Life Sciences
tetrapodzoology | August 28, 2009
If you follow the comments here at Tet Zoo you'll already have seen the thread that's been developing on the 'Giant killers: macropredation in lions' article (originally posted back in February, and itself a re-post of a ver 1 article from November 2006). If you don't follow the comments, the following will be new to you. It seems that philosopher David Pearce is honestly proposing that we should feel ethically compelled to eradicate all suffering and cruelty from the natural world in order to create a sort of global vegan paradise where predators don't exist. Pearce terms this the…
clock | August 26, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
A Blog Around The…
neurophilosophy | August 26, 2009
THIS weird and wonderful creature is the star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata), a small, semi-aquatic mammal which inhabits the low wetlands of eastern North America. Like other moles, it ekes out an existence in a network of narrow underground tunnels, and digs shallow surface tunnels where it forages for insects, worms and molluscs. Living as it does in almost complete darkness, the star-nosed mole has poorly developed eyes, and is virtually blind. Instead, it relies heavily on its remarkable star-shaped nose. This organ enables the star-nosed mole to decide whether something is edible with…
clock | August 25, 2009There are 33 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:
Business Return in New Orleans: Decision Making Amid Post-Katrina Uncertainty:
Empirical observations on how businesses respond after a major catastrophe are rare, especially for a catastrophe as great as…
clock | August 24, 2009There are many interesting articles published in PLoS ONE, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 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:
Estimating Impact Forces of Tail Club Strikes by Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs:
It has been assumed that the unusual tail club…
tetrapodzoology | August 23, 2009
Time to finish with the mesonychians. Previous articles have looked at Andrewsarchus and the triisodontids, the mesonychids, and the hapalodectids. That's essentially it... though - as mentioned a few times now - Andrewsarchus doesn't seem to be a mesonychian after all. However, there are a number of other obscure Paleogene mammal groups that have been considered to be allied to (or part of) Mesonychia by some authors, and in the interests of completeness I want to look at them here.
We start with the didymoconids. This is a peculiar group of Asian mammals known from the Paleocene, Eocene…
clock | August 22, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
A Blog Around The…
pharyngula | August 22, 2009
Last night, I asked for a copy of an article (I have plenty now, thanks!) that was getting a lot of press. The reason I was looking for it is two-fold: the PR looked awful, expressing some annoying cliches about evolution, but the data looked interesting, good stuff that I was glad to see done. Awful and interesting — I'm a sucker for those jarring combinations. My favorite pizza is jalapeno and pineapple, too.
I'm going to split my discussion of this article in two, just to simplify dealing with it. This is the awful part. I'll do the interesting part a little later.
The paper is about the…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009
That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on "Millions of Years" at the Creation "Museum". Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith.
He's right, of course. It's a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes…
gregladen | August 17, 2009Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods.
~ ~ ~
The things that people know already often need to be removed from the brain prior to teaching new stuff. This may seem a little offensive to some, but really, it is easier to just admit it. I'm not…
tetrapodzoology | August 17, 2009
We now move to another mesonychian group: Hapalodectidae. This is yet another of those obscure little groups that sounds really interesting, yet are never the subject of focus or discussion. Virtually all of the literature on them - and that's still only ten papers or so - mentions the idea that they might have been piscivorous, but I can't find any elaboration of this and would like to see some. Hapalodectidae was named by Szalay & Gould (1966) as a mesonychid 'subfamily' (following Ting & Li (1987) and others, I here refer to the group as Hapalodectidae instead of Hapalodectinae);…
edyong | August 15, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Twenty-two thousand sounds like a huge number. It's happens to be number of eastern Pacific gray whales currently swimming off the coast of North America. It's certainly much larger than 140, the number of whales that aboriginal people of this area are allowed to hunt. And it's far, far bigger than zero, the population size that the whales were rapidly approaching in the mid 20th century.
Obviously, it's all relative. Twenty-two thousand is still much less than ninety-six thousand. That's the size of…
tetrapodzoology | August 15, 2009After Andrewsarchus, the best known mesonychians are the mesonychids... and, as we saw previously, Andrewsarchus may not be a mesonychian anyway. Mesonychids are a mostly Eocene group that originated in the Paleocene; Mesonyx, from the Middle Eocene of North America, was the first member of the group to be named (Cope published the name in 1872), and it's still one of the most familiar mesonychians, by which I mean one of the kinds featured most frequently in the popular and semi-technical literature. Its limbs indicate a cursorial lifestyle [Charles Knight's Mesonyx shown below].
A number…
pharyngula | August 13, 2009Stuart Pivar is on a rampage again — he has rallied his lawyers and is on the attack. Not against me, fortunately, but against Robert Hazen, biochemist and author of the excellent book on abiogenesis, Genesis. His crime is that Hazen said a few generous things about Pivar's work once upon a time, Pivar inflated the remarks into a wholesale endorsement of his cockamamie theories, and when Hazen saw he was being touted as a True Believer™ in the evolution of balloon animals, he demanded that Pivar cease and desist.
Now Pivar claims this is a cruel attempt to silence the promulgation of his…
edyong | August 12, 2009In a French laboratory, a team of ants is attempting a daring rescue. One of their colony-mates is trapped in a snare - a nylon thread that dastardly researchers have looped around its waist and half-buried in some sand. Thankfully, help is at hand. A crack squad of rescuers work together to dig away at the sand, expose the snare, and bite at the threads until their colleague is liberated.
Many animals help each other but actual rescue attempts, even between individuals of the same species, are rarely documented. Among back-boned animals, dolphins are famously said to help injured comrades…
tetrapodzoology | August 9, 2009What the hell, I've decided to keep the ball rolling with the Paleogene mammals, and do a whole week series on mesonychians. Yes, let's deal with a group that everyone has at least heard of.
Mesonychians are an assemblage of Paleocene and Eocene mammals, best characterized (or are they?) by the superficially wolf-like carnivorous or omnivorous forms Andrewsarchus and Mesonyx [life-sized Andrewsarchus model above from here]. Why use the term 'mesonychians' and not 'mesonychids'? Answer: because there is at least some evidence linking a number of non-mesonychid taxa with Mesonychidae. Some…
grrlscientist | August 9, 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…
tfk | August 5, 2009I've been slow in writing this review only because the kerfuffle over Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum distracted me. Yes, there's a lot of controversy, but I'm going to set that aside, ignore other reviews, and give my own take here. A response to some of the reviews will follow separately.
"Americans are dumb." This is the reaction I get most often when talking about the creation/evolution conflict, and it's the premise of many actions by the scientific community (which includes both scientists and a broader group of…
ejohnson | August 5, 2009Below, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka responds to the question:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On what specific issue/problem do you feel we need to bring the scientific lens to bear?
I think that we need to bring the scientific lens to bear on the larger social issue of the role that public health and sustainable environments play in reducing poverty, and in some situations, conflict in war torn areas. In developing countries and…
clock | August 5, 2009North Carolina Snakes: Facts and Fiction
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
Did you know that North Carolina is home to almost 40 species of native snakes and all but six of them are non-venomous and considered harmless? Of the six venomous species found in our state, only one, the copperhead occurs statewide and is likely to be encountered in Wake County. Unfortunately, snakes are often feared and misunderstood, with many harmless species being misidentified and killed.…