Environment
grrlscientist | June 12, 2006
Pale Male over Central Park West in NYC, 6 June 2006 (in moult).
Pale male, an unusual light-morph red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis, has lived in NYC for 14 years.
Image: Lincoln Karim. You can purchase your own copy of this image here.
Birds in Science
Researchers found that female songbirds alter the size of eggs and possibly the sex of their chicks according to how they perceive their mate's quality. The researchers played back attractive ("sexy") songs and less attractive control songs of male canaries to female domesticated canaries, Serinus canaria. When the females started egg-…
clock | June 11, 2006
Welcome to the thirty-first edition of the Carnival of the Green. I am still trying to figure out the details of Movable Type after my move here last Friday (and please look around - there are 45 fantastic science bloggers here at SEED's ScienceBlogs), so fancy graphics and creative hosting will have to wait for some other time. Let's just take a straightforward look at this week's entries.
Is it sexual repression that's behind the religious right's obsession with gay marriage? Or are they just plain evil? Either way, they are using it to distract us from the far more serious issue of…
tlambert | June 11, 2006Christopher Pearson foolishly relies on Ian Plimer for an article claiming that the link between global warming and sea level rises is "bad science":
Plimer notes that "the tidal measuring station at Port Adelaide is sinking, thereby recording a sea level rise". The same is true of many other areas of subsidence, a fact apparently lost on most contemporary oceanographers. "If there is a sea-level rise we would expect every atoll in every ocean to be inundated. But we don't see this. We would expect harbours around the world to record a sea level rise. This is not recorded. So something is…
chaoticutopia | June 9, 2006When I first decided to go to Las Vegas for YearlyKos, I thought I would just tag along with my husband, who was representing Progress Now. I figured I'd do some shopping, maybe some sightseeing, and definitely some rockhounding along the drive there and back. When I saw a number of science related discussions popping up on the YearlyKos schedule, I changed my mind, and registered. (Ok, so, I still plan to do a bit of the tourist bit, too.) Now, I'm so glad that I did.
So far, this has been an incredible experience. Most of the people I've talked to have been bright and enthusiastic, thinking…
terrasig | June 9, 2006Welcome to the new home of Terra Sigillata, a blog dedicated to disseminating objective information on Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy, Pharmacy, the Pharmaceutical Sciences, and all aspects of medicines from the Earth.
More later on the theme of our discussions and links to classic posts.
I thought I'd start with a brief introductory essay on coming home, under the fold...
Seed Media Group, the host of ScienceBlogs, is located in the Flatiron District, 11 miles (18 km) from the town in northern New Jersey where I spent the first 17 years of my life. Growing up in the literal shadow of the…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2006
I was bemoaning to Paul Griffiths and Sahotra Sarkar, admittedly over a beer, that unlike them (they are both birdwatchers), I lacked a special organism I could be expert about. This is a grievous fault in a philosopher of biology, so we wondered what I could choose as my "target organisms". Sahotra suggested I name and describe creationists (well, actually he suggested he would, but I'm stealing this from him) as a species. It's important to do this, so that when we describe the behavior of these creatures (pun intended) in the wild, we know exactly what we are discussing. One wouldn't want…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2006
Brown Pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis.
Image: Bob Miller/Southwest Birders.
People Hurting Birds
Scottish scientists say global warming's first major British wildlife victim is the ring ouzel, Turdus torquatus (pictured) -- a close relative of the blackbird, Turdus merula. Researchers from the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, said the bird, which lives in cool mountain and moor areas, suffered a nearly 60 percent reduction in its population during the past decade, and this decline is linked to rising temperatures. Scientists said they fear higher temperatures in…
tsmith | June 3, 2006Via Science magazine's NetWatch:
If you know a thing or two about animal behavior, remote sensing, pollution, or related topics, you might want to contribute a chapter to the nascent Encyclopedia of Earth. Bucking the trend toward user-written--but sometimes inaccurate--content, the environmental reference will feature some 1000 peer-reviewed articles penned by experts. Sponsored by the nonprofit National Council for Science and the Environment, the project seeks writers and editors.
Homepage and more information is here; topic areas can be found here.
cmooney | June 1, 2006Part of debating, of course, is knowing your opponent. In the case of Ron Bailey, I've appeared at three separate events with him in the past, so we do know each other's arguments fairly well. Still, I've done a little background research now that we're going to be going head-on (we've been more orthagonally aligned at the other events). And since I know there are some good brains out there, here's your chance to react to specific arguments by Bailey that I've dug up...
First, Bailey has a long record of criticizing 1970s environmnentalists (the old school types) for exaggerating potential…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2006Do you remember the amusing anecdote, "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it!" Well, one could also say something similar about helping birds that are in trouble. Until now, that is. While the rest of us were talking, Laura Erickson went to work researching and writing a book about this topic; 101 Ways to Help Birds (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2006).
This attractive and affordable 284-page trade paperback is engaging and educational, balancing important information with relevant and interesting personal anecdotes about birds. It is well-researched with an…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2006Late is better than never, as they say, and so it is with this new feature, Ask a Science Blogger. This week's question was late, arriving yesterday, but here it is;
Question: Will the "human" race be around in 100 years?
Um, YES. Even if The Rapture does occur, there still will be people on Earth since someone has to take care of the christians' pets that were so thoughtlessly abandoned.
But I do wonder if the human race will still exist 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years from now? I think that's open to debate, particularly considering our tendency towards self-destruction and especially as…
cmooney | May 16, 2006Just a couple of things that I've been meaning to give a plug to:
1. Daniel Collins, a geoscientist and environmental engineer at MIT, has started a new science blog entitled "Down to Earth." Check it out.
2. Defenders of Wildlife has launched a new program, the Conservation Support Network, to help promote the use of good science--not "sound science"--in wildlife protection policy. The scientific integrity movement continues to grow....
3. The website of the National Science Foundation actually won a Webby award recently for best government website. That is seriously cool--congrats.
Enjoy....
grrlscientist | May 2, 2006What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "Dust Bowl"? Like most people, I learned about the Dust Bowl in my high school history class. But even though I attended high school last century (iieee!), as I recall, my textbook devoted perhaps one paragraph to this event before moving on to other, more important events, such as the stock market crash and the banking failure, the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal, and World War II. In fact, except for my astonished sadness after reading John Steinbeck's literary rant, The Grapes of Wrath, I never gave the actual event much thought.…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2006
Male magnolia warbler, Dendroica magnolia.
This image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells.
Click image for larger view in its own window.
Birds in Science
Spring is the season for flashy mates, at least for house finches, Carpodacus mexicanus (pictured, right). It is only later in the year that the females choose based on genetic diversity, according to new research from two scientists at the University of Arizona. Their 10-year study of a colony of 12,000 finches in Montana has revealed the seasonal dynamics of finch attraction and thereby resolved an…
ksharpe | April 21, 2006You know what they say about great minds.
In the April 14 issue of Science Magazine, two environmental scientists opine that scientists can, and must, become active bloggers and readers of blogs, for two main reasons. First, hard-blogging scientists will ensure that sound scientific information makes it to a wide public audience (while by shunning blogging, the scientific community will cede the conversation to other voices and other interests). Second, scientists have, in the blogosphere, an unprecedented tool for sharing and soliciting ideas, data, and hypotheses. A blog-literate scientific…
cmooney | April 21, 2006Seed has just published an interview I did with the Times global warming reporter Andy Revkin to discuss climate change coverage and his new book, The North Pole Was Here, which is unique in that it is a GW book that's aimed at an audience aged 10 and higher (after all, they're the ones that are going to have to live with a different planet). There was some really good stuff in the interview, in my opinion, like the following:
Mooney: Is there anything that science journalists ought to be doing to focus attention more acutely on this issue [global warming]?
Revkin: The bottom line is, I don'…
tlambert | April 17, 2006Mark Hertsgaard has an excellent article in Vanity Fair
exposing the war on climate science. For instance:
Call him the $45 million man. That's how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds -- "They didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," says Seitz, who is now 94 -- but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry's purposes. Throughout those years, the…
grrlscientist | April 17, 2006
Dark-eyed junco, Junco hyemalis.
Click image for a larger view in its own window.
Photo by Dawn Bailey and appears here by permission.
Birds in Science
A Duke University evolutionary ecologist reported evidence that aggressive male western bluebirds, Sialia mexicana, out-compete less aggressive males for preferred breeding territories, a finding that may offer more insight into how evolution operates. This research, conducted by Renée Duckworth suggests the birds may play more active roles in their own natural selection than traditional models of evolution would support. Further, it was…
oracknows | April 13, 2006With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…
cevans | April 7, 2006
In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement.
With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to…