April 16, 2009
Climate Change Makes Migrations Longer For Birds:
A team of scientists, led by Durham University, have published findings that show that the marathon flights undertaken by birds to spring breeding grounds in Europe, are going to turn into even more epic journeys; the length of some migrations could…
April 15, 2009
Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune…
April 15, 2009
Owls' Dawn And Dusk Concerts Promote Visual Communication:
Reporting in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE April 8, Vincenzo Penteriani and Maria Delgado of the Estacion Biologica de Doñana, Spain, describe the evolution of white throat badges in association with dawn and dusk vocal signals…
April 14, 2009
That's what life is like. You have to keep running on the treadmill of evolution or you fall off.
- Bill Nye, The Science Guy
April 14, 2009
There are 9 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 (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one…
April 14, 2009
Encephalon #68 is up at Ouroboros
Grand Rounds Vol. 5 No. 30 are up on Pharmamotion
April 14, 2009
I have received, from a friend, a draft of an intra-institutional guideline for employee blogging and online behavior. The employer has been anonymized. The document has been written by non-scientist non-bloggers at the institution and is making the rounds prior to formal review and approval.
We…
April 14, 2009
Deadly Parasite's Rare Sexual Dalliances May Help Scientists Neutralize It:
For years, microbiologist Stephen Beverley, Ph.D., has tried to get the disease-causing parasite Leishmania in the mood for love. In this week's Science, he and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health report that…
April 13, 2009
Contentment is for cows; a challenging purpose is for people.
- Denis Waitley
April 13, 2009
As you may be aware, there was a non-review review of OpenLab 2008 in The New Scientist. I thought about fisking it line-by-line, but Passover interfered, and anyway, Brian, SciCurious, Ed and Blake already did it very, very well, so I can just move on...you can also see a discussion here. Any…
April 13, 2009
Ah, it takes me so long these days to actually blog about events I attend! This one was last Thursday! But here it is. I went to the Triangle Blogger Bash in Durham, organized by Ginny of 30THREADS (find them on Twitter as well) and hosted by the Durham Performing Arts Center.
I am bad at…
April 13, 2009
Periodic Tables and the Museum of Life and Science Present:
April 14, 2009 | 7:00 P.M.
Waves of Ocean Literacy
Speaker: Cynthia Cudaback, NC State University
If the Earth is a body, the ocean is its blood, circulating over most of the surface, moderating temperature and sustaining life. Cynthia…
April 13, 2009
Since The Lay Scientist had technical problems with the blog, there was no Praxis last month. Martin will thus post it this month (on or close to the 15th). He still has all the entries from last time around, but please also send some fresh submissions as well.
Next edition of The Giant's Shoulders…
April 13, 2009
Odor Matching: The Scent Of Internet Dating:
Dating websites will soon be able to compare partners in terms of whether the personal body odour of the other party will be pleasant to them. This has a very serious biological background.
Dance Your Way To Successful Aging:
Older people can dance their…
April 12, 2009
A good deal happens in a man's life that he isn't responsible for. Fortunate openings occur; but it is safe to remember that such breaks are occurring all the time, and other things being equal, the advantage goes to the man who is ready.
- Lawrence Downs
April 12, 2009
He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User by Jay Rosen. And his new podcast with Dave Winer, mostly about the AP fiasco, has been posted here. Worth a read and a listen.
April 12, 2009
About a week ago, my brother sent me a couple of interesting papers about funding in science, one in Canada, the other in the UK. I barely had time to skim the abstracts at the time, but thought I would put it up for discussion online and come back to it later. So I posted the link, abstract and…
April 12, 2009
Circadian Clock: Scientists Model 3D Structures Of Proteins That Control Human Clock:
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute say they have taken a leap forward in their quest to understand the proteins that control the human circadian clock -- the 24-hour wake-sleep cycle that, when…
April 11, 2009
There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.
- J. Donald Adams
April 11, 2009
Ants Can Learn To Forage On One-way Trails:
Ant trails fascinate children and scientists alike. With so many ants traveling in both directions, meeting and contacting one another, carrying their loads and giving the impression that they have a sense of urgency and duty, they pose the following…
April 11, 2009
How You Feel The World Impacts How You See It:
In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects -- such as rocks -- appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect…
April 10, 2009
I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed. Except perhaps the time I found out that M&Ms really do melt in your hand ...
- Peter Oakley
April 10, 2009
We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew.
In the meantime, I want to cover…
April 10, 2009
(First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,
Comparative analysis of sexual…
April 10, 2009
[First posted here] Since I already posted, earlier in the week, the weirdest and most disgusting animal sex post ever, instead of writing a new one, I'll just send you to see some cute ladybug sex (scroll down to the middle of the post), which also reminded me of these pictures I discovered a few…
April 10, 2009
{First posted here]. Well, this Friday Weird Sex Blogging is not going to be so unique. After all, Janet and Zuzu have already blogged about it, but who can resist a phallic-looking, rotten-meat smelling, fly-attracting flower! And it is not a B-grade movie on the sci-fi channel. This is real!…
April 10, 2009
As always, animal porn is under the fold (first posted here):
You have probably heard that a female praying mantis eats her mate's head during the mating process. You may imagine the process to go something like this:
Actually, there are many species of praying mantises and in most of them…
April 10, 2009
Some flatworms, for instance these pretty Pseudobiceros hancockanus, engage in penis fencing. Both individuals are hermaphrodites, i.e., have both male and female organs. The penis is white, pointed and two-headed. Both individuals are trying to inseminate the other. The one who is inseminated…
