Life Sciences
jdupuis | December 10, 2009Yet another solid list from the Globe and Mail, assembled from a few different categories. This list focuses on gift/coffee table-style books; I've left out a few of the many science and nature books that seem a bit more peripheral to my main mission.
Aviation in Canada: The Formative Years by Larry Milberry
Gil Cohen: Aviation Artist by Gil Cohen
Eco House Book by Terence Conran
Illustrated Birds of North America by Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer
Whole Green Catalogue: 1,000 Best Things for You and the Earth edited by Michael W. Robbins
Birds of North America: The Complete…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
clock | December 4, 2009Seasonal Differences of Gene Expression Profiles in Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia) Hypothalamus in Relation to Territorial Aggression:
Male song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) are territorial year-round; however, neuroendocrine responses to simulated territorial intrusion (STI) differ between breeding (spring) and non-breeding seasons (autumn). In spring, exposure to STI leads to increases in luteinizing hormone and testosterone, but not in autumn. These observations suggest that there are fundamental differences in the mechanisms driving neuroendocrine responses to STI between seasons.…
sa smith | December 2, 2009I love it when a research paper makes me laugh.
This paper makes me laugh.
It is AWESOME!!
Continuous Quinacrine Treatment Results in the Formation of Drug-Resistant Prions
Okay, heres the deal: Prions cause disease by making 'normal' proteins fold wrong. When they fold wrong, they clump up together to form amyloid fibrils (wrote about this in the context of HIV-1 a while back). These amyloid fibrils are super stable. They build up and build up... and cause neuronal damage. Now, weve got drugs that work super to stop the formation of amyloid fibrils, thus prion progression, in tissue…
edyong | December 2, 2009If I say the phrases 'anti-ageing' and 'nutritional balance' to you, you'd probably think of the pages of quack websites selling untested supplements than the pages of Nature. And yet this week's issue has a study that actually looks at these issues with scientific rigour. It shows that, at least for fruit flies, eating a diet with just the right balance of nutrients can lengthen life without the pesky drawback of producing fewer offspring.
Despite the claims of the cosmetic and nutritional industries, chemicals or techniques that slow the ageing process are few and far between. We're a long…
laelaps | December 1, 2009
The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.).
Louis Leakey had a problem.
During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species.
When Mary fit all the pieces…
tetrapodzoology | November 30, 2009
After a little delay, it's time to embark once more into the World of Toads!!! Having previously looked at toads in general, and at the toads of Europe, we here continue the series by looking at yet more familiar, northern toads: this time at those of North America.
As with some of the other 'northern' toads we've looked at (the Natterjack and the Green toad and its relatives), North America's many toad species have conventionally been subsumed into the anuran genus-that-ate-the-world, Bufo. However, genetic studies have shown that the North American toad clade that includes the Common…
jdupuis | November 29, 2009One of the most interesting lists every year is The Globe and Mail's Globe 100, and this year is no exception. There's relevant stuff all over the spectrum, from biography to history to graphic novels to popular science to the environment.
In the print version, the categories are pretty basic: Canadian fiction, international fiction, poetry, non-fiction, graphica. Online, the categories are, well, a little more granular, and we'll get to that train wreck after the list.
Here goes:
Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
Tar…
edyong | November 28, 2009
Ah, penguins. You just can't help but smile. These animals are found on Boulders Beach near Cape Town, where they come so close to the erected walkways that you could potentially reach out and grab one (if the mood took you and you were an idiot).
The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) is part of a genus with four species. The last time I saw one of them, it was off the Galapagos Islands (the Galapagos penguin), and the other two members of the group (the Humboldt and Magellanic penguins) are natives of Patagonia. They're commonly known as jackass penguins because of their distinct,…
awild | November 27, 2009Myrmecos Blog appeared online two years ago today.  While I'm obviously the guy writing most of the posts, the reason we're still on the air isn't me and my bloviating. It is all of you guys- the readers, the guest bloggers, the commentators. Without the life provided to the site by the many participants, I'd long since have lost the incentive to keep at it. So, a heartfelt thank you.
If I had to finger any one difference between blogging in 2007 and blogging in 2009, it is this. In 2007 blogs had already risen to mainstream acceptability, especially in the political, commercial, and…
edyong | November 25, 2009
The role of Velociraptor's infamous claw has received much attention from scientists ever since they clicked their way across a movie kitchen. In comparison, the formidable claws of living raptors (birds of prey) have received little attention. Eagles, hawks, falcons and owls are some of the most widespread and well-liked of all birds. They are superb hunters and even though it's always been suspected that they use their talons to kill, we know amazingly little about their techniques.
Denver Fowler (great name for an ornithologist) and colleagues from Montana State University have changed…
gregladen | November 24, 2009Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question:
a repost
How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems…
edyong | November 22, 2009
Of all of South Africa's species of antelope, the kudu is my favourite, mainly because of those elegantly spiralling horns. They adorn the logo of the national parks and several street signs (which promise kudus majestically leaping out across highways, but seldom deliver). And they're pretty tasty too...
This individual is one of the only adult males we saw. The one in the second photo is a juvenile, and his shorter horns have only begun their first turn. The animals in the bottom two photos are hornless females.
The fact that they're called antelope suggests a relationship with…
laelaps | November 20, 2009
A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo.
For me, no visit to the zoo is complete without stopping by to see the giraffes. They are among the most common of zoo animals, certainly, but I still find them fascinating. If giraffes did not actually exist and someone drew an illustration of one as a speculative zoology project the picture would likely be written off as absurd, yet the living animal is more charming than preposterous.
As with many extant large mammals, though, the giraffe is only a vestige of a once more diverse group. Its closest living relative is the okapi, a short-necked and…
clock | November 18, 2009There are 28 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:
Breaking the News or Fueling the Epidemic? Temporal Association between News Media Report Volume and Opioid-Related Mortality:
Historical studies of news media have suggested an association between…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009On November 24, 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Then, as now, many people were made uncomfortable to think that human beings could be related to the "lower" animals and this discomfort was regularly represented in popular depictions of Darwin during the 19th century. An excellent study on this was written by Darwin scholar Janet Brown in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Interestingly enough, it was believed that the most cutting insult to Darwin (or perhaps just the funniest) was to compare him to a primate. Primates have often made people…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009
See thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth
All matter quick, and bursting into birth:
Above, how high progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being! which from God began;
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, who no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee;
From thee to nothing.--On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the…
edyong | November 16, 2009At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly).
But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…
laelaps | November 16, 2009
The display of horse evolution at the AMNH as created by W.D. Matthew. Price reproduced this illustration without permission in his creationist textbook The New Geology.
The 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" put scientists on the defensive. It did not matter that the defendant in the famous case, John Scopes, probably never taught evolution in a Tennessee school (he was only a substitute teacher and football coach who agreed to take the fall so that the ACLU could test a law that barred evolution from schools); the issue that everyone was concerned about was the conflict between science and…
tetrapodzoology | November 15, 2009By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right].
It's a bit unusual for a Tet Zoo article, as it contains a whole paragraph of boring travel-writing stuff, but I hope you can grit your teeth and get through this - the meat and potatoes on obscure subspecies and so on is delivered towards the end, I promise. So, without further ado...
Having spent our time in…