Life Sciences
laelaps | March 30, 2009
The "reincarnated" Cohoes Mastodon. You can see him today at the Cohoes Public Library. (From Natural History)
For decades we have been hearing of the designs of some ambitious scientists to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. I first heard of such plans in the 1980's when I was a young child but they continue to pop up every now and again. Perhaps we could make a mammoth-like creature through the selective breeding of living elephants or a little developmental engineering, but I doubt that a true Mammuthus primigenius will ever exist again. They are long gone.
It may be that what makes…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
American Avocet chick, Recurvirostra americana.
Image: Richard Ditch, 2007 [larger view].
Birds in Science and Technology
Researchers have discovered the first direct evidence that exposure to stress in young birds affects the way they react to stress when adult. Exposure to stressful events soon after birth has significant effects on a range of physiological and behavioral responses later in life. Previous work in mammals has been unable to work out whether this is due to raised stress hormone levels produced by…
tetrapodzoology | March 29, 2009
Every now and again a carcass of a large marine animal washes up on a beach somewhere: local people and journalists identify it as a monster, and all hell breaks loose. Inevitably, the carcass turns out to be a decomposing whale or shark. Typically, it now becomes known that a person who arrived at the scene early on stated exactly this, but, because their conclusion was rather boring, it was ignored - or mentioned only in the very last paragraph of a newspaper article. We've looked at this sort of thing before, many times, on Tet Zoo: see the links below.
Last year cryptozoological…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
edyong | March 28, 2009
Animals have distinct personalities and temperaments, but why would evolution favour these over more flexible and adaptible mindsets? New game theory models show that animal personalities are a natural progression from the choices they make over how to live and reproduce.
Any pet owner, wildlife photographer or zookeeper will tell you that animals have distinct personalities. Some are aggressive, others are docile; some are bold, others are timid.
In some circles, ascribing personalities to animals is still a cardinal sin of biology and warrants being branded with a scarlet A (for…
tetrapodzoology | March 27, 2009Yesterday's brief look at brontotheres was such a rip-roaring success I thought I'd do a little bit more on them (on members of Brontotheriidae that is, not on rip-roaring successes). No time for a proper article: all I've done here is to take screen-shots of various powerpoint slides (from a perissodactyl lecture I give), and throw in a few words where appropriate.
To begin with, we mostly know of brontotheres thanks to the gigantic, Late Eocene North American taxon Megacerops Leidy, 1870, now thought to include both Brontotherium Marsh, 1873 and Brontops Marsh, 1887 (the slides shown here…
cwilcox | March 27, 2009Males—now this might shock you—generally spend a lot of time and effort trying to convince females they're worth sleeping with. Whether it means building an ornate bower, shaking their tail feathers, or buying the biggest diamond ring, men put a lot of work into getting laid. And why do they go to such ridiculous and even dangerous lengths? Well, because we females demand it.
Sexual selection is a process first coined by Darwin explaining how mate choice could drive evolutionary changes. Females pick guys that they think have the best package—of DNA, that is. The gals pick guys whose genes…
grrlscientist | March 25, 2009tags: new species, Papua New Guinea, Zoology, Biodiversity
A large brilliant green tree frog, Nyctimystes species, with enormous eyes, was discovered by scientists next to a clear-running mountain river.
Image: Steve Richards/Conservation International.
A brilliant green tree tree frog with giant black eyes, tentatively classified as a Nyctimystes species, is one of 56 new species of animals discovered during a 2008 expedition to the remote island of Papua New Guinea.
This species of frog is specially adapted to its habitat of rushing freshwater rivers: females lay their eggs underneath…
edyong | March 24, 2009Be it in sports or comedy, they say that timing is everything. In evolution, it's no different. Many of the innovations that have separated us from other apes may have arisen not through creating new genetic material, but by subtly shifting how the existing lot is used.
Take our brains, for example. In the brains of humans, chimps and many other mammals, the genes that are switched on in the brain change dramatically in the first few years of life. But Mehmet Somel from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found that a small but select squad of genes, involved in the…
clock | March 24, 2009Groups Share Information In Workplace, But Not The 'Right' Information:
From the operating room to the executive board room, the benefits of working in teams have long been touted. But a new analysis of 22 years of applied psychological research shows that teams tend to discuss information they already know and that "talkier" teams are less effective.
Racial Biases Fade Away Toward Members Of Your Own Group:
White people don't show hints of unconscious bias against blacks who belong to the same group as them, a new study suggests. But this lack of bias only applied to black people in their…
tetrapodzoology | March 24, 2009
Last weekend I did the beach clean-up thing again, and again I went along with my son, my mum (Sandra), and about 40 other people. There's always something new to say about the problem of litter and plastic pollution: once again, I thought I'd pen some random musings on the experience, and on the problem of litter and pollution in general.
There's every reason to be depressed about the fact that, thanks to our species, many environments and ecosystems are royally screwed, but there's hope in the fact that more and more people are at least aware of the situation, and more and more are acting…
neurophilosophy | March 24, 2009Optogenetics is a newly developed technique based on a group of light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which were isolated recently from various species of micro-organism. Although relatively new, this technique has already proven to be extremely powerful, because channelrhodopsins can be targeted to specific cells, so that their activity can be controlled by light, on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale.
A group of researchers from Stanford University now report a new addition to the optogenetic toolkit, and demonstrate that it can be used to precisely control biochemical…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Recent surveys in Myanmar and Vietnam are adding to our knowledge of the non-breeding distribution of Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus.
Image: Zheng Jianping/RareBirdsYearbook.
Birds in Science and Technology
According to the most comprehensive report ever published in the USA, nearly one third of America's 800 native bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, thanks to habitat loss, pollution, climate change, competition from invasive species and other threats. The shocking…
grrlscientist | March 22, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2009tags: The State of the Birds 2009, ornithology, birds, endangered species, conservation, global warming, climate change, environment, invasive species, habitat loss
Streaming video [6:31]
According to the most comprehensive report ever published in the USA, nearly one third of America's 800 native bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, thanks to habitat loss, pollution, climate change, competition from invasive species and other threats.
The shocking report, published by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, reveals that of the more than 800 bird species that…
tetrapodzoology | March 20, 2009
Before I start: TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG.
Ok, moving on...
It is the contention of some that the field of Mesozoic reptile research is plagued with bizarre, nonsensical hypotheses. You may or may not agree with me that skim-feeding giant pterosaurs, wind-surfing sail-crested pterosaurs, dedicated-to-scavenging Tyrannosaurus, and crampon-using dromaeosaurs are all, shall we say, unlikely. In some cases the science has been done to smack these ideas down, in other cases it has not. In my opinion, one of the most illogical hypotheses entertained within recent…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2009Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is often criticised for his racial classification and supposed racism, but in this work, published in 1775, he not only argues for the unity of the human species, but in other passages for their general equality of intelligence, contrary to the use his ideas were later put to.
And now we must come more closely to the principal argument of our dissertation, which is concerned with this question; Are men, and have the men of all times and of every race been of one and the same, or clearly of more than one species? A question much discussed in these days, but so far…
clock | March 19, 2009Missing Piece Of Plant Clock Found:
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified a key protein that links the morning and evening components of the daily biological clock of plants. Their discovery, detailed in the March 13 issue of Science, solves a longstanding puzzle about the underlying biochemical mechanisms that control plant clocks and could provide a new way to increase the growth and yield of agricultural crops.
Long, Sexy Tails Not A Drag On Male Birds:
The long tails sported by many male birds in the tropics look like they're a drag to carry around and a…
laelaps | March 18, 2009
A very unusual reconstruction of Dimetrodon from the textbook Geology, based on a reconstruction by E.C. Case. Dimetrodon and other sail-backed creatures were once considered to have become too "spiny" to survive.
According to the old, if inaccurate, aphorism ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or the development of an individual organism replays its evolutionary history. This idea was seen in the work of various scholars, from Ernst Haeckel to Sigmund Freud, but at the turn of the 20th century some paleontologists thought it could hold true stated the other way. Might the evolution of a…
clock | March 18, 2009Mini Dinosaurs Prowled North America:
Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America's ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago.
Where Does Consciousness Come From?:
Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind. Yet basic questions about the precise…