Life Sciences
edyong | June 21, 2009
There is a reason why there are no dinosaur geneticists - their careers would quickly become as extinct as the 'terrible lizards' themselves. Bones may fossilise, but soft tissues and molecules like DNA do not. Outside of the fictional world of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have left no genetic traces for eager scientists to study.
Nonetheless, that is exactly what Chris Organ and Scott Edwards from Harvard University have managed to do. And it all started with a simple riddle: which came first, the chicken or the genome?
Like almost all birds, a chicken's genome - its full complement of DNA…
tetrapodzoology | June 21, 2009At some stage, I'll have to write full-length articles on lysorophians, aïstopods, the remaining temnospondyls, nectrideans, microsaurs, and assorted other groups of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic non-amniote tetrapods. Alas, this hasn't happened yet. In the meantime, here are some slides from one of my talks...
Lysorophians are peculiar, long-bodied lepospondyls from the Carboniferous and Permian, best known for Brachydectes. They had strongly reduced limbs and limb girdles and elongate skulls, typically with a strongly emarginated cheek region. Trace fossils suggest that some species were…
clock | June 19, 2009
Hunters Are Depleting Lion And Cougar Populations, Study Finds:
Sport hunters are depleting lion and cougar populations as managers respond to demands to control predators that threaten livestock and humans, according to a study published in the June 17 issue of PLoS One. The study was led by Craig Packer, a University of Minnesota professor and authority on lion behavior, who worked with an international team of conservationists.
Mammoths Survived In Britain Until 14,000 Years Ago, New Discovery Suggests:
Research which finally proves that bones found in Shropshire, England provide the most…
clock | June 18, 2009Friday - the day to take a look at all seven PLoS journals and make my own personal picks. 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:
Taking the Lag out of Jet Lag through Model-Based Schedule Design:
Traveling across several times zones can cause an individual to experience "jet lag," which…
razib | June 18, 200920 years ago Jeffrey Schwartz published The Red Ape, making the case that humanity's closest extant relatives within the animal kingdom were orangutans, not chimpanzees. This was contemporaneous with the media hullabaloo around African Eve, so either you could say that Schwartz's timing was perfect, or it was disastrous. Certainly he was swimming against the spirit of the age, and I recall assuming that The Red Ape was a piece of crankery when I first heard about it, its thesis was so outrageous. But historically the idea that humanity descends from Asian apes is less anomalous, and many…
clock | June 17, 2009There are 16 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:
Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs:
Objective: To compare expert assessment with bibliometric indicators as tools to…
pharyngula | June 17, 2009
I was recently sent a strange article for comment…well, not that recently. It's 51 pages long, so I've kind of dragged my heels over it all. I have finally finished it, though, and it is weird.
There is a significant tradition in developmental biology that is currently a bit out of fashion: some names for it are formalism or structuralism. It's the idea that forms arise from the application of simple physical properties to tissues, and that it would be possible to describe an organism in some way by a set of parameters plugged into a mathematical formula. It's an interesting idea, it has a…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2009Today, at R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S., Dr J. posted a picture of a charming looking cat with the following text:
As little as I can do to push back against the sick minded evil mo-fo bastards who think animal testing on cats is ok....from now on I will post occasional photos of cats as a reminder that these animals are infinitely better than the low life scum that would put them in a lab and murder them, or would sit on an animal experiments committee and authorize their use in any such way, or cite papers involving their research or in anyway devalue them...I think you are debasing and damaging…
clock | June 16, 2009There are 20 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:
General Intelligence in Another Primate: Individual Differences across Cognitive Task Performance in a New World Monkey (Saguinus oedipus):
Individual differences in human cognitive abilities show…
edyong | June 15, 2009
In 1979, somewhere in Dartmoor, a butterfly died. That would hardly have been an exceptional event, but this individual was a Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) and it was the last of its kind in the United Kingdom. Over more than a century, the Large Blue's population had been declining and it was finally declared nationally extinct 30 years ago.
Now, it's back. A bold conservation effort managed to work out the factors behind the butterfly's decline, and resurrect this vanished species. The Large Blue's reintroduction has been one of conservation's flagship successes and it was the…
grrlscientist | June 14, 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 | June 13, 2009Hmm, I usually do this on Fridays, but I was busy. So here is a Saturday sampler of papers from all seven PLoS journals published last week. 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.
Melanopsin as a Sleep Modulator: Circadian Gating of the Direct Effects of Light on Sleep and Altered Sleep Homeostasis in Opn4â/â Mice:
Light affects sleep in two ways: indirectly through…
clock | June 13, 2009Female Water Striders Expose Their Genitalia Only After Males 'Sing':
Chang Seok Han and Piotr Jablonski at Seoul National University, Korea have found that by evolving a morphological shield to protect their genitalia from males' forceful copulatory attempts, females of an Asian species of water strider seem to "win" the evolutionary arms race between the sexes. Instead, females only expose their genitalia for copulation after males produce a courtship "song" by tapping the water surface.
African Bird Species Could Struggle To Relocate To Survive Global Warming:
African bird species could…
grrlscientist | June 12, 2009tags: book review, Animals Make Us Human, animal welfare, pets, farm animals, agriculture, Temple Grandin
What do animals need to have a good mental life? This question seems easy to answer until we realize that even though we can provide for an animal's physical welfare, we actually don't know that much about the specifics of an animal's emotional life and what they need to be happy. In this book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009), animal welfare guru Temple Grandin explores what the most commonly kept species of domestic…
pharyngula | June 11, 2009Over the last few days, I've been reading the articles in the latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. This is a fairly new journal with the mission stated in the title, and I have to say that it is very, very good — the articles are almost always easily readable, and they address significant issues in the public understanding of evolution. This particular issue focuses on transitions, and not just on transitional fossils, but all kinds of evidence for change over evolutionary time. It's been commented on by Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, and they're entirely right that these are…
tetrapodzoology | June 10, 2009
In the previous article we looked at the Birds Come First, or BCF, hypothesis. It goes without saying that BCF has not won acceptance in the community, nor - in fact - is it even familiar to the majority of archosaur workers. Here, we take a critical view of BCF: does it stand up, or does it fail?
To begin with, let me note that the underlying premise of BCF is fundamentally problematical: the idea that there is some sort of 'central trunk' (Olshevsky 1994, p. 42) or single, unbroken lineage that extended from the first stem-archosaur to the most recently evolved, modern bird. Old 'family…
clock | June 4, 2009Here are some titles, from all seven PLoS journals, that caught my attention this week. 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:
Defining Global Neuroendocrine Gene Expression Patterns Associated with Reproductive Seasonality in Fish:
Many vertebrates, including the goldfish, exhibit seasonal…
edyong | June 4, 2009 If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood.
But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…
edyong | June 3, 2009The animal world is full of harmless liars, who mimic species more dangerous than themselves in order to avoid the attention of predators. But none do it quite like the dark-footed ant-spider Myrmarachne melanotarsa.
As its name suggests, this small species of jumping spider, discovered just nine years ago, impersonates ants. In itself, that's nothing special - ants are so aggressive that many predators give them a wide berth and lots of species do well by imitating them. The list includes over 100 spiders but among them, M.melanotarsa's impression is unusually strong. It doesn't just mimic…
cortex | June 3, 2009Daniel Engber has a very interesting series of articles over at Slate on Pepper the Dalmation and the use of stolen pets in biomedical research. In 1965, the theft of Pepper from a Pennsylvania farm - she ended up dying in a Bronx lab, sacrificed so that scientists could experiment with cardiac pacemakers - created a media sensation:
The dog-napping of Pepper marked the beginning of the end of canine experimentation. Outrage over her demise, and the theft and killings of other family pets, would soon turn public opinion--and federal law--against the use of dogs in biomedical research.…