Life Sciences
cwilcox | July 16, 2009Following on the heels of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets and Southern Fried Science, I am posting this fantastic letter about ocean acidification by Randy Repass and Sally-Christine Rogers of West Marine (originally posted at The Intersection). Ocean acidification is, for me, the real crux of the issue when people talk about global warming or climate change. Acidification is a clear, very real chemical reaction between CO2 and seawater - there's no arguing its causes or consequences, which i suspect will be far more noticeable and painful in our lifetimes. Anyhow, read up!
We are both…
clock | July 16, 2009Sally-Christine Rodgers and Randy Repass do a TON for ocean conservation around the world, including supporting students and getting the right folks involved on the ground. They wrote this letter and asked a bunch of us bloggers to spread it around the Web:
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We are both lifelong boaters. What we have learned from sailing across the Pacific over the past 6 years, and especially from scientists focused on marine conservation, is startling. Whether you spend time on the water or not, Ocean Acidification affects all of us and is something we believe you will want to know about.
What…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Dear Reader. The following letter was written by Randy Repass and Sally-Christine Rodgers and it concerns you and the planet earth. The publication of this letter is happening in numerous blogs at the same time, coordinated by Sheril Kirshenbaum.
We are both lifelong boaters. What we have learned from sailing across the Pacific over the past 6 years, and especially from scientists focused on marine conservation, is startling. Whether you spend time on the water or not, Ocean Acidification affects all of us and is something we believe you will want to know about.
What would you do if…
gregladen | July 16, 2009Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species…
hrynyshyn | July 16, 2009As someone with a marine biology degree, I've been asked to help spread the word about the threat to ocean ecosystems from falling pH levels -- what everyone who doesn't have a marine biology degree calls ocean acidification. It's a worthy cause. Read the following letter, review this report and then go to this site and do something about it:
We are both lifelong boaters. What we have learned from sailing across the Pacific over the past 6 years, and especially from scientists focused on marine conservation, is startling. Whether you spend time on the water or not, Ocean Acidification…
clock | July 15, 2009This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this post was first written on April 12, 2005.
A Phase Response Curve (PRC) can be made in three ways:
One can construct a PRC for a single individual. If you have a reasonably long-lived organism, you can apply a number of light pulses over a period of time. The advantage is that you will always know the freerunning period of your organism, and you will know with absolute…
gregladen | July 14, 2009 Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858.
It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with carnivals. That is not the case with this post.
Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…
ddobbs | July 13, 2009
Greg Laden, trying to toss a line between the "New Atheists" and 'Accommodationists" who are currently squabbling about a dust-up featuring PZ Myers v Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum (who apparently rough Myers up a bit in their book Unscientific America), writes:
Now, I just want to make this point: I learned early on (when I was still an altar boy) that where religion and life conflict -- where the religion was not doing a good job at explaining the bits and pieces of life that were not making sense -- it was OK to drop the details of the religion part and chalk it up to mystery.
I'…
grrlscientist | July 13, 2009tags: Antarctica, Orcas, Killer Whales, Orcinus orca, wildlife, streaming video
In this video, we are given a look at a pod of Orcas -- "killer whales" -- Orcinus orca, that live in the Antarctic. I have spent many happy hours in Friday Harbor at the University of Washington's research station, watching Orcas and talking to the biologists who study them. These biologists were fairly certain that the Friday harbor Orcas are a different subspecies or species from those orcas that live in more open waters, such as the ones you see in this video. The reasons? At the time, they didn't have DNA…
tetrapodzoology | July 13, 2009
Some time during the last several hours (while I was asleep), Tet Zoo reached the three million hits mark. Yes, three million hits in two years (Tet Zoo ver 2 was launched on Jan 31st 2007). A noble achievement, I'm sure you'll agree. Due to workload and assorted other commitments, I still don't have anything major new to post (how the hell do the more prolific bloggers do it?), though there was the new salamander thing yesterday - knocked up very quickly on the spur of the moment - and I've also just produced a new SV-POW! article. Inspired by a comment Nathan Myers left here recently…
oracknows | July 12, 2009I've just returned from Las Vegas after having attended The Amazing Meeting.. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! While I'm gone, However, my flight was scheduled to arrive very late Sunday night, and I'm still recovering. Consequently, for one more day I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the…
clock | July 12, 2009Hypotheses leading to more hypotheses (from March 19, 2006 - the Malaria Day):
I have written a little bit about malaria before, e.g, here and here, but this is my special Malaria Action Day post, inspired by a paper [1] that Tara sent me some weeks ago and I never got to write about it till now.
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In a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" Kumar and Sharma [1] propose that jet-lagged travellers may be more susceptible to getting infected with malaria. They write:
Rapid travel across several time zones leads to…
grrlscientist | July 12, 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…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2009
The naming of new amphibian species is a fairly routine thing. This doesn't mean that - despite the global amphibian crisis - amphibians are actually ok and that we can stop worrying; it means that we haven't been paying enough attention, and indeed many of the species that are being named anew are endangered, or threatened, or with tiny ranges.
The current edition of Journal of Zoology includes the description of a new plethodontid salamander (aka lungless salamander): the Patch-nosed salamander Urspelerpes brucei Camp et al., 2009. The big deal about this entirely new species is that it's…
oracknows | July 9, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two (or three), but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006.
Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard…
gregladen | July 9, 2009 It has become virtually axiomatic that as climate shifts or other potential insults to the ecology of a given area occur, plants and animals enclosed in parks bounded by "impermeable" landscapes are at great risk. Instead of the extreme ranges of a plant or animal moving north or south, or across a gradient of rainfall, or up or down in elevation, organisms that are protected in parks are also stuck in the parks and risk local extinction when change happens or disease becomes endemic, or poaching uncontrolled or fire more common or .... well, we can go on and on.
In a new study on "The…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2009Back in April 2008 (my god - where does the time go?) I wrote a brief article about the Animal Life and The Private Lives of Animals books, published by Casa Editrice AMZ. These first came out during the late 1960s and were written in Italian; they were then translated into English during the 70s. As I said last year, the art in these books is generally pretty fantastic and a joy to look it. However, the artists were, evidently, sometimes asked to paint things that they'd never seen (example: the sexual dimorphism present in Sable antelopes Hippotragus niger).
What also makes the books…
edyong | July 8, 2009It's 1964, and a group of Canadian scientists had sailed across the Pacific to Easter Island in order to study the health of the isolated local population. Working below the gaze of the island's famous statues, they collected a variety of soil samples and other biological material, unaware that one of these would yield an unexpected treasure. It contained a bacterium that secreted a new antibiotic, one that proved to be a potent anti-fungal chemical. The compound was named rapamycin after the traditional name of its island source - Rapa Nui.
Skip forward 35 years and rapamycin has made a…
clock | July 7, 2009There have been 19 new articles Monday night and 11 new articles Tuesday night in PLoS ONE. 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:
Sex Is Always Well Worth Its Two-Fold Cost:
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its positive contribution to Darwinian fitness remains…
clock | July 6, 2009You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…