Life Sciences
pharyngula | March 14, 2010There was a bit of unwarranted controversy in Richard Dawkins' talk here at the Global Atheist Convention. In the Q&A at the end, one woman got the microphone, declared that she was a believer, announced that she was grateful to a god, and asked the question, "What is DNA? Where did DNA come from?" (and she did not ask in the tone of someone who sincerely wanted an answer to a basic question in biology.) She was loudly but briefly jeered, before Dawkins and the organizers quieted the audience, and then Richard went on to answer the question politely and at length.
Some people felt badly…
jstemwedel | March 12, 2010Because there are some conversations you have to have with your kids even if you wish you didn't have to have them:
Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to talk to you about a situation that has come up for a friend of mine and is a little worrisome. So, you know I went down to UCLA the other week, right?
Younger offspring: Yeah.
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what I was there for?
Elder offspring: A conference?
Dr. Free-Ride: Nope, it wasn't a conference. It was an event, a dialogue, where people were discussing scientific research with animals. In particular, some people were discussing why they support…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2010
Waterfowl (or wildfowl, or anseriforms, or ducks, geese, swans and kin) are awesome. Last year saw the publication of a particularly freakish, recently extinct member of the group that's been known to some of us for a while: the surreal Hawaiian duck Talpanas lippa Olson & James, 2009 from Kauai*. I'll admit that I missed the memo (didn't know about publication until Glyn Young sent me a pdf), even though Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms wrote about Talpanas on its publication.
* Note that Talpanas joins that very annoying list of names where the authorship of the taxon [Olson…
clock | March 11, 2010There are 15 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:
Extreme Female Promiscuity in a Non-Social Invertebrate Species:
While males usually benefit from as many matings as possible, females often evolve various methods of resistance to matings. The prevalent…
thusspakezuska | March 10, 2010This is part two of a multi-part presentation of a sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Madame Curie Complex. Part One can be found here. Part Three can be found here.
Recently I was approached with an offer to share with my readers a sample chapter from a forthcoming book called The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. A caveat: I have not read the whole book, and offering the sample chapter here for you to read does not constitute an endorsement by me of the book. But I was sufficiently intrigued by the sample chapter I read to think it was worth sharing…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA, aDNA, molecular biology, molecular ecology, archaeology, paleontology, fossil eggshell, extinct birds, giant moa, Dinornis robustus, elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus, Mullerornis, Thunderbirds, Genyornis, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus, egg
compared to a human hand with a hummingbird egg balanced on a fingertip.
To conduct my avian research, I've isolated and sequenced DNA from a variety of specimens, such as blood, muscle, skin and a variety of internal…
cagapakis | March 10, 2010Animal cells are made up of many smaller membrane-bound compartments called organelles that perform highly specialized functions necessary for life. Incredibly, several of these organelles have been shown to be evolutionarily related to free-living bacteria, captured and incorporated inside a larger cell billions of years ago in a complex mutually beneficial relationship, known as endosymbiosis (a partnership between two species where one of the species is inside the other). The mitochondria that power our cells, generating energy by breaking down sugars are in fact relatives of regular old…
clock | March 10, 2010There are 35 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:
Does Tropical Forest Fragmentation Increase Long-Term Variability of Butterfly Communities?:
Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Yet, the overall effects of fragmentation on…
laelaps | March 9, 2010
A simplified evolutionary tree of primate relationships showing the placement of Darwinius in relationship to other groups. From Williams et al., 2010.
The study of human origins can be a paradoxical thing. We know that we evolved from ancestral apes (and, in fact, are just one peculiar kind of ape), yet we are obsessed with the features that distinguish us from our close relatives. The "big questions" in evolutionary anthropology, from why we stand upright to how our brains became so large, are all centered around distancing us from a prehistoric ape baseline. Despite our preoccupation…
clock | March 9, 2010There are 22 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:
Measuring the Conservation Value of Tropical Primary Forests: The Effect of Occasional Species on Estimates of Biodiversity Uniqueness:
Developing effective conservation plans for multi-functional…
tetrapodzoology | March 8, 2010Yeah, things are still tough here at Tet Zoo Towers, and the time needed for blog-writing has yet to materialise. But the end is in sight, and things will be back to normal within the next few weeks. I hope.
If you've been reading the series of babirusa articles - and, hey, who hasn't? - you'll recall the mention of that most sought-after of objects: a male babirusa skull where one of the upper canines has pierced the frontal bone, and grown into the skull... perhaps with fatal consequences. Given the extraordinary form of the canines, it seems obvious and perhaps inevitable that at least…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2010I'm conflicted about Nicholas Kristof's recent op-ed about antibiotic resistant organisms. On the one hand, Kristof is one of the only national columnists to raise this issue at all. On the other hand, I found his most recent column somewhat confusing--and I'm an expert in this area (I also think he's jumping to unfounded conclusions, but more about that later in the post). I think this is largely an effect similar to playing "telephone": information is being transferred multiple times from the primary source and finally conveyed by someone with no biological training. So what I'm going…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | March 6, 2010Freeman Dyson (with whom I have many disagreements, so don't take this as an unqualified endorsement), wrote an interesting article that predicted, in part, a coming new age of biology. I think he's entirely right in that, and that we can expect amazing information and changes in this next century.
If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still…
emjohnson | March 2, 2010In light of the recent discussion on animal testing and animal rights I thought a few additional points would be valuable. It is a fact that animal testing leads to some necessary medical advances that save lives. Anyone who would say differently doesn't have the slightest clue what they're talking about and should be dismissed out of hand. The question is an issue of how many, especially given the ethical concerns. It is also a fact that the vast majority of animal testing serves more peripheral goals, categorized as applied studies that include cosmetic, chemical and pharmaceutical…
Not Exactly Pocket Science - panic aboard the Titanic, the rise of polar bears and emasculated frogs
edyong | March 2, 2010I'm trying something new. Right from the start, I've always tried to write fairly long and detailed write-ups of new papers but this means that on any given week, there are always more stories than time and my desktop gets littered with PDFs awaiting interpretation.
So, I'm going to start doing shorter write-ups of papers that don't make the cut, linking to more detailed treatments on other quality news sources. This is something that I hope science journalists will do more of. It stems from a Twitter conversation where I asked if I should (a) write up short versions of these stories, (b)…
clock | March 2, 2010Four of the seven PLoS journals post new articles on Monday nights - let's see what is exciting and bloggable 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:
Predation upon Hatchling Dinosaurs by a New Snake from the Late Cretaceous of India:
Snakes first appear in the fossil record towards…
emjohnson | March 1, 2010It's wonderful to see that my Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front has generated discussion on this important topic. The issue as I see it is really quite simple and boils down to two essential issues: the benefits to science versus the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research. Furthermore, our current understanding about primate cognition, emotional complexity, and their rich…
razib | March 1, 2010A few days ago I pointed to a paper which suggests the possible utility of looking at selection on standing genetic variation on quantitative traits to get a sense of the role of adaptation in the human genome. We humans like to think we're a complex species, so I see no a priori reason why our evolutionary history should be easily reducible to spare compact dynamics. Granted, we can start with the assumption that on the order of 50,000 years before the present there was a rapid demographic expansion of anatomically modern humans out of the continent of Africa. This story is simple, and is…
tetrapodzoology | February 28, 2010
In the previous article we looked at the proposal that the various babirusa taxa - long regarded as subspecies - deserve to be raised to species rank. The argument goes that the taxa concerned are (1) morphologically diagnosable, (2) 'as distinct' as are other taxa traditionally regarded as species (raising the taxa to species level therefore represents a sort of attempt at uniformitarianism), and (3) represent distinct phylogenetic lineages. Meijaard & Groves's proposal therefore reflects their adherance to the phylogenetic species concept, or PSC (where distinct lineages on a…