Life Sciences
scientificactivist | November 16, 2006Living successfully with other people demands sacrifice. From going out of your way to pick your little brother up from school to paying taxes toward government health care programs, there is an expectation in any society that its members will sacrifice some personal gain for the greater good. This cooperation, in turn, contributes to a stronger and more successful society, the benefits of which should be felt by all of its members. This is true not just for humans, but for some other animals and, most notably, colony-forming insects. Even there, though, the picture isn't so simple, and a…
pharyngula | November 13, 2006
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week's issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I'm late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn't just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin…
loom | November 13, 2006Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You'd be hard-…
clock | November 13, 2006
This post is a relatively recent (May 24, 2006) critique of a PLoS paper.
----------------------------------------------------There is a new study on PLoS - Biology that is getting some traction in the media and which caught my attention because it was supposed to be about circadian rhythms. So, I downloaded the paper and read it through to see what it is really about.
Well, it is a decent study, but, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with circadian rhythms. Many examples of tritrophic relationships involve parasitoids (usually small wasps) being attracted by plant volatiles which are…
retrospectacle | November 13, 2006Some news from my old stomping grounds at Mote Marine Lab in Sarasota, Florida. Back in undergrad I worked there with the manatees Hugh and Buffet to test their visual acuity (its bad), now the marine observatory is attempting to test the hearing of manatees. This is essential, as the most likely cause of death for a manatee is an "meeting" with the propeller of a speed boat. Can they hear the approach of a boat? And, if so, how loud or far away can they hear it?
When a buzzer sounds, the speed bump-shaped mammal slowly flips his 1,300 pounds and aims a whiskered snout toward one of eight…
clock | November 9, 2006Second lecture notes from my BIO101 class (originally from May 08, 2006). As always, in this post and the others in the series, I need comments - is everything kosher? Any suggestions for improvement?
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BIO 101 - Bora Zivkovic - Lecture 1 - Part 2
The Cell
All living organisms are composed of one or more cells - the cell is the unit of organization of Life.
Most cells are very small. Exceptions? Ostrich egg is the largest cell. Nerve cell in a leg of a giraffe may be as long as 3m, but is very thin.
Basic Structure of the Cell
A cell is a…
neurontic | November 9, 2006Over the past decade, as Baby Boomers have begun flooding the ranks of the AARP, science has become increasingly focused on discovering the recipe for longevity. Every week, it seems, a new study is published touting the life extending powers of antioxidants, exercise, or sleep.
By and large, the anti-aging prescriptions issued over the last 10 years have been sensible. It's hard to take issue with the idea that eating more greens, getting more sleep, and breaking the occasional sweat promotes health. But as the eldest Boomers enter their sixties, the mania for longevity seems to be reaching…
pharyngula | November 6, 2006Jonathan Wells, the creationist who makes shoddy claims about developmental biology, has deigned to respond to my criticisms…but only indirectly, on another blog. It's an interesting response, in that it once again reveals Wells' misunderstandings of biology, and his sneaky way of inserting phony claims.
Here is Wells' rebuttal.
The issue here is not all that complicated. Darwin thought that "community in embryonic structure reveals community of descent" and concluded that early vertebrate embryos "show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its…
clock | November 6, 2006Fossils Of Ancient Sea Monster Found In Montana:
A complete skull of a long-necked plesiosaur has been discovered in Montana. The 70-million-year-old skull is one of the best specimens of its kind found in North America.
Snow Data Helps Maintain Nation's Largest, Oldest Bison Herd:
NASA satellite data and computer modeling and US Department of Agriculture information are helping track the remnants of the once mighty bison herd in Yellowstone National Park as they migrate with the melting snowpack.
Reduced Body Temperature Extends Lifespan, Study Finds:
Scientists at the Scripps Research…
pharyngula | November 4, 2006
This odd marine worm, Xenoturbella bocki, is in the news right now, and I had to look it up in Pechenik's Biology of the Invertebrates(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to remind myself of what it was. Here's the complete entry:
Xenoturbella bocki
This marine worm, first described in 1949 as an acoel flatworm and later claimed as either an early metazoan offshoot or a primitive deuterostome, has recently been affiliated with primitive bivalve molluscs, based upon a study of gamete development (oogenesis) and an analysis of sequence data from both 18S rRNA and mitochondrial genes. Little is known about…
grrlscientist | November 3, 2006tags: global warming, Permian-Triassic boundary, mass extinction, weather
Computer simulation of the Earth's annual average surface temperatures in degrees Celsius 251 million years ago, at the Permo-Triassic (PT) boundary. Approximately 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct at the PT boundary, creating niches that the dinosaurs then occupied as the dominant animal group during the next geological age.
Image: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
A computer simulation of the Earth's climate 250 million years ago…
evolgen | November 3, 2006When Phylogeny Friday last made an appearance on this blog, we were exploring the vertebrates. This was part of a larger series in which we were working our way through the eukaryotes, focusing on animals. I've come to realize that weekly phylogenies are too much, so we're scaling Phylogeny Friday back to appear on the first Friday of the month.
Today, we will take a look at another group of eukaryotes: the fungi. (We'll return to the animals in a future edition.) Both fungi and animals are unikonts, and the clade containing fungi is sister to the clade containing the animals:
This is one…
clock | November 2, 2006This week's question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series is:
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?
The first and obvious answer is, of course, "my field", whatever it is.
But then....
But then I thought about my own field of chronobiology and I think that its funding goes as overal funding goes. When there is a lot of money to go around, clock researchers get their fair share. When everyone is suffering, so does my field. After all, circadian field is deemed pretty "sexy" - it was a runner-up in the year-end popularity lists of the Science magazine at…
clock | November 2, 2006
I am currently teaching only the lab portion of BIO101 and will not teach the lecture again until January, but this is as good time as ever to start reposting my lecture notes here, starting with the very first one (originally posted on May 07, 2006) and continuing every Thursday over the next several weeks.
Although this is old, I'd love to get more comments on each of those lecture notes. Did I get any facts wrong? Is the material inappropriate for the level I am teaching? Is there a bette rway to do it? Are there online resources I can tap into…
terrasig | November 2, 2006Earlier this week during Chris Mooney's NC visit, I noted two articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on reports of caloric restriction (CR) and the possibility that some drugs might replicate the health benefits of CR. The coincidence seemed quite odd, so I suspected that some major scientific publication was in the hopper.
Indeed, as revealed by Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle, the red wine antioxidant resveratrol has now been shown to increase lifespan in mice in a paper reported in this week's issue of Nature (btw, vote for Shelley here to receive a $5000 student blogger…
cortex | October 31, 2006Sometimes, it seems as if science reporters just decide to make something a big story, even if there's no new news to report. In the last week, the link between calorie reduction and increased lifespan has been everywhere. New York Magazine was first, with an account of a dinner party eaten with people who don't actually eat. (The menu: salad followed by asparagus tips, followed by Quorn, washed down with water.) Now the WSJ and NY Times have joined the bandwagon:
In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time's caprice the hard way. At 28,…
grrlscientist | October 30, 2006Birds, bees, bats, butterflies and other species that pollinate North American plant life are steadily vanishing, according to a study released recently by the National Research Council. This "demonstrably downward" trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, since three-quarters of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.
Domesticated honeybees, which pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, have declined by 30 percent in the last 20 years. In fact, U.S. farmers had to import honeybees last year for the first time…
pharyngula | October 29, 2006Reconstruction of Priscomyzon in dorsal (top) and left lateral (bottom) views. b, Macropthalmia stage of Lampetra showing anterior location of orbit and smaller oral disc, both positioned in front of the branchial region. The total length of the specimen is 116 mm. Drawings in a and b are scaled to show equivalent head lengths: from anterior limit of the oral disc to rear of the branchial region. Horizontal bars indicate the anterior–posterior span of the oral disc in each species.
The life of a parasite must be a good one, and often successful; the creature at the top of the drawing above is…
clock | October 26, 2006Researchers Give Name To Ancient Mystery Creature:
For the first time, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, have been able to put a name and a description to an ancient mammal that still defies classification.
Protein Important In Blood Clotting May Also Play A Role In Fertility:
A protein known to play a role in blood clotting and other cell functions is also critical for proper sperm formation in mice, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
Computer Scientists Go Badger Spotting:
Although an unlikely subject…
loom | October 25, 2006To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they could only pick a handful that would give the biggest bang for the buck. Squabbling ensued, with different coalitions of scientists lobbied for different species. Some argued successfully for medically important species, such as the mosquito that carries malaria. Others made the case for…