May 8, 2008
Anna Kushnir is now to be referred to as Doctor Anna Kushnir!
May 8, 2008
May Scientiae Carnival is up on A Cat Nap
170th Carnival of Education is up on Bellringers
Carnival of the Recipes: Spring-Fever Edition is up on Everything And Nothing
May 8, 2008
Why Face Symmetry Is Sexy Across Cultures And Species:
In humans, faces are an important source of social information. One property of faces that is rapidly noticed is attractiveness. Research has highlighted symmetry and sexual dimorphism (how masculine or feminine a face is) as important…
May 7, 2008
If you're there before it's over, you're on time.
- James J. Walker
May 7, 2008
The genome of the Platypus has been sequenced:
The first analysis of the genome sequence of the duck-billed platypus was published today by an international team of scientists, revealing clues about how genomes were organized during the early evolution of mammals. The research was supported in part…
May 7, 2008
The challenge from skullsinthestars is up - pick up a very old, classic science paper and write a blog post about it. Put it in a proper historical, theoretical, methodological and philosophical context. You can always go back to blogging about the latest research or latest creationist idiocy…
May 7, 2008
I wanted to write this, but Abel did it much more eloquently.
May 7, 2008
My daughter collects snowglobes. Or, to be precise, we collect snowglobes for her when we travel. She has a few from New York City, one from San Francisco, one from Murtle Beach, one from Milwaukee. I badly messed up when I went to Boston last year and did not get one. Last year, the TSA made a…
May 7, 2008
Considering this I am kinda baffled by this. There is tons of microbial metagenomics and genomics in PLoS journals.
May 7, 2008
Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki that contains all the information one may need and want in regard to Open Access Publishing, from jobs to research questions. You should bookmark it and check it out regularly.
May 7, 2008
Peter Suber relays the announcement (and add some more) of the Open Humanities Press, a collection of seven Open Access journals (a humanities PLoS of sorts) in critical and cultural theory.
Humanities bloggers have been way ahead of science bloggers in regards to posting their own work (including…
May 7, 2008
There are 56 new articles published in PLoS ONE this week and it was hard to make the picks as this seems to be a very, very good week with lots of cool papers. Here are some of the highlights - please post ratings, notes and comments on the papers, write blog posts and send trackbacks:
Seed…
May 6, 2008
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
- Herbert Clark Hoover
May 6, 2008
Dinosaur Bones Reveal Ancient Bug Bites:
Paleontologists have long been perplexed by dinosaur fossils with missing pieces - sets of teeth without a jaw bone, bones that are pitted and grooved, even bones that are half gone. Now a Brigham Young University study identifies a culprit: ancient insects…
May 6, 2008
International Carnival of Pozitivities - edition 2.11 - is up on DropDeadHappy
Grand Rounds 4:33 are up on Suture for a Living
Carnival of Homeschooling: Week 123 is up on Melissa's Idea Garden
May 6, 2008
I am about to go to vote. You can watch the NC results here.
Update: Pam is liveblogging the election. If you have experiences from the polling places around NC today, post them in her comments.
May 5, 2008
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.
- Louis Kronenberger
May 5, 2008
Birds Do It, Bees Do It, but Candida albicans Does It Differently:
The yeast Candida albicans lives an unnoticed and mostly harmless life as a member of our gut flora. However, mainly in an immunocompromised host, it can proliferate and cause severe, life-threatening infections. Within this…
May 5, 2008
Roaring Bats: New Scientific Results Show Bats Emitting More Decibels Than A Rock Concert:
Researchers studying the echolocation behavior in bats have discovered that the diminutive flying mammals emit exceptionally loud sounds -- louder than any known animal in air.
Young Songbirds Babble Before…
May 5, 2008
Tar Heel Tavern - NC Primary Edition - is up on Terra Sigillata
Carnival of the Blue #12 is up on Island Of Doubt
Carnival of the Green # 126 is up on Bean Sprouts
May 5, 2008
You really think I am going to put this above the fold? No way - you have to click (First posted on July 7, 2006):
Today's lesson is on the reproductive anatomy of the domestic pig (Sus scrofa domestica), which probably applies to the wild species in the pig family as well. Although we may…
May 4, 2008
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
- Marcus Aurelius
May 4, 2008
When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action…
May 4, 2008
Grunewald station in Berlin is a small, unasuming train station that looks like thousands of such stations around the world. But it is at this spot that thousands of Jews were loaded onto trains to Auschwitz and other places, initially in precise batches of 100 people per day, later increasing to…
May 4, 2008
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe where, by design, concrete slabs that are initially perfectly aligned, due to sinking of the soil, adopt all sorts of different angles. Looking down the "aisles", one sees people, children playing hide-and-seek, and suddenly disappearing. People vanish,…
May 4, 2008
The Boneyard XIX is up on Familiarity Breeds Content
Festival of the Trees #23 is up on 10000 birds
Circus of the Spineless #32 is up on Deep Sea News
Friday Ark #189 is up on Modulator
May 4, 2008
More pictures from the Museum:
We found a Coturnix:
Enormous insects:
Linnaeus, Ernst Mayr and Charles Darwin:
May 4, 2008
Catriona and I, obviously, had fun here:
Fossils, including the best Archaeopterix in the world:
The Evolution of Life:
May 4, 2008
Time to put up some of the pictures. Catriona took me around Berlin, for whatever one can see in just a day and a half - the Brandenburg gate, a slab of the Berlin wall, etc....
Quick breakfast:
Going from West to East Berlin:
The Wall:
The oldest traffic light in Germany:
Evening…
May 4, 2008
This post from March 27, 2006 starts with some of my old research and poses a new hypothesis.
The question of animal models
There are some very good reasons why much of biology is performed in just a handful of model organisms. Techniques get refined and the knowledge can grow incrementally until…
