voltagegate
Posts by this author
I found the following article on the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) this morning on ScienceDaily, and due to the conservation problems we're having with the endangered fish, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss eutrophication and hypoxia, two huge issues in marine and…
Fairy rings are regarded in legends across Europe and North America. In Wales and much of Britain, people thought the rings were leftover from the merriment of fairies. In Ireland they are associated with leprechauns. In Germany, witches gathered around the rings at night. In Scandinavian tales (…
PLoS One has an overload of ecology centered articles I want to read and review from the past few weeks. I'm hoping I get to some of them in the next week:
Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene?
[…
Millenia ago, Brian from Laelaps presented The Voltage Gate with the Thinking Blogger Award, and I have finally found some time to pass it on to blogs that make me think. It's difficult to siphon the 50 or so blogs I peruse and only choose five, but I'll do my best.
Jen, The Infinite Sphere: Jen…
Twelve years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a 70 year absence due to over hunting (and outright slaughter). Beyond the pure principle of reintroduction, an added bonus was cutting the elk population in the area, and subsequently reducing the pressure on riparian…
Paleoecologist Margaret Davis' work has become legend among ecologists. She analyzed layer upon layer of pollen buried in lake sediments in the Appalachian Mountains to determine the natural history of trees in the area.
She found an interesting pattern:
Spruce (Picea) pollen dominated the area 12,…
I've been waiting for a decent Star Trek game for over a decade now, and so has AT; he's speculating about how good a Star Trek MMO could be. My question to the developers: Can you steal the Defiant and strafe Bajor? Please? The Bajorans are freakin' irritating.
"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."
-Thomas Jefferson
I finally got around to reading this study from PLoS One, another paper trying to address socioeconomic influences on ecology and biodiversity. The researchers explored a possible correlation between economic inequality - the distribution of wealth - and biodiversity in the US (state by state) and…
Found this in my mailbox this morning, thought it would be nice to get it out there:
The BBC Natural History Unit is currently looking for stories for its sequel series to Planet Earth, Frozen Planet. In conjunction with a cutting edge website that will run for the 3 years of the production,…
Critique of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows below the fold. Spoilers ahead.
I think it's important to get one thing straight right off the bat: I am a fan of the Harry Potter series. I think Rowling is a great storyteller, and I have enjoyed the series so far. I think she has seriously dropped…
After hosting TB last week, I had been planning a bit of a break to spend time with family and get lost in the mountains for a bit (while secretly waiting in line last Saturday at midnight for the new Harry Potter - review pending).
We had a chance to sift through some flea markets and I found a…
After a long hiatus (in blogging terms), Jen has restarted The Infinite Sphere (unfortunately someone swiped her original address), a blog about environmental science, conservation, limnology and ecology. She started blogging at is also the cofounder of Oekologie and a dear friend.
I love when she…
Go say hi to the Angry Toxicologist, our new SciBling here at SB:
I am a Ph.D. scientist in the public health sector with a good amount of toxicology and regulatory knowledge. I'm not going to be dishing about projects I am privy to, but I am much freer to make my opinions known anonymously, than I…
Crap. I totally forgot about Martin's carnival idea. I had plans to visit a couple of places in my area that are being excavated, but never got around to it. Maybe next time (if there is one).
It's up right now, and looks like there's some great stuff.
Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us.
I want to begin this edition with an important announcement.…
Last time we delved into some of the smallest components of spiders and insects, exploring their differences based on deviations in their genetic code through molecular homology.
But there is one particular unifying element to these creatures and their overall make up. They share a series of genes…
Found this in ScienceDaily this morning:
A team of John Innes centre scientists lead by Professor Nick Harberd have discovered how plants evolved the ability to adapt to changes in climate and environment. Plants adapt their growth, including key steps in their life cycle such as germination and…
Don posted the seventh edition of Oekologie yesterday morning (it's late, but he's on vacation; have fun, Don).
I'll have Tangled Bank #84 up tomorrow, so get your submissions in by this evening. I'm thinking that the theme will be ancient Greek/Roman science history. We'll see.
In the last post of this series, we established that spiders descended from marine arthropods called the eurypterids, distinct and separate from insects, appearing in the fossil record in the late Silurian/early Devonian, about 425 million years ago.
The cladogram we used to analyze the spider's…
Don was supposed to have it up yesterday, but I have yet to hear from him. A bit of patience, please.
At least they're letting some students finish up before they pull the entire rug out from under them:
The beleaguered Savannah River Ecology Lab hopes to remain open - but with vastly reduced staff and resources - through the end of the year due to commitments that require some scientists and…
So far we have established that spiders are distinct from insects for two reasons: physiology (mouth parts, body plan, respiratory structures) and more importantly, evolutionary history (or phylogeny, as scientists call it).
But where did spider's come from? How did they come to speciate ?
The…
A "green" art show just opened up in Lexington titled "HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming", where area artists wanted to "participate in the conversation about climate change" through their works.
The objective of the show was to go beyond the informational and factual aspects and allow the…
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
-Carl Sagan
So how is it that spiders are more closely related to horseshoe crabs - marine arthropods that haven't changed much in the past 250 million years - than to a more obvious choice, the insects?
The answer to that question is more complex than you might think.
Up until the middle of the 20th century,…
I'm jealous. Look at him crush that Homer donut.
He's posted a video slideshow of his trip just to rub it in.