Life Sciences
clock | April 23, 2010Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
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A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?
A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird
A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock?
A Meandering Scholar: Back to basics: The Evolution of a Postdoc
Anna's Bones: The Ape That Wouldn't Grow Up
Anthropology in Practice: The Irish…
tetrapodzoology | April 22, 2010Now that the main gekkotan groups have been introduced, it's time to get down to some of the details. We begin with stuff on lifestyle and behaviour... [gekkotan motley below - mostly assembled from wikipedia - features (top, left to right) Aeluroscalabotes felinus, Pachydactylus bibronii, Rhacodactylus ciliatus and (bottom, left to right) Nephrurus amyae, Phyllodactylus xanti and Phelsuma madagascariensis].
Gekkotans are mostly insectivorous, but some of the large species prey on other lizards, and even on snails, birds, mammals (including bats) and small snakes. Nectar and pollen is eaten…
emjohnson | April 22, 2010A new study shows that chimps sacrifice their own advantage if they earned it unfairly.Image: Owen Booth / Creative Commons
Fairness is the basis of the social contract. As citizens we expect that when we contribute our fair share we should receive our just reward. When social benefits are handed out unequally or when prior agreements are not honored it represents a breach of trust. Based on this, Americans were justifiably outraged when, not just one, but two administrations bailed out the wealthiest institutions in the country while tens of thousands of homeowners (many of whom were…
tetrapodzoology | April 21, 2010As you may know, Tet Zoo has been going for four years now. Despite this, there are still entire tetrapod clades - consisting of hundreds or even thousands of species - that have scarcely been mentioned here, if at all.
Lately, I've been feeling 'gecko guilt'. Yes, I can barely believe that the enormous squamate clade known as Gekkota has been all but unmentioned on these pages. I don't have time to give the group any sort of justice (sorry, Gekkota), but here is a very brief intro to the group and how neat it is (aaaaand, as usual I wrote this sentence long before completing what you're…
clock | April 21, 2010Four out of seven PLoS journals published new articles last night - here are the ones that caught my eye. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Do Decapod Crustaceans Have Nociceptors for Extreme pH?:
Nociception is the physiological detection of noxious stimuli. Because of its obvious…
clock | April 19, 2010Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here and here is the Submission form so you can get started.
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A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?
A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird
A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock?
A Meandering Scholar: Back to basics: The Evolution of a Postdoc
Anna's Bones: The Ape That…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, evolutionary biogeography, molecular biology, medicine, ectoparasite, orificial hirudiniasis, mucosal leech infestation, hirudinoids, leech, Tyrannobdella rex, public health, zoology, PLoS ONE, anatomy, phylogenetic analysis, taxonomy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Figure 1. Mucosally invasive hirudinoid leeches. Known from a wide variety of anatomical sites including eyes (A) as in this case involving Dinobdella ferox (B), mucosal leech species, as in a case involving Myxobdella annandalei (C), more frequently feed from the…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
cagapakis | April 17, 2010New in vitro fertilization technology is making it possible for someone to have two moms--one that provides the genome in the nucleus of the cell, and one that provides the rest of the egg cell, including the mitochondria. Since all mitochondria are passed down from the mother in the egg (sperm are just too small to provide anything but the father's genetic material to the fertilized embryo), transplanting the nucleus from a fertilized embryo to an egg from a different woman can bypass the transmission of any mitochondrial diseases that the mother carries. Because mitochondria have their own…
pharyngula | April 17, 2010We had a fun evening on Friday—a crowd of a few hundred people sat down to consider the problem of a morality at the University of Chicago. At the front of the room we had Bob Bossie (a very liberal Catholic), Sunsara Taylor (a very articulate Communist) and me to make a few opening remarks and open the floodgates of questions from the audience. It was interesting and thoughtful, and nothing at all like this incredible session on Fox News.
Let me emphasize that Bob was not that crazy priest in the video, declaring that godlessness meant the death of hope and the decline of your money making…
clock | April 15, 2010Today, four out of seven PLoS journals published new articles. Here's my pick of papers I find most interesting and/or bloggable. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Use of Herring Bait to Farm Lobsters in the Gulf of Maine:
Ecologists, fisheries scientists, and coastal managers have…
tetrapodzoology | April 15, 2010Yet another entry from the fieldguide (though substantially updated and enlarged)...
What might be one of the strangest Cretaceous birds was described in 2004. I refer of course to Aberratiodontus wui of the Jiufotang Formation of Liaoning Province, China.
Named for a near-complete specimen, Aberratiodontus was regarded by its describers (Gong et al. 2004) as one of the most unusual of the enantiornithines or 'opposite birds' (though read on!). In keeping with the tradition of Linnaean taxonomy, they gave it its own eponymous 'family' and 'order' (these being 'Aberratiodontuidae' and '…
clock | April 14, 2010There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data:
The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a significant challenge, as datasets continue to grow in size and demand for open access sharing…
clock | April 13, 2010Four of the seven PLoS journals published today. Let's take a look.
As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Male Accessory Gland Protein Reduces Egg Laying in a Simultaneous Hermaphrodite:
Seminal fluid is an important part of the ejaculate of internally fertilizing animals. This fluid…
cwilcox | April 11, 2010When I saw these pictures over at Zooborns, I knew they had to be this week's dose of cute. These are some of the cutest animals I have ever seen!
These photos were taken by Flickr user PeterH81 at the British Wildlife Centre.
Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are the species that we tend to think of when we think of a "fox." The name comes from their characteristic orange-ish, red-ish brown fur. The fox's amazing flexibility and intelligence that have given it a mischievous reputation have served it well evolutionarily, and the red fox is the most abundant species of fox on the planet. They're…
cagapakis | April 10, 2010My two great thesis project loves are hydrogen and symbiosis, and as such, the recent news of a multicellular organism that lives in a completely oxygen free environment and gets its energy from hydrogenosomes instead of mitochondria is totally fascinating.
Hydrogenosomes are organelles that are evolutionarily related to mitochondria. Mitochondria generate energy for the cell by transferring electrons pulled off of sugars molecules to oxygen (this is why we breathe oxygen). The energy from this electron motion is transferred to the production of ATP, the energy currency of the cell, through…
tfk | April 9, 2010Science magazine reports:
In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang. â¦
"Discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is intellectual malpractice" that "downplays the controversy" over teaching evolution in schools, says Joshua Rosenau…
laelaps | April 8, 2010
A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010.
A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa, a torrential downpour washed the bodies of two humans into the deep recesses of a cave. Just how their remains came to be in the cave in the first place is a mystery. Perhaps they fell in through the gaping hole in the cave roof just as hyenas, saber-toothed cats, horses, and other animals had, but, however the humans entered the cave, their bones ultimately came to rest in a natural bowl…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2010tags: Pacific Golden-Plover, Asian Golden-Plover, Eastern Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Pacific Golden-Plover, also known as the Asian Golden-Plover or Eastern Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, photographed on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, Midway Island, Hawai'i. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Image: Joe Fuhrman, March 2010. I encourage you to purchase images from this professional photographer.
This migratory bird that visits North America as well as countries on the other side of the Pacific Ocean shares a…
elerner | April 7, 2010 World Water Day may have come and gone, but ScienceBloggers re still searching the depths of the oceans and the rivers of tropical islands for great new research. Today, Nick Anthis of The Scientific Activist points to the discovery of the first truly anaerobic animal. These microscopic creatures don't need oxygen to make their home at bottom of the Mediterranean, so you'd be forgiven for thinking they're from another planet. For aquatic life in more familiar territory, Christine Wilcox of Observations of a Nerd follows up on a post she made in January about how farming Tilapia in Fiji puts…