Life Sciences
clock | June 2, 2009There are 23 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 day - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Emergence of Predators in Early Life: There was No Garden of Eden:
Eukaryote cells are suggested to arise somewhere between 0.85~2.7 billion years ago. However, in the present world of unicellular…
oracknows | June 2, 2009Three years ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a fascinating and promising approach to understanding tumor biology. This method involved understanding that tumors are in general made up of a heterogeneous collection of cells. Using this knowledge, it is possible to apply evolutionary principles to cancer, treating a tumor as, in essence, an ecosystem. Indeed, that is exactly what Maley et al did three years ago. They applied evolutionary principles to the precancerous lesion in the distal esophagus known as Barrett's esophagus by examining various measures of population diversity in…
worldsfair | June 1, 2009
Science Scout twitter feed
In botany, a pome (after the Latin name for fruit: pomum) is a type of fruit produced by flowering plants in the subfamily Maloideae of the family Rosaceae.(from wiki)
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Today at the Science Creative Quarterly we have this great story written by Matt McKenna.
For those of you unfamiliar with the SCQ, it's sort of a science web publication whose most mentioned comparison is the McSweeney's website (not a bad thing to be compared to, and to be honest, I quite like the site having the label, "McSweeney's for Sciencegeeks.")
Anyway, the SCQ has actually been…
grrlscientist | May 31, 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 | May 30, 2009The proofs for one of my books arrived the other day, so I have been busy busy busy. This (in part) explains the lack of action here on the blog, and the preponderance of recycled stuff. Sorry about that. In fact, sorry, here's another recycled article from Tet Zoo ver 1. Hopefully I'll have the time to produce some new content over the next week, but don't hold your breath. And sorry about all the dinosaur stuff: I know you much prefer it when I post on frogs, lizards, mice and passerines. Anyway...
As a kid I always got the impression from textbooks that the only tetrapods (and thus only…
clock | May 29, 2009Male Or Female? Coloring Provides Gender Cues:
Our brain is wired to identify gender based on facial cues and coloring, according to a new study published in the Journal of Vision. Psychology Professor Frédéric Gosselin and his Université de Montréal team found the luminescence of the eyebrow and mouth region is vital in rapid gender discrimination.
'Glowing' Transgenic Monkeys Carrying Green Fluorescent Protein Gene Pave Way For New Disease Models:
A transgenic line of monkeys carrying a gene encoding green fluorescent protein fully integrated into their DNA has been created for the…
clock | May 28, 2009Usually on Thursday nights I take a look at all seven PLoS journals to see what strikes my fancy. 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:
Africa's 32 Cents Solution for HIV/AIDS:
By preventing urogenital schistosomiasis in sexually active females through simple and low-cost methods, we have…
laelaps | May 28, 2009
Saartje Baartman, drawn from a wax cast made in Paris. From The Human Race.
On December 31, 1816 Saartje Baartman died in Paris. She had been ill for three days, perhaps stricken with smallpox, before she and her unborn child expired. Better known as the "Hottentot Venus", Baartman was a tragic celebrity in Europe. She was a dark-skinned member of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa*, and she had buttocks so large that they mesmerized Europeans. Despite her intelligence and talent with languages she was treated as a sideshow attraction, considered to be the antithesis of the European…
razib | May 26, 2009On this week's Science Saturday John Horgan interviews Richard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I've heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they're all brought together. Humans are a large animal with a very small gut, so we need to maximize the bang-for-the buck when it comes to what we eat. Unlike gorillas and to a lesser extent chimpanzees we just aren't able to process enough low quality vegetable matter to keep ourselves going. Part of this…
tetrapodzoology | May 26, 2009No time to produce anything new, so here's another recycled book review...
While the Mesozoic strata of Patagonia are particularly well known for their diverse and often spectacular dinosaurs, they have also yielded a phenomenally rich record of other Mesozoic reptiles, including turtles, squamates, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, crocodilians and pterosaurs. In this multi-authored volume (another contribution to Indiana University Press's Life of the Past series), Gasparini, Salgado and Coria have edited a collection of 14 papers on the region's Mesozoic reptiles, and on their geological context…
clock | May 25, 2009Primate Eye Evolution: Small Evolutionary Shifts Make Big Impacts -- Like Developing Night Vision:
In the developing fetus, cell growth follows a very specific schedule. In the eye's retina, for example, cones -- which help distinguish color during the day -- develop before the more light-sensitive rods -- which are needed for night vision. But minor differences in the timing of cell proliferation can explain the large differences found in the eyes of two species -- owl monkeys and capuchin monkeys -- that evolved from a common ancestor.
Thieving Whale Caught On Video Gives Rare Clues About…
grrlscientist | May 24, 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…
grrlscientist | May 21, 2009tags: book review, Why Evolution is True, evolution, creationism, religion, scientific method, Jerry Coyne
Considering the plethora of books about evolution out there, is it really necessary to publish yet another one? What can another book about evolution have to offer that previous books have not provided? This new book not only presents the latest information about evolution to come to light, but it also responds to the most recent attacks made upon this branch of scientific knowledge. The book, Why Evolution is True (NYC: Viking; 2009) by Jerry Coyne, is the most up-to-date and one of the…
gregladen | May 20, 2009You probably know that there is a new primate fossil, nicknamed "Ida," and that there is quite a buzz about it.
Darwinius masillae, aka Ida
Ida comes from fossil deposits in Germany, and was originally excavated in two different parts by private collectors, and only recently rejoined and recognized for the amazing fossil it is. This is considered to be a new genus, and is named Darwinius masillae
...holotype skeleton in right lateral view...
Ida is a 47 million year old adapid primate of outstanding, unprecedented state of preservation that seems to have some very interesting and…
tetrapodzoology | May 20, 2009
Few dinosaurs are as well studied as the Upper Cretaceous tyrannosaurid theropod Tyrannosaurus rex. It might be easy to assume that this intense focus has been driven by the fame and glory associated with working on this dinosaur. That might be partly true but, in fact, T. rex really is one of the best known dinosaurs, represented by multiple individuals that are often near-complete and well preserved. It has also - in the form of bite marks, coprolites and soft tissue traces (or alleged soft tissue traces) - left us more evidence of its behaviour than many other Mesozoic dinosaurs. T. rex…
clock | May 19, 2009There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today and there were 21 yesterday. 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, 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:
Predicting Visibility of Aircraft:
Visual detection of aircraft by human observers is an important element of aviation safety. To assess and ensure safety, it would be useful to be able to…
pharyngula | May 19, 2009This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She's a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.
What's so cool about it?
Age. It's 47 million years old. That's interestingly old…it puts us deep into the primate family tree.
Preservation. This is an awesome fossil: it's almost perfectly complete, with all the bones in place, preserved in its death posture. There is a halo of darkly stained material around it; this is a remnant of…
awild | May 19, 2009
The summer insect season is upon us here in temperate North America, and with it comes the need for good identification guides.
Before I begin, a cautionary note. We have so many species on our continent that were we to create a bird-type guide that listed all the insects, with their ranges and identifying characteristics, the full set would span at least 30 volumes.  Any book small enough to carry into the field necessarily omits more than 95% of the relevant animals. Insect guides are understandably neurotic and overwhelmed compared to the corresponding bird and plant guides, and it…
esiegel | May 19, 2009One of the greatest challenges in all of evolutionary science is to figure out which species evolved into which over time. From our perspective, we would love to know how humans came to be, who our ancestors were, and what simpler animals gave rise to us.
Well, we don't know this right now. We know a good portion of the fossil records, but -- like anything that relies on fossils -- there are gaps, referred to colloquially as missing links. One of the fun things to track is cranial capacity over time, and we find that Homo Sapiens' huge brains are recent developments.
And, as you can also…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2009The wonderful Project Gutenberg has just released a fully HTMLised version of R. C. Punnett's (he of the famous "square") 1911 book Mendelism, which shows how quickly the implications of Mendelian genetics, rediscovered 11 years earlier, were worked through. It's a wonderful read, and anyone with a slight knowledge of biology and the interest to work through the examples can understand it, something one cannot say of texts on science for very much longer after this. I was particularly interested in the following passage, from page 150:
One last question with regard to evolution. How far does…