Life Sciences
cwilcox | April 13, 2009The frozen tundra that covers a majority of Russia and northern Asia is a hard place to live. The average winter temperature is 30 below zero, and winter seems to last a lifetime. The short summer, which still gets only glancing rays of sun, barely breaks above freezing. It's so cold year round that part of the ground never defrosts. Without the flowing groundwater and rich sunlight of more southern climates, the tundra cannot support trees. That's its defining trait, really - "tundra" comes from the Finnish word tunturi, meaning treeless plain.
The dominant plant life, thus, are the grasses…
grrlscientist | April 13, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
The only egg known to be collected by Charles Darwin, recently rediscovered.
Image: University of Cambridge.
Birds and American Law
The American Federation of Aviculture Inc. (AFA), the Avicultural Society of America (ASA) and the National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA) issued an action alert together that opposes H.R. 669, a bill banning most nonnative animals in the United States. "H.R. 669 is an 'anti-animal bill'. There is no amendment that can fix this bill," states the action alert. H.R. 669 is a bill that…
edyong | April 12, 2009
Sponges are among the most primitive of all animals. They are immobile, and live by filtering detritus from the water. They have no brains or, for that matter, any neurons, organs or even tissues. If you were looking for the evolutionary origins of animal intelligence, you couldn't really pick a less likely subject to study.
So it was with great surprise that Onur Sakarya from the University of California, Santa Barbara found that sponges carry the beginnings of a nervous system.
With no neurons to speak of, these animals still have the genetic components of synapses, one of the most…
clock | April 10, 2009I love getting alumni letters from NCSU - I get reminded over and over again how cool research gets done there all the time. In this issue, for instance:
NC State Study Finds Genes Important to Sleep:
For many animals, sleep is a risk: foraging for food, mingling with mates and guarding against predators just aren't possible while snoozing. How, then, has this seemingly life-threatening behavior remained constant among various species of animals?
A new study by scientists at North Carolina State University shows that the fruit fly is genetically wired to sleep, although the sleep comes in…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2009Older histories of biology are often full of useful and interesting facts. One of my all-time favourites is Eric Nordenskiöld's history, but I came across an earlier one by Louis Compton Miall in which I found this text:
Bonnet in 1745 traced the scale of nature in fuller detail than had been attempted before. He made Hydra a link between plants and animals, the snails and slugs a link between mollusca and serpents, flying fishes a link between ordinary fishes and land vertebrates, the ostrich, bat, and flying fox links between birds and mammals. Man, endowed with reason, occupies the highest…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2009tags: lories, Loriinae, Loriidae, ornithology, molecular biology, natural history museums
A young pair of Meyer's Lories (Lorikeets), Trichoglossus flavoviridis meyeri.
Image: Iggino [larger view].
"Can you help us identify a mystery lory in our collection?"
I was pleasantly surprised to find this email request from Donna Dittmann, Collections Manager and Museum Preparator for the Section of Genetic Resources at Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"Sure," I wrote back. "Send it to me and I'll see what I can do."
I, and some of my lories,…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it's safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of…
drorzel | April 7, 2009
Brigham Young U.'s Student Newspaper Is Pulled After Embarrassing Typo - Chronicle.com
"The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saintsâ General Conference, and it referred to the groupâs âQuorum of Twelve Apostatesâ rather than âApostles.â
Rich Evans, editorial manager of The Daily Universe, the student paper, told the Tribune it was âthe worst possible mistake.â BYU is owned and run by the church, as the Mormon Church is formally known.
The error was an accident: A student had misspelled the word âapostle,â and the articleâs editor chose…
clock | April 7, 2009Lifeless Cells Ensure Sharp Vision:
Seemingly dead cells perform a surprising task in the lens of a fish eye. Every morning and evening they change the lens's capacity to refract light in order to enhance color perception during the day and night vision when it's dark. This is shown in new research from Lund University in Sweden.
Lice Genomes Uniquely Fragmented: How Did It Evolve?:
Parents and school nurses take note. Lice are a familiar nuisance around the world and vectors of serious diseases, such as epidemic typhus, in developing regions. New research indicates that lice may actually…
clock | April 6, 2009It's Monday night, so let's see what just got published in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases:
Cryptochrome Mediates Light-Dependent Magnetosensitivity of Drosophila's Circadian Clock:
Magnetic fields influence endogenous clocks controlling the sleep-wake cycle of animals, but the underyling mechanisms are unclear. Birds that can do magnetic compass orientation also depend on light, and the blue-light photopigment cryptochrome was proposed to act as a navigational magnetosensor. Here we tested the role of cryptochrome as a light-dependent magnetosensor…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since Tangled Bank has gone the way of the Dodo (Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker -- insert the name of your favorite extinct species here) and will probably never be seen again, despite promises to the contrary, there is a huge hole in the science writing blogosphere. A hole…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
In a dramatic discovery, BirdLife has filmed Common Cuckoos calling with a "Ooo-Cuck, Ooo-Cuck". (April fools?)
Image: Greg & Yvonne Dean/WorldWildlifeImages.com.
Birds in Science and Technology
Count your chickens after they hatch, and they may do a little arithmetic themselves. Chicks only 3 or 4 days old manage an animal version of adding and subtracting, says Rosa Rugani of the University of Trento Center for Mind/Brain Sciences in Rovereto, Italy. Inspired by experiments with human babies, Rugani and her…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2009tags: Circus of the Spineless, invertebrates, insects, arachnids, plants, algae, blog carnival
Welcome to Circus of the Spineless! This is the migratory blog carnival that specializes in all things spineless, and the contributions that you'll find here range from essays and photoessays, to photographs with some accompanying explanatory text and even a few videos. This blog carnival has seen some scary times in its recent past where it almost went extinct, but thanks to some friends of mine who are much more expert in spineless things, it was revived after I made a bunch of noise about…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2009tags: Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula, body language, behavior, peer-reviewed paper
Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula.
This is the smallest species of corvid (crows and ravens).
Image: Wikipedia [larger view].
Those of you who go birding will know what I am talking about when I say that birds are so capable of reading human body language that they know when we are looking at them, which frequently causes them to hide from our gaze. However, this capacity has never before been scientifically studied in birds, until now, that is.
A newly published paper studied handraised, tame…
clock | April 4, 2009
No Sponge In Human Family Tree: Sponges Descended From Unique Ancestor:
Since the days of Charles Darwin, researchers are interested in reconstructing the "Tree of Life", and in understanding the development of animal and plant species during their evolutionary history. In the case of vertebrates, this research has already come quite a long way. But there is still much debate about the relationships between the animal groups that made their apparation very early in evolutionary history, probably in the late Precambrian, some 650 to 540 million years ago.
Beverage Consumption A Bigger Factor…
gregladen | March 31, 2009
Aprile Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penguins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. "I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking," says Pazzo. "When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I'd ever seen them move."
Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one penguin that hadn't fled. "It was sinking…
clock | March 31, 2009You really need to go to a PLoS ONE paper and take a look - we have done some nifty home remodeling ;-)
What is really new and important is that there are all sorts of article-level metrics on each paper. The same goes for all the other TOPAZ-based PLoS journals (i.e., all but PLoS Biology - you may have noticed that PLoS Medicine has migrated onto TOPAZ as well).
Mark Patterson explains what and why. Pete Binfield gives you a new house tour. And Richard Cave gives the information for those interested in the technical side of the changes.
Please take a look and give us feedback at any of…
tetrapodzoology | March 31, 2009
I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that 'dinosaurs' had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.
For some reason, the study of dinosaurs attracts people with strong 'fringe' beliefs: this must be a by-product of popularity, as you don't get this with temnospondyls, fossil ostriches, Eocene primates, corals or sea jellies (at least…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2009A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles' "random monster" theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.
Publishing in the Journal of Evolutionary Diversions, the major journal in the field, Professor Augustus P. Rillful and his colleagues of the paragenetics laboratory at the University of Münchhausen in Germany have shown…
clock | March 30, 2009You know I have been following the "death of newspapers" debate, as well as "bloggers vs. journalists" debate, and "do we need science reporters" debate for a long time now. What I have found - and it is frustrating to watch - is that different people use different definitions for the same set of words and phrases. "News", "reporting", "media", "press", "journalism", "Web", "Internet", "blog", "citizen journalist", "newspapers", "communication", etc. are defined differently by different people. Usually they do not explicitly define the terms, but it is possible to grasp their definition from…