Life Sciences
clock | October 23, 2009There are 18 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:
Impaired Control of Body Cooling during Heterothermia Represents the Major Energetic Constraint in an Aging Non-Human Primate Exposed to Cold:
Daily heterothermia is used by small mammals for energy and…
grrlscientist | October 22, 2009This week has not gone very well, probably because I've been ill since Sunday with some sort of illness that makes me vomit a lot. Last week, I thought I had everything figured out, but this week, I've been confronted by an increasingly complex tangle of paperwork and problems and with having to make decisions about how to spend huge sums of money (well, huge sums in the view of this unemployed scientist). All the while, I am reminded how intelligent I was to resist the pressure put on me to relocate anywhere unless I knew I had a job first.
Here's a list of everything that has gone wrong so…
edyong | October 22, 2009By directing the evolution of a worm, scientists have confirmed answers to the age-old question: "What is the point of having sex with someone else?" For most people, that would hardly be a tricky query but it's no reflection on the lives of evolutionary scientists that sex has been one of biology's oldest puzzles.
The problem is this: many creatures can reproduce by fertilising themselves instead of getting someone else to do it, and at first glance they should do much better individuals that cross-fertilise. For a start, they'd ensure that all of their genes reach the next generation,…
edyong | October 20, 2009In the forests of South Africa lurks an arachnophobe's nightmare - Nephila kowaci, the largest web-spinning spider in the world. The females of this newly discovered species have bodies that are 3-4 centimetres in length (1.5 inches) and legs that are each around 7.5cm long (3 inches).
This new species is the largest of an already massive family. There are 15 species of Nephila - the golden orb weavers - and at least 10 of them have bodies that are over an inch long. Many spin webs that are over a metre in diameter.
The first of these giants was discovered by Linnaeus himself in 1767 and…
clock | October 20, 2009Five Years of Access and Activism:
In April 2009, we marked the five year anniversary of PLoS Medicine's first call for papers with an editorial titled "A Medical Journal for the World's Health Priorities" [1]. The editorial was a renewed and revitalized call for papers, announcing a "refocusing of the journal's priorities." Going forward, we said, we would prioritize papers addressing those diseases with the greatest global burden. We would also aim to be as broad a journal as possible, publishing papers that explored not just biological causes of illness, but also social, environmental, and…
cwilcox | October 20, 2009What's cuter than bunnies? Pygmy bunnies! What's cuter than pygmy bunnies? Baby pygmy bunnies!
While they're unbelievably cute, these little guys are more than just adorable - they're the last remaining hope for their local population. Pygmy rabbits were once found throughout the Northwestern United States in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, California, and Nevada. In 1990, declining populations due to habitat loss led to the rabbits being listed as threatened, and further decline placed them on the federal endangered species list in 2003.
Recently, searches for wild…
tetrapodzoology | October 18, 2009
After a brief hiatus we return to the remarkable world of toads, and this time round we look at reproductive biology. As a western European person, the toad species I'm most familiar with (the Common toad Bufo bufo and Natterjack Epidalea calamita [see later articles for details on the name changes]) are seasonal breeders that turn up at ponds early on in the year [Common toad mating ball shown here, photo by Neil Phillips] and produce strings of hundreds or thousands of eggs (between 400 and 7500). There are other toad species that are even more fecund, with individuals of some species (…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: 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…
bioephemera | October 17, 2009
NPS Photo/Dan Stahler
This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops.
And what do Montana authorities have to say about this?
"Members of…
pharyngula | October 16, 2009I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells' visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells' version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea.
The next person--apparently a professor of developmental biology--objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve…
emjohnson | October 16, 2009Three products that profit on male insecurities (Enzyte, Viagra and Tiger Penis Wine)
Note: the third image is from a campaign to encourage people to stop, not an actual ad.
In my earlier posts I explored why women experience menopause and discussed the Grandmother Hypothesis as a leading explanation. There is accumulating evidence that suggests reproductive senescence in women is an adaptation promoting inclusive fitness. However, there are many claims that menopause also occurs in men. There's even a fancy name for it: andropause.
A quick Google search reveals an onslaught of online "…
laelaps | October 15, 2009
My new favorite illustration from the technical literature; a baseball player compared to the glyptodont Doedicurus clavicaudatus. From the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper.
In the introduction to his most famous work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin began by writing;
WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me…
razib | October 12, 2009I've talked about menopause before. One question in evolutionary anthropology is whether it is an adaptation, a derived trait in our species which emerged due to the force of natural selection, or simply a physiological byproduct of some other phenomenon. The key point is the peculiar asymmetry in male and female reproductive potentials; males decline gradually over time, while the general suite of female reproductive function simply shuts down at during middle age. Eric Michael Johnson reviews a new paper by the redoubtable Virpi Lummaa, Fitness benefits of prolonged post-reproductive…
tetrapodzoology | October 11, 2009
I forget how it started now, but lately I've been very, very interested in toads (yes, toads), so much so that I've felt compelled to write about them. The problem is that toads - properly called bufonids - are not a small group. On the contrary, this is a huge clade, distributed worldwide and containing about 540 species in about 38 genera (as of October 2009). So, there are a lot of species to write about, and covering all or most of them is quite the challenge. But it's the sort of challenge I like...
As is so often the case with amphibian and reptile groups, accessible literature that…
grrlscientist | October 11, 2009tags: 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…
clock | October 10, 2009Let's look back at the week and see what's cool. 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:
ECG Response of Koalas to Tourists Proximity: A Preliminary Study:
Koalas operate on a tight energy budget and, thus, may not always display behavioral avoidance reaction when placed in a stressful…
laelaps | October 9, 2009
Chucking stones at baboons; the first hominin passtime? From The Making of Man.
For the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, the fossilized bones scattered among the caves of South Africa were testimonies to the murderous nature of early humans. The recovered skulls of baboons and our australopithecine relatives often looked as if they had been bashed in, and Dart believed the bones, teeth, and horns of slain game animals were the weapons hominins used to slaughter their prey. (He gave this sort of tool use the cumbersome name "osteodontokeratic culture.") Our origins had not been peaceful;…
pharyngula | October 8, 2009Nicholas Wade has a very peculiar review of Richard Dawkins' book, The Greatest Show on Earth, in the NY Times Review of Books. It's strange because it is a positive review which strongly agrees with Dawkins' position on the central importance of the theory of evolution in biology in the first half…but the second half is a jaw-droppingly stupid attack on a small point in the book. Wade has a very absolutist and wrong view of the definitions of some terms, and he goes on and on, whining about a topic that he doesn't understand himself.
There is one point on which I believe Dawkins gets tripped…
laelaps | October 7, 2009
I have often been teased for my habit of carrying a science book wherever I go. ("That's such a Brian thing," an acquaintance once remarked.) If I am going to be waiting for someone or have a few minutes to spare here or there I like to have something to read to fill up the time. It's either that or fiddle around with Tetris on my cell phone. Some people have told me that this manifestation of bibliophilia makes me seem antisocial,* but I cannot break the habit. I have been toting around science stuff wherever I go from a very young age.
*[My favorite instance was when I was told to "Make…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2009tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty
I am focusing on this project, The Viking Shark Project, because there are only four days left to fund this proposal before the deadline passes and 70 students from an impoverished high-crime magnet classroom are left wanting -- AGAIN!
The teacher is asking for 35 dogfish for his 70 students to dissect and this proposal has already raised half of the required funds, but it still needs to raise the remaining $248.50 so these kids can enhance their educational experience.
Given the fact that sharks are so misunderstood…