Life Sciences
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
The Wnt genes produce signalling proteins that play important roles in early development, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. It's hugely important, used in everything from early axis specification in the embryo to fine-tuning axon pathfinding in the nervous system. The way they work is that the Wnt proteins are secreted by cells, and they then bind to receptors on other cells (one receptor is named Frizzled, and others are LRP-5 and 6), which then, by a chain of cytoplasmic signalling events, removes β-catenin from a degradation pathway and promotes its import into…
grrlscientist | May 8, 2006
Long-billed Curlew, Numenius americanus.
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Arthur Morris, Birds as Art.
Click image for larger view in its own window.
Birds and Science
Some pied flycatchers, Ficedula hypoleuca (pictured), a common migratory bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, are missing their spring meals and dying as a result of climate change, a team of scientists reported this week. The discovery is one of the most sophisticated showing the domino effect of shifting seasons and their impact on predators and prey. The migratory birds fly thousands of…
loom | May 2, 2006In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong…
grrlscientist | May 1, 2006
Male Painted Bunting, Passerina ciris.
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Judd Patterson.
Click image for larger view in its own window.
Birds in Science
The European starling, Sturnus vulgaris (pictured) -- long known as a virtuoso songbird and expert mimic - may also soon win a reputation as something of a grammatician, researchers say. Timothy Gentner, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and his team found that the bird can learn language patterns formerly thought to be unique to humans. They discovered that starlings can understand…
oracknows | April 26, 2006Oh, boy.
Last week, as part of my series Medicine and Evolution, I mentioned the blog of a homeschooled medical student who also happens to be a young earth creationist and used her as an example of why I feared that credulity towards a a pseudoscience that is so obviously wrong based on the empirical evidence, so easily debunked with so little effort is an indicator of credulity when it comes to other forms of pseudoscience, like quackery. I hadn't really planned on mentioning her again any time soon, or even ever, as I thought my point had been made.
Then a reader had to point out to me…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2006I first learned about this book, Club George: The Diary of a Central Park Bird Watcher (NYC: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), when the author, Bob Levy, was interviewed recently by Brian Lehrer on the local National Public Radio affiliate, WNYC [mp3, 17:54]. After that interview concluded, I poked around on the internet, found the publicist's contact information and emailed him, requesting a review copy of the book, which he was happy to provide.
Club George is the story of the relationship that developed between a human and a wild bird, the transformation of a focused career man into a devoted…
tsmith | April 20, 2006Though much of the attention to and reports of intelligent design/creationist shenanigans come from the United States, we're certainly not the only ones inundated with deniers of evolution and other sciences. A self-described UK evolution "sceptic" is journalist Melanie Phillips, who writes for The Daily Mail. She's annoyed many scientists in the country due to her views not only on evolution, but also on vaccination (such as this article from earlier this year), drawing the ire of many who point out that she doesn't understand the underlying science.
She's proven her critics correct…
tsmith | April 19, 2006According to msnbc:
Normally adventurous Chinese diners are eating fewer owls, civets and other wildlife due to fears of SARS and bird flu, according to a survey released Tuesday by U.S. and Chinese conservation groups.
The survey of 24,000 people in 16 cities found that nearly 72 percent had not eaten wild animals in the past year, up from 51 percent in a similar 1999 survey, said San Francisco-based WildAid and the official China Wildlife Conservation Association.
For those who may be unfamiliar with civets, they're almost like a cross between a cat and a weasel, and have been linked to…
stcynic | April 14, 2006We've already documented the profoundly silly response of the Discovery Institute and ID advocates to the recent announcement of the finding of Tiktaalik roseae; now let's look at the response of more traditional creationists. Two creationist groups, the young earth Answers in Genesis and the old earth Reasons to Believe, have put out press releases (what is it with creationists and press releases?) claiming to have debunked the finding and shown that it poses no problem for creationism. As we will see, this is wishful thinking to the point of delusion on the part of both organizations.
Let'…
lee billings | April 10, 2006Gather 'round, dear readers, and let me regale you with the sad saga of the late, great Linus Pauling.
On second thought, calling it "sad" might be a bit excessive. Pauling was the only person to win two individual Nobels, after all (one for chemistry, one for peace). His great achievements are too numerous to fully list here; suffice to say he was a pioneer in molecular biology, genetics, immunology, the nature of chemical bonds and scientific activism. But by his death in 1994, many in the scientific community regarded him as an embarrassment, an out-of-touch quack at best and a dishonest…
razib | April 9, 2006A week ago I interviewed cogntive psychologist Justin L. Barrett. Dr. Barrett studies religion as a natural phenomenon, and I asked about the nature of individuals who are atheists. He responded:
As self-proclaimed atheist Jesse Bering has observed it can be very hard to identify true atheists. He even suspects that they comprise a very tiny number of people. By true atheists, I mean people that consistently hold no belief (cognitive commitment that motivates behavior) in superhuman agency. Lots of people say they don't believe in superhuman agency (including gods and ghosts) but will…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2006
Female hummingbird, asleep.
Photo by Dylan Maldonado.
A flash of scarlet and emerald zooms past me as I poke my sleepy head out of the kitchen door, a vibrant splash of summer color against the sullen winter sky. Suddenly, an indignant Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, confronts me, beak-to-nose, demanding his breakfast. Shivering, I retreat quickly into the kitchen to prepare warm sugar water for my feathery guest.
Hummingbirds are classified into the avian family, Trochilidae, which is from the Greek word, trochilos, or "small bird." In fact, the smallest avian species alive today is the…
stcynic | April 7, 2006Jon Buell, the head of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and publisher of the book Of Pandas and People (Pandas), has written a long essay criticizing Judge Jones' ruling in the Dover case. That's hardly a surprise, of course. The judge ruled against his position, how could he do anything but criticize it? Unfortunately for him, his criticisms don't hold up under scrutiny because they are based on false claims, legal ignorance and, in at least one case, an outright lie. This may be a long one, so let's get started. He begins by complaining that the judge refused their request to intervene…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2006April 5, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
written by Shelley Bluejay Pierce
freelance writer from Bozeman, Montana
ORANGE COUNTY, FLORIDA- A peaceful day golfing in Florida brought humans face to face with two Red Shouldered Hawks defending their nesting area. In Orange County Florida, this past week brought human-wildlife conflict to a head that left the two hawks dead and federal wildlife agents in turmoil over how the issue was handled.
After more than a dozen human attacks, the red shouldered hawks were killed by shotgun blasts Wednesday morning at the Villas of Grand Cypress Golf Resort…
tsmith | April 6, 2006 I've touched on the broad issue of "cultural practices" that can lead to emerging diseases in a few posts already (such as farming practices and cockfighting and avian influenza, or petting zoos and bacterial diseases), but today I'm going to go into a bit more detail with the specific example of the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia.
Nipah is a paramyxovirus, in the same family as measles and mumps. The virus was first recognized in 1999, during an encephalitis outbreak in Malaysia that had begun the previous September. The vast majority of the cases had occupational exposure to…
stcynic | April 6, 2006GilDodgen over at Dembski's place has a post with excerpts from an article that appeared in Crisis, a Catholic magazine. The article, written by George Sim Johnston (whoever that is), is about the Darwin exhibit now showing at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In just the short excerpt that Dodgen includes, Johnston manages to get much wrong.
The show tells us that Darwin's theory helps us to "understand" the fossil record. This is odd, because the exhibit's curator, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, has written extensively about how Darwin's idea of gradual evolution has…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2006One of three newly-discovered specimens of the 383 million-year-oldTiktaalik roseae.
These specimens fill a gap in the fossil record between aquatic and terrestrial animals.
Image: Ted Daeschler.
Making that transition from aquatic life to living on land was very important for vertebrates. However, there has been a gap in the fossil record at precisely that transitional point -- up until now, that is. Today, a group of scientists report that they found a group of three fossils from "crocodile-like" animals that neatly fit into the evolutionary progression as animals moved from water to land…
loom | April 5, 2006Tiktaalik: music to my ears.
Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik's discoverers (Ted Daeschler, Neil Shubin, and Farish Jenkins) detailed their discovery in back-to-back papers in today's issue of Nature. In some ways Tiktaalik is big news. It may prove to be the single most important fossil for telling us how our ancestors changed from fish to land vertebrates complete with legs,…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2006Birding Babylon -- does the title of this book sound familiar to you? If so, then you, like me, are one of thousands of people who have been reading the author's blog with the same name. Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq by Jonathan Trouern-Trend (2006, Sierra Club Books), is one of only a handful of published books out there that began as a series of entries "posted" on a public blog instead of a proposal sitting on an agent's desk. But even when it was "only" a blog, excerpts were quoted in the media and the author was interviewed at least once (by National Public Radio) while…
pharyngula | April 3, 2006There are these fossilized embryos from the Ediacaran, approximately 570 million years ago, that have been uncovered in the Doushantuo formation in China. I've mentioned them before, and as you can see below, they are genuinely spectacular.
Parapandorina raphospissa
But, you know, I work with comparable fresh embryos all the time, and I can tell you that they are incredibly fragile—it's easy to damage them and watch them pop (that's a 2.3MB Quicktime movie), and dead embryos die and decay with amazing speed, minutes to hours. Dead cells release enzymes that trigger a process called autolysis…