Greetings friends!
Sarah, daddy, and I visited the beach on Sunday(Sep. 27th. The waves were really high, due to the full moon, and the sunrise was just glorious. I have included some photos and a couple videos in this post.
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Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.
Psalms 21:13
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Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that moveth therein.
Psalms 69:34
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From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord's name is to be praised.
Psalms 113:3
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One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.
Psalms 145:3
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And blessed by his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen.
Psalms 72:19
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Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.
Psalms 150:1
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The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.
Psalms 145:9
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I will sing of the mercies of the Lord for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.
Psalms 89:1
And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God:
Revelation 19:1
Which picture do you like best? I've numbered them so you can easily leave a comment with the number of the picture you like best. :)
Your friend in the Lord,
Ashley
At
a personal level, some will decide that the year just ending was better
than most; for others, it was a year they would rather forget. Then at a
global level, when we see and hear of unending wars and famines and new
diseases spreading worldwide, some will ask, "If there is a God, where
is He?" Others will turn the situation around and ask, "What kind of God
permits all this to happen?"
Several
years ago, an international research team convincingly demonstrated how
bees know how far they have traveled visually. Researchers trained bees
to fly through a 30 foot tube by placing food at the far side. Then
they placed a checkerboard pattern inside the tube designed to make the
bees think they had flown farther than they really had. Researchers
found that the pattern made the bees think they had flown 31 times
farther than they really had. After watching the bees that had gone
through the tricky tube, researchers calculated that for every 18
degrees an image travels across the bee's eye, she will dance for one
millisecond as she communicates her discovery. As one researcher put it,
they have calibrated the bees' odometer.
Dr.
Stuart Burgess, the aerospace engineer responsible for the solar array
deployment system on the European Space Agency's earth observation
satellite system, wrote a whole chapter about the human knee in his book
Hallmarks of Design. He refers to the knee as a sophisticated
"four-bar system" in which two bones and two ligaments work together in
perfect harmony. 
Let's
say that you are a frog in a pond. High above your head, cosmic rays
are striking nitrogen-14 atoms and changing them into radioactive
carbon-14 atoms. That carbon eventually finds its way into your food and
becomes part of you. Throughout your life it continues to accumulate in
you. When you die, it stops accumulating. Being unstable, carbon-14
decays over time. Researchers measure the carbon-14 that remains in
something that was once alive to determine how old it is. To do so,
however, they must assume that the Earth is over 50,000 years old.
That's how long it would take for the amount of carbon-14 being produced
to equal the rate of carbon-14 decay. But we now know that there is
more carbon-14 being produced than is decaying, meaning that the Earth
must be less than 30,000 years old! In addition, the processes at work
during Noah's Flood would have lowered the availability of carbon-14 to
living things, which would also help account for the shortage of
carbon-14. 
Researchers
studying pigeons have learned that they can read all of the letters of
the alphabet and they read them in a way similar to people. Scientists
became convinced that pigeons see the world in much the same way as we
do when they discovered that pigeons tend to confuse the very same
letters that people do. What’s more, it took only four months for
pigeons to learn to distinguish all the letters of the alphabet. For
years, pigeons have been used to spot and reject defective items on
assembly lines, where they have better records than human beings. 
Penguins,
of course, can't slip on a pair of sunglasses, but they don't need to.
These marvelous birds have an external eye fluid that filters out blue
and ultraviolet wavelengths from the solar spectrum. This gives them
clear vision while protecting their eyes from harm. As you might have
guessed, eagles, falcons, hawks and other birds of prey also have this
fluid.
Scientists
do know that the clock is set by light. They also know that your clock
is not set by the rods and cones in your eye that see color and images.
They had conclusively shown that the eye's rods and cones have nothing
to do with setting the clock. Several years ago, researchers bred mice
whose eyes lacked rods and cones. As they shifted light periods, the
mice still adjusted their biological clocks to the new periods. Now
researchers are convinced they have found how our eyes adjust our
biological clock after studying, of all things, the African horned frog.
While studying the frog, scientists discovered a photoreceptor called
melanopsin. This photoreceptor is found in the skin, eyes and brain of
the frogs. They then decided to test for melanopsin in our eyes. They
discovered that a form of the photoreceptor is produced in the inner
retina of our eyes. The rods and cones of our eyes are located on the
outer retina. The human eye, and those of mammals, is a multi purpose
organ!
A
male courting a female will bring her a flower petal. The petal usually
matches his color or is a deeply contrasting color. Normally a perky
little bird with an upright tail, when courting he lowers his tail and
creeps around close to the ground. As he twists his body back and forth,
he puffs out his cheek feathers. If the female accepts his courting,
she builds their nest alone, lining it with bright parrot feathers.
While they mate for life, they are not known for fidelity to their
mates. When mature, females will go off on their own, but males may stay
with their parents for a year or more. Their main duty is to guard the
family nest. If danger approaches the nest, the guard will puff up his
wings, lower his tail and scuttle through dry grass, pretending to be a
mouse. The idea is to lure the predator away from the nest. 
As
these incredible creatures make their way through the soil, they
shorten in length and then stretch their body to as long as fourteen
feet. Despite their size, it is very difficult to study these giant
earthworms because they never come to the surface unless flushed out by
heavy rains. They prefer to spend their lives deep underground where
they won't be cut to pieces by farmers tilling the ground. 
The
Grandidier's baobob is probably the strangest and most magnificent of
the eight species of baobab, and it is found nowhere else on earth than
Madagascar. Lack of water can sometimes be a problem for plants in
Madagascar, so the baobab overcomes this by storing water within the
fibrous wood of the trunk. It is so effective at storing water, the
tree's diameter actually fluctuates with rainfall. Though the tree
trunks look solid, elephants know they can gouge into the wood with
their tusks to enjoy a nice drink of water.