ScienceBlogs

Life Science

• November 7, 2009

• Evolution for Everyone

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  Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection XV: Group Selection in the Wild In T&R XIV I showed that prejudice against group selection is impervious to evidence from laboratory experiments. It is also impervious to evidence from the wild. I will focus on one of many examples that can be provided. In 1995,...

• Mike the Mad Biologist

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  Good News About Flu Production Cell-based vaccination production could be available soon.

• Not Exactly Rocket Science

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  South African wildlife - Wait, that's not a trunk... This is a bull elephant firmly establishing why it is he, and not the lion, who is king of beasts. The elephant's penis is not only massive but prehensile. As we watched in baffled amusement (and the faintest tinge...

• Laelaps

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  Photo of the Day #756: American avocets American avocets (Recurvirostra americana), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah....

• The Scientific Indian

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  A matter of Life and er... Matter As I was stuffing my face today, I wondered if the Universe cared. The short answer is no. The slightly longer and more depressing answer is: my existence is more marginal than a speck of stray DNA on a grain...

• November 6, 2009

• Pharyngula

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  Penis envy Face it, guys: we all wish we had a penis with the versatility and length and flexibility of the barnacle's. Mating barnacles from Casey Dunn on Vimeo....

• Pharyngula

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  Friday Cephalopod: Will you be this pretty when you're dead? Ammonite Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman....

• A Blog Around The Clock

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  New and Exciting in PLoS this week Current Status of a Model System: The Gene Gp-9 and Its Association with Social Organization in Fire Ants: The Gp-9 gene in fire ants represents an important model system for studying the evolution of social organization in insects as...

• Laelaps

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  Photo of the Day #755: Dire wolf The skeleton of a dire wolf (Canis dirus), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City....

• November 5, 2009

• A Blog Around The Clock

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  Tweetlinks, 11-05-09 Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my...

• Tomorrow's Table

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  Plants and Bacteria 'Talk' to Thwart Disease In plant and animal innate immunity, like many of the dances of life, it takes two to tango. A receptor molecule in the plant pairs up with a specific molecule on the invading bacteria and, presto, the immune system swings...

• Laelaps

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  Where's My Elephant? Almost every time I get into a discussion about woolly mammoths with someone the conversation eventually steers towards the topic of cloning a mammoth. "Wouldn't it be fascinating?", they often say. And with a little extra genetic engineering, many...

• Not Exactly Rocket Science

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  Discriminating butterflies show how one species could split into two An Ecuadorian butterfly represents the first step in the separation of one species into two. It comes in one of two colours, and one of these shows a preference for mating with individuals of its own hue. It's the sort of early segregation that provides species with their origins.

• Evolution for Everyone

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  New Evidence for Group Selection Published in Science Magazine The newest issue of Science Magazine includes a lovely demonstration of multilevel selection by Omar Tonsi Eldakar, my former graduate student, who is currently at the University of Arizona's Center for Insect Science. Readers who have been following my "Truth...

• Pharyngula

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  Marine tragedy! Stop the killing! Be not faint of heart, O Loyal Cephalopodophiles, but National Geographic has a whole series of photos of a squid slaughter. The whales are shameless. They're just swimming around with tattered corpses dangling from their mouths, and they even dandle...

• Evolution for Everyone

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  Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection XIV: Group Selection in the Laboratory In the storybook portrayal of science, theories are tested by experiments, which are conducted in laboratories so that the conditions can be rigorously controlled. How would group selection be tested in the laboratory? Let's begin with the thousands of selection...

• Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

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  Today's Mystery Bird for you to Identify Here's an LBJ to challenge you .. but you're getting better at recognizing these birds, aren't you?

• A Blog Around The Clock

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  New and Exciting in PLoS ONE There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...

• Common Knowledge

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  Distributed Science, Part 2 I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of...

• Laelaps

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  Photo of the Day #754: Giant bison The skeleton of a giant bison (Bison latifrons), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City....

• November 4, 2009

• On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess

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  The Flawless Logic of Little Isis (One Year at ScienceBlogs) Today is my blogoversary of joining ScienceBlogs. w00t! It's been, well, quite a year. Last week I was anticipating the big commemorative event, complete with fan fare, the sacrifice of some animals (but not JB Handley's horse), a full day...

• Gene Expression

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  Best paper title I've seen in a while Cooperation and individuality among man-eating lions....

• Laelaps

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  The March of Progress Has Deep Roots A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress." The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is...

• A Blog Around The Clock

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  Science Cafe Raleigh: Dog Genome: Teaching Scientists New Tricks Dog Genome: Teaching Scientists New Tricks November 17th; 6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 919.833.8898 This year, roughly 66,000 people will be diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, while another...

• Genetic Future

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  More on return of research data to participants from Genomics Law Report Yesterday I posted a brief rant about the need for researchers to think about the best way to return genetic research data to participants, spinning off an equally brief opinion piece I wrote for the ongoing ELSI series at Genomics...

Hurricanes

As the 2009 hurricane season picks up speed after a remarkably mild beginning, we look to the ScienceBlogs archives for the science behind the storms.

The Island of DoubtJuly 25, 2006

The real story of the hurricanes

Neuron Culture September 11, 2008

Hurricanes & Climate Change: A Round-Up Says Maybe More, Definitely Hotter

Corpus Callosum September 12, 2008

What Ike Really Means; Introducing Integrated Kinetic Energy