Life Sciences
drorzel | September 5, 2006The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him, but he seems to have been very good at getting people interested in rare and interesting wildlife, and it's always sad to lose someone like that.
As a tribute of sorts, I'll bump Douglas Adams's wildlife book Last Chance to See up in the booklog queue. The concept here was vaguely similar, though not…
evolgen | September 5, 2006Razib pointed out this blog article on theory in biology. The author deals with three, self defined, points:
Unifying theory in biology.
Theory vs. experimental biology.
Justification through medical applications.
His first point, that biology (or a given biological discipline) lacks a unifying theory, is a bit silly and comes across as physics envy. But even physics doesn't have a unifying theory, with different models for small objects and large objects. In his second point, he argues that there is a rift between theoretical and experimental biologists. He is correct, there is a…
clock | September 4, 2006The first in a series of posts on circadian clocks in microorganisms (from February 23, 2006)...
Many papers in chronobiology state that circadian clocks are ubiqutous. That has been a mantra since at least 1960. This suggests that most or all organisms on Earth possess biological clocks.
In the pioneering days of chronobiology, it was a common practice to go out in the woods and collect as many species as possible and document the existence of circadian rhythms. Technical limitations certainly influenced what kinds of organisms were usually tested.
Rhythms of locomotor activity are the…
bushwells | September 3, 2006The latest Science Blogs hot topic on Dario Ringach's decision to cease his research struck a Bushwellian nerve or two thousand. Here's an excerpt from Predators Unleashed (see Investors.com, 8/24/2006).
A group named Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has reportedly posted on its Web site the home telephone numbers, addresses and the children's schools of those who work for or do business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract animal-research firm.
Last March, in the midst of a bunch of other tumultuous life events, I received a disconcerting e-mail from Dark Overlords Pharmaceuticals, Inc…
evolvingthoughts | September 2, 2006The claim often made is that Darwin is the sine qua non of the eugenics that the Nazis used to justify their genocide.What I aim to do today is show that while it is true (and widely accepted) that Darwinism was used by eugenicists to justify the "scientific" nature of their project, particularly in America, in point of fact the eugenics program was based on the idea that evolution wasn't preserving the "fit" in modern society, and needed the assistance of public policy.
Moreover, many of the opponents of eugenics were themselves evolutionists (a term that just means here a specialist in…
clock | September 1, 2006 In light of the recent cases of researchers quitting animal research under the duress of threats and attacks by Animal Rights groups, e.g., Dr. Ringach at UCLA, this may be a good time to repost this old rant from May 23, 2005 (originally here, then reposted here on January 16, 2006):
The story about the class dissection of a dog stirred quite a lot of controversy, including heated exchanges in the comments of these two posts on Pharyngula.
I joined in late to that discussion, not because I missed it, but because I did not know what to say before I knew more about the case, and also because…
loom | August 30, 2006From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will be a great thing if it happens, which he doubts. The question is, does he have a point?
The question of what the full range of effects from global warming will be--both good and bad--is an important one, but Robbins shows little ability to offer an answer. His column overlooks important things, gets various facts wrong, and belies a general ignorance of and…
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
clock | August 28, 2006
You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…
stcynic | August 28, 2006Well I watched about half of the abominable D. James Kennedy special about Darwin and Hitler last night, about as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I imagined, perhaps even worse. The dishonesty absolutely leapt off the screen. At one point they present noted paleontological scholar Ann Coulter claiming that "all animal phyla" appeared in the Cambrian "in the blink of an eye" - yes, she actually said that. Apparently in Coulter's world, 70 or 80 million years is "the blink of an eye".
Most galling, I thought, was that they invoked Hitler's book Mein Kampf as being laced with…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006I have talked before about evidence that there is no new neurogenesis in the adult cortex, but that paper used stereological techniques.
A new paper in PNAS shows a more direct method to demonstrate that there are no newly created neurons in the adult cortex -- and their technique for this is so clever that I have to talk about it. They use a spike in the atmospheric levels of Carbon 14 isotopes after nuclear testing -- before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 -- to carbon date the creation of new cells in the human brain.
First some background: If you want to start a fight among…
stcynic | August 25, 2006Despite no longer working as legal counsel for the Discovery Institute, Seth Cooper has still been quite busy writing articles on their behalf slamming Judge Jones' ruling in Kitzmiller. Not content with the whopper he told a few months ago in an article he wrote with Joe Manzari of the American Enterprise Institute, he's now back with this article on the DI website. Wesley Elsberry has already handled the main charge that Cooper makes regarding the question of whether Judge Jones should have allowed the plaintiffs to subpeona draft versions of the next edition of Pandas; I'm going to deal…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006
This article is part of a series of critiques of Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that will be appearing at the Panda's Thumb over the course of the next week or so. Previously, I'd dissected the summary of chapter 3. This is a longer criticism of the whole of the chapter, which is purportedly a critique of evo-devo.
Jonathan Wells is a titular developmental biologist, so you'd expect he'd at least get something right in his chapter on development and evolution in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, but no:…
clock | August 24, 2006Wow - this one is old: December 29, 2004. It is in a need of serious updating, not to mention providing amazon links so I can earn pennies if you click and buy. But, it is still a good list nontheless:
I have picked my top ten books on politics and have posted a long list of books before, and now, as I promised, here is my list of best science books. As I struggled so much to restrict myself to just 10 books on politics, and left out so many worthy titles, this time around I decided to cheat a little. Instead of Top 10 Science Books, I will make a meta-list of my top picks of books in each…
purepedantry | August 23, 2006The press is all in a tizzy about so-called ethical stem cells, but this still indicates a really limited understanding of how embryonic stem (ES) cells work. (Frankly, if I had a dollar for every time I read bad reporting on ES cells, you and I would not be talking. I would be Tahiti...with Natalie Portman.)
Anyway, in an article published in advance online in Nature, Klimanskaya et al. show that single cells derived from preimplanation genetic diagnosis (PGD) can be used to grow new stem cell lines.
Some background:
People go to in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics for a variety of…
clock | August 23, 2006Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005):
Did A Virus Make You Smart?
I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it.
His is also some of the hardest of hard sci-fi around. He must be a…
razib | August 23, 2006
Update: Over at Genetics and Health:
Last month, 12-year-old Bobby Stephens, Jr. died after football practice in Florida. This week, his family learned that he carried genes for both Hemoglobin S and Hemoglobin E. There have only been 27 documented cases world-wide of people who've died as a result of the combination of both of these two genetic mutations.
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Hemoglobin S. This the predominant hemoglobin in people with sickle cell disease.
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Hemoglobin E trait is benign. Hemoglobin E is extremely common in S.E. Asia and in some areas equals hemoglobin A in frequency.
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Bobby had a…
clock | August 23, 2006June 07, 2005 and another one of those....had to change all my answers so they differ from the previous one!
I got tagged by Revere to do the Book Meme. I did the Other Book Meme recently, which is similar, so this time around I have to make it different - all different titles to double your pleasure.
Number Of Books I Own: Last time I was able to estimate the number of books was almost four years ago. They were neatly arranged: fiction by alphabetic order of the author in one room, non-fiction by topic in another room, sci-fi in alphabetical order in our bedroom, kids books in their rooms,…
clock | August 22, 2006A broken taxi, a mouthy snake, and a question about snake embryology.
Jiuchong, revisited
16 August
Day of rest. Day before I was at Banqiao, tomorrow I'm heading for Jiuchong. I discovered to my absolute horror that Independence Day has been taken off the air. My savior, my light at the end of the tunnel, my safety blanket has vanished. No one except for Vanessa and Emma will be able to empathize with me. The line up is no longer Shaolin Soccer, followed by Independence Day, followed by the bank robbery movie, followed by the Russian movie, now the line up is completely different. The line-…
loom | August 21, 2006Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host…