowing them to favour viral strains best suited to their current environment. Viruses straddle a line between bacteria and complex molecules (for example proteins that combine to form DNA). This gap that ID would wish to exploit already has some islands of understanding appearing in it.

A couple of weeks ago a highly relevant paper was also published in Science, one of the world's top science journals (News Article / Paper). It demonstrated that prions (protein molecules which can cause neurodegenerate diseases such as BSE and CJD) were also capable of undergoing environmental selection and change in the same fashion as life itself.

The fact that lifeforms, viruses and proteins such as prions all undergo and obey a common universal behaviour helps to give confidence that the problem of the formation of DNA (DNA fitting in amongst these groups) is probably going to be solved using similar mechanisms. This is indeed where much of the research into the origins of DNA is currently focused. Unfortunately this leaves very little room for the theoretical positions of ID, a position that says we can never know because it is impossible in principle to know. The reality however appears to be very different.

The individual examples of viruses and prions don't by themselves disprove the ideas of ID, but they do strengthen the case for natural selection as a driver for evolution at the molecular level and in doing so squeezes further the small (current) gaps in our understanding that IDers claim as support for their ideas.

Focusing on gaps is not the way a scientific hypothesis becomes a valid scientific theory. In order to become an accepted theory within the scientific community (such as evolution has accomplished) a theory must provide experimental evidence that the model it is proposing mirrors reality. This is achieved through close observation of the natural world and through experimentation. The experiments on prions outlined in the mentioned paper for example do this well and fit the evolutionary model nicely. This forces the arguments of IDers back yet another step, closing further the gaps which they claim are impassable chasms.

The ideas of ID have primarily been developed by select groups of Christians. These groups seek both a political and a theological agenda hostile to changes in society over the last century and to promote a specific thinking on God's character derived unwittingly from a mindset forged in the era of the Industrial Revolution.

In that era humans begun to innovate and develop technology on a scale not seen before in our history. This gave us the capacity to mould creation around us in drastically more noticeable ways than before. The viewpoint that this mechanistic piece meal method of creativity was the way in which God could create gained much popularity in popular circles. It's popularity amongst some Christians was further cemented when social changes about them begun to be blamed on Charles Darwin's ideas of biological evolution which stood in stark contrast as a mechanism of creation when compared with the emerging interventionist view.

This was also an era where mass printing was in widespread operation and every man on the street was able to read the Biblical texts for themselves. While this is undoubtedly a good thing people's individual readings were often without guidance. This lead to incorrect understandings of the texts as they became improperly contextualised. In the case of Genesis 1-3 a straight forward reading of an English translation of the texts does indeed at first glance seem to support the interventionist rather than evolutionary view of God's creativity. With understanding and appreciation of the original language, purpose and genre it does not.

All these factors have combined to generate a succession of anti-evolution (and by extension anti-science) movements ranging from the 'creation science' of the mid-late 20th century, to the ID movement at the turn of the century to the current series of 'academic freedom' cases running through various law courts in the United States in recent years.

Within this context it can be seen that the promotion of ID (and indeed most anti-evolutionary religious activity) that occurs nearly exclusively by Christian believers is on pretty shaky grounds. It is not only unsupported by any actual science (only by misunderstandings of established science), but is also derived from a misjudged theology driven by cultural and societal factors rather than by actual substantiated theological problems between modern science and Christian belief.

A serious problem with ID for the Christian theist is it makes God's purposeful actions in the world limited to only those fewer and fewer areas of understanding we don't yet have a handle upon. This is in stark comparison to the active Lord and Ruler of all creation that the Bible presents him as. The ID position not only diminishes God in our thinking by assigning Him less and less authority, over creation but also attempts to elevate humans (however innocently) to the position where we dictate what God can and can't do. We lift ourselves up as divine deciders while lowering the idea and expectation of God to the human level. Both of these positions are not only unnecessary and spiritually harmful, but also the height of human arrogance.

A final problem should also be easily evident. Until we learnt about the existence of DNA this was a gap that we never even knew existed and yet theists have been quite happily about and believing in God for thousands of years beforehand. If our faith becomes heavily reliant on current gaps in our thinking or understanding than our faith is constantly on the run as our understandings develop. Faith becomes only a moment in time and defined by a specific set of facts. It then becomes subject to the cultural whims of a particular time in history. If however our faith is rightly rooted upon an external viewpoint and eternal God then it can be surer and more confident and capable of successfully and joyfully assimilating new discoveries within its paradigm.

This is the viewpoint of faith that the God of Christianity puts forward to us. A God who is sovereign, timeless and at the heart of the universe, but also a God with such overwhelming love and interest in us, not only individuals and as people but also as an idea. His love has not just gifted us a universe simply to exist in, but it goes far beyond that to gifting us a universe that continuously and actively makes us a reality.

Christians in Science: Northern Conference - Registration Open

Registration for the upcoming Christians in Science conference here in Edinburgh on 20th March 2010 is now open along with details of the speakers and program over on the CiS website.

A Fistful of Planets

The Kepler space telescope that I have previously written about of has started pulling in its first results. The first batch of new exoplanets to be discovered by the telescope are mainly in the 'hot Jupiter' class or massive, gaseous worlds that all orbit very close in to their parent star.

Of course these worlds are not the target mission of the telescope which is to track down earth-sized worlds in habitable zones around stars. For such planets we still need years more of observations, however these early results are encouraging as it shows the telescope to be capable of making unique discoveries of its own rather than just confirming observations from other telescopes (although that is quite useful itself as well).

I admit that I hadn't quite appreciated it would be catching other world besides its target ones, but that is actually a pretty neat bonus for the mission. Knowledge of the basic properties of the other 400 or so exoplanets that have been discovered so far has been helping to improve and guide our models of planetary formation over the last decade or so. A big limitation on this has been that our ability to observe these worlds has either been indirect (through wobbles in a stars position) or scanty (the transitioning method that Kepler has been designed to vastly improve). This limit has meant both a slow growth in the number of worlds detected able to offer data for our models alongside a heavy bias towards the detection of more massive worlds against less massive worlds.

From the looks of things Kepler will not only rapidly stack up the number of worlds, but will also be filling in data from all sizes of worlds in many different types of orbit as well. Great stuff.

Tim Keller on Creation

The BioLogos Foundation held a conference for church leaders in America recently which gathered together theologians, historians and scientists alongside a number of leading US church leaders with the objective of tackling constructively the relationship between science and theology with an emphasis on celebrating God's creation by understanding both what the Bible and Nature teach about it.

Tim Keller is pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. He is also a Christian book writer with popular titles such as the Reason for God under his belt. Recently he presented a paper at a BioLogos workshop looking at concerns with science, especially understanding evolution, that church members have bought to him over the years. The paper also looks at possible best answers to such concerns. It is now available from the BioLogos Website and I would recommend it very much.

Firstly I think that what comes over throughout the paper is an obvious sense of grace and patience throughout. Keller recognises that there is room for healthy discussion and investigation on the topic of creation but also that we must be prepared to change our opinions on some issues where our opinions may not appear as firmly routed in a more learned reading of the Bible as we had first thought - especially when other streams of learning such as science are potentially alerting us to this already.

Keller comes out strongly in favour of a reading of the Genesis text that is not of the 'young earth' brand and arrives at this conclusion by an analysis of Genesis itself without reference to outside sources. For him this resolves many of the apparent conflicts with modern science while remaining honouring the original intent of and style of writing that we find in Genesis itself. Indeed Keller would seem to conclude that this is in fact much more how the text was meant to be read originally than how a literalistic 'young earth' reading would take it.

Although comfortable with reading the text in this way Keller does acknowledge that an acceptance of biological evolution leads to some possible problems for the Christian faith in general. He acknowledges and spends time discussing Biblical authority, suffering, evil, Adam and Eve and the Fall and provides pointers and references towards understanding these issues within a vision of creation that embraces biological evolution as the expression of God's creativity in the universe.

He also points out that for many evolution has become extended far beyond the biological arena it was first proposed in and this is often where conflicts between Christian ethics and science often mistakenly appear to be. Rather than the scientific evidence for biological evolution being the problem this over-extension of evolution is often the reason for Christians rejecting all aspects of evolution in the entirety - the biological along with the philosophical.

He advocates that Christians need to learn to differentiate between evolution as the most successful explanation for biological diversity on the planet and evolution as a philosophy to explain or contextualise the entirety of human experience. While it seems clear that evolution has played a majority role in the physical development of life at all levels on this world it is cannot be the sole driver of morals, ethics and concious for creatures with free will such as ourselves - a position in agreement with the Biblical viewpoint of humanity at some level being created in the image of God.

If I would have one 'problem' with Keller's paper it would be that in discussing models of the Fall and Adam and Eve he favours that from Derek Kinder, a theologian, whom writing in the 1960's seems to attempt to maintain some form of special physical creation of humanity (even just Eve rather than both Adam and Eve) in order to reinforce a perceived separation between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Since the 1960's however genetic analyses of humans and apes has revealed a wealth of further evidence that has only reinforced the evidence for our common descent with the rest of life on this planet. This should make positions advocating any level of unique special creation (of the physical body anyway) a rather shaky approach when trying to look holistically at creation which rather seems to go against the thrust of the rest of the paper and seems like some rather abstract fiddling of the corners rather than creating an integrated point of view. It's possible I guess that Keller was simply unaware of this change in the weight of evidence but I think is a good example of constructive dialogue between science and theology where our understandings are allowed to be sharpened by both.

He does however also propose Alexander's (summarised from Lucas) five models of integration between Genesis and modern science as other possibilities (although of course excluding the young-earth and old-earth literalistic options by virtue of his earlier discussion).

In closing I was also very pleased to note that Keller wisely calls other church leaders to action in deepening their understandings of these sorts of topics for the benefit not only of themselves or academic discourse but also for the benefit of person in the pew with questions and a desire to understand. He says:

"In short, if I as a pastor want to help both believers and inquirers to relate science and faith coherently, I must read the works of scientists, exegetes, philosophers, and theologians and then interpret them for my people. Someone might counter that this is too great a burden to put on pastors, that instead they should simply refer their laypeople to the works of scholars. But if pastors are not ‘up to the job’ of distilling and understanding the writings of scholars in various disciplines, how will our laypeople do it?

This is one of the things that parishioners want from their pastors. We are to be a bridge between the world of scholarship and the world of the street and the pew. I’m aware of what a burden this is. I don’t know that there has ever been a culture in which the job of the pastor has been more challenging. Nevertheless, I believe this is our calling."

That's a call I hope our leaders will take up seriously in 2010 and beyond. I would recommend this excellent paper as a good starting point.

This paper as a whole (and the larger workshop itself) strikes me as a fantastic move in the right direction for the church. Too many people in (and out of) our churches have genuine questions on these issues that are often stumbling blocks to their deepening of faith. Often this is simply because they lack leaders, opportunities or tools necessary to productively engage with these issues.

It can be too easy for us to have an 'anything goes' type attitude on these issues, when in fact that can encourage unhelpful and hindering viewpoints as surely as the advocating of viewpoints unsupported by rigorous Biblical understanding or scientific evidences can do as well. If we are to engage with scripture and creation honourably then it should only be natural that we should be providing the means for this to happen. If we want to encourage our congregations to deepen their faith and to realistically consider the world around them for the benefit of others then we should be facilitating these sorts of discussions. The people and resources to help us do this are out there, we just need to be brave enough in our faith to engage with them.

CREATION, EVOLUTION, AND CHRISTIAN LAYPEOPLE - By Tim Keller

A Decade of Science in Review

The BBC has an interesting set of short interviews with scientists asking them what their top advance or discovery from science has been in the last decade.

In summary they are:

1. Discovery of Exo-Planets - Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society
   
2. Discovery of 'Hobbits' - Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum
3. Mapping of the Human Genome - Tim Hubbard, Wellcome Trust
4. Watery Atmosphere at Enceladus, a moon of Saturn- Michele Dougherty, Imperial College London
5. Observations of Dark Matter - Richard Massey, Royal Observatory Edinburgh
6. Construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - Alvaro De Rujula, CERN
7. Cataloguing of Sea Life on Earth - Ron O'Dor, Census for Marine Life
8. Next Generation Biofuels - Joyce Tait, University of Edinburgh

EDIT: The Telegraph also has a different list with many of the same items featuring amongst others.