Life Sciences
tetrapodzoology | August 5, 2009
On to our second day of talks (read part I first): things kicked off with Mike A. Taylor and Angela Milner's talk on the history and collections of Street. Pinpointing the locations of original quarries is always difficult as exact records are often not kept, and of course the areas once used for quarrying change function and appearance over time. One interesting point is that the concept of 'Street' as a locality should perhaps be interpreted as broadly as possible, given that certain other, nearby Somerset sources might sometimes have provided specimens too [adjacent photo by Mo Hassan of…
tetrapodzoology | August 4, 2009
I promised myself back in 2007 that I'd cut down on the number of conferences I attend. There's a problem with that: I'm pretty bad at keeping promises (at least, to myself). This year I'm attending a ridiculous four conferences, and I've just returned from the first of them (please remind me why I have no money, and no spare time). Entitled Sea Dragons of Avalon: the early radiations of the marine reptiles and recovery from the Triassic-Jurassic faunal crisis, with special reference to Street in Somerset and the wider British record, this Palaeontological Association (Pal Ass) seminar…
edyong | August 3, 2009Swine flu has made the world all too aware of the possibility of diseases making the leap from animal hosts to human ones. Now, we know that another disease made a similar transition from chimpanzees to humans, several thousand years ago. This particular infection is caused by a parasite, and a very familiar and dangerous one - Plasmodium falciparum, the agent responsible for malaria.
Transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, P.falciparum infects over 500 million people every year. Its closest relative is a related parasite, Plasmodium reichenowi, which infects chimpanzees. Leading an…
grrlscientist | August 3, 2009
I receive a fair number of books to review each month, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever (NYC: Little, Brown and Company; 2009). Review copy.
Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World by Jeff Schweitzer and Giuseppe Notarbartolo-Di-Sciara (Jacquie Jordan Inc.; 2009). Review copy.
Animal Investigators: How the World's First Wildlife…
bnsullivan | August 2, 2009New month, new topic here on Photo Synthesis: underwater photography.
For the next four weeks I will be presenting photos of marine invertebrates and fishes from warm water locations around the world. These photos are the product of what has been, for me, a long journey of discovery -- about the sea, about marine life, and about photography.
My photos are documentary in nature, rather than works of art. That is not to say that I don't strive for a certain level of eye appeal, but my purpose always has been to record which creatures live where, what they look like in their natural…
gregladen | July 29, 2009In which I explain how Abrahamic religious tradition, ingrained in Western society since before its very history began, explains some of the special ways in which we can be so dumb.
Leviticus, the ancient Biblical law, does not give us a lot of room for negotiation, and I think this may help explain the illogical way in which most Westerners approach the realities of society and culture. Leviticus asserts that human behavior intersects with the law of god in a black and white fashion. We tend to see our fellow human beings as wonderful or terrible.
A recent news story serves as an…
laelaps | July 29, 2009
Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009)
When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely; it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…
clock | July 28, 2009There are 31 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:
Climate Change, Habitat Loss, Protected Areas and the Climate Adaptation Potential of Species in Mediterranean Ecosystems Worldwide:
Mediterranean climate is found on five continents and supports five…
emjohnson | July 28, 2009Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…
gregladen | July 27, 2009Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
A once-in-a-lifetime photograph of a Common (Eurasian) Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis.
Image: orphaned [larger view].
Birds in Science
For centuries, scientists have puzzled over why the toucan's bill is so remarkably large -- but now one team thinks it might have an answer. The researchers say that the toucan uses its enormous beak to stay cool. They used infrared cameras to show the bird dumping heat from its body into its bill, helping it to regulate its body temperature. The toucan has the largest bill of any bird,…
tetrapodzoology | July 26, 2009
Over the past few weeks, Channel 4 here in the UK screened the four-part series Inside Nature's Giants. If you're at all interested in the world of zoology you'll already - I assume - have heard quite a lot about it. I watched it religiously, and let me tell that you that it was excellent, well deserving of the Tet Zoo stamp of approval. More importantly, it was - as billed - pretty much the first time that this sort of thing had been done for television. The public face of natural history is, let's face it, behaviour, behaviour, behaviour, behaviour, ecology, conservation, conservation,…
laelaps | July 23, 2009
The incomplete skull of Nicrosaurus (formerly "Belodon"), one of the earliest-recognized phytosaurs. It is missing teeth and it did not have an extended downward extension of the palate (the outline that extends below the upper jaw marked by the dotted line) like modern crocodiles. From A guide to the fossil reptiles and fishes in the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the British Museum (Natural History).
On the occasion of our third anniversary my wife bought me one of my most favorite works of paleo-art; a scene from the late Triassic set in what is now Arizona's Petrified…
clock | July 22, 2009Our system was down fpr the past 17.5 hours so I could not post this last night, so here it is now. There 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:
Relativity Theory and Time Perception: Single or Multiple Clocks?:
Current theories of interval timing…
clock | July 20, 2009Still getting all my Legos together after the trip, here are some of the highlight from various PLoS journals from last Friday and 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:
You Say You Want a Revolution: An Interview with Pat Brown:
I have known Pat Brown for about two decades and he…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Birdwatchers in southeastern Australia have been thrilled to see the arrival of about a third of the total national population of the highly endangered Swift Parrot, Lathamus discolor, on the Far South Coast.
Image: Max Sutcliffe, Narooma News [larger view].
Birds in Science
Bird deaths around the Baltic Sea and possibly elsewhere in the world may be caused by a shortage of the vitamin thiamine, researchers say. Wild birds of varied species along the Baltic coasts have been dying of hard-to-explain paralysis since…
gregladen | July 20, 2009Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?
Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.
The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain…
edyong | July 18, 2009We think of spiders as fearsome hunters, spinners of webs and treacherous mates, but construction workers? Yes, that too. Some groups of spiders - trapdoor and wolf spiders - dig tunnels that they use to ambush passing insects. But these tunnels can also provide shelter and accommodation for other animals, including one of the rarest of Australia's lizards - the pygmy blue-tongue lizard. It seems that the lizard's survival depends entirely on the spiders.
The pygmy blue-tongue is a native of South Australia. It's so rare that zoologists thought it extinct for over 30 years and it re-emerged…
clock | July 17, 2009This April 09, 2006 post places another paper of ours (Reference #17) within a broader context of physiology, behavior, ecology and evolution.
The paper was a result of a "communal" experiment in the lab, i.e., it was not included in anyone's Thesis. My advisor designed it and started the experiment with the first couple of birds. When I joined the lab, I did the experiment in an additional number of animals. When Chris joined the lab, he took over the project and did the rest of the lab work, including bringing in the idea for an additional experiment that was included, and some of the…
clock | July 16, 2009This post from March 27, 2006 starts with some of my old research and poses a new hypothesis.
The question of animal models
There are some very good reasons why much of biology is performed in just a handful of model organisms. Techniques get refined and the knowledge can grow incrementally until we can know quite a lot of nitty-gritty details about a lot of bioloigcal processes. One need not start from Square One with every new experiment with every new species. One should, of course, occasionally test how generalizable such findings are to other organisms, but the value of models is hard…