Life Sciences
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009tags: African Diaries: Sketches and Observations, nature, wildlife, field research, Africa, David G. Derrick, book review
I love art, birds and travel, and because Africa has such a huge variety of exotic wildlife that I've only ever seen in zoos and aviaries, it is high on my list of places to visit. Recently, David G. Derrick, Jr., the author of a new book that combines art and African wildlife into an unusual diary format, asked if I would like to read and review his new book, African Diaries: Sketches & Observations (self-published, 2008).
This slim paperback is an unusual travel…
gregladen | February 27, 2009 This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party is hard to understand in this way: How can a party that is trying to become more rather than less relevant keep putting Michele Bachmann on the podium in places like the National Party Convention and, most recently, at CEPAC??!?!?!?
I can't explain any of this, but I can at least redescribe the…
edyong | February 25, 2009Imagine that a massive hole appeared in a wall of your house, and you'd decided to fix it yourself. You head over to a DIY store and load up on plaster, tools and paint and look forward to many hard and tedious hours of work. If that seems like a chore, you might get some perspective by considering the plight of the gall aphid Nipponaphis monzeni. When holes appear in their homes, some unlucky individuals are tasked with repairing the damage using their own bodily fluids. They sacrifice themselves for the sake of some DIY.
Some species of aphids are heading towards the incredibly cooperative…
clock | February 25, 2009Bizarre Bird Behavior Predicted By Game Theory:
A team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, has used game theory to explain the bizarre behaviour of a group of ravens. Juvenile birds from a roost in North Wales have been observed adopting the unusual strategy of foraging for food in 'gangs'. New research explains how this curious behaviour can be predicted by adapting models more commonly used by economists to analyse financial trends.
Widespread Stress Found Among Veterinarians:
Veterinarians frequently suffer psychosocial stress and demoralization associated with heavy workloads…
clock | February 24, 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, 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:
Rich Pickings Near Large Communal Roosts Favor 'Gang' Foraging by Juvenile Common Ravens, Corvus corax:
Ravens (Corvus corax) feed primarily on rich but ephemeral carcasses of large animals, which are usually…
tetrapodzoology | February 23, 2009
Dave Hone (of Archosaur Musings and Ask A Biologist) kindly provided the photo you see here of two captive West African gaboon vipers Bitis rhinoceros (NOT East African gaboon vipers B. gabonica: see comments), and initially I was going to use it in a 'picture of the day' post. One thing led to another and what you're reading is the result. Gaboon vipers, the largest of the African viperids, are among the best known members of the genus Bitis (in which there are about 11 species). Like several other species in the genus, they're stocky, broad-headed snakes of forest floors, but other species…
laelaps | February 23, 2009
Moropus, a chalicothere. From The Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History.
Suppose for a moment that you are walking across a dry, wind-swept landscape known to be rich in fossils. During your perambulations you notice a large fossilized claw sitting on the surface; what sort of animal could it be from? There is a lot you would have to know about the area, like how old the rock in that spot was, but it would seem reasonable that the claw belonged to a large predator.
Nature, of course, is not so straightforward. Panda bears have teeth and claws that reveal their carnivoran…
clock | February 23, 2009How Fat or Fit Were Dinosaurs? Scientists Use Laser Imaging:
Karl Bates and his colleagues in the palaeontology and biomechanics research group have reconstructed the bodies of five dinosaurs, two T. rex (Stan at the Manchester Museum and the Museum of the Rockies cast MOR555), an Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, a Strutiomimum sedens and an Edmontosaurus annectens. The team found that the smaller Museum of the Rockies T. rex could have weighed anywhere between 5.5 and 7 tonnes, while the larger specimen (Stan) might have weighed as much as 8 tonnes.
Genes Important To Sleep Discovered:
For many…
tetrapodzoology | February 22, 2009
More stuff from the archives... or, from Tet Zoo ver 1 anyway. The following article is about the bizarre jerboa Euchoreutes naso. Back when I wrote the article (2006), there were no photos of this species available, and I had to resort to using a single painting. However, a glut of good photos are now available, as explained below. Incidentally, do not ever google the term 'Asian wild life'.
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It's funny how things work out. Today I am obsessed with rodents. Why? Most of my day was spent clearing out an old loft, and while rummaging through…
laelaps | February 19, 2009
The "Navel of the earth." From Paradise Found.
In 1885 the theologian William F. Warren, then president of Boston University, could no longer keep silent. Society was turning away from "old time religion" in favor of an ever-expanding naturalism that made(in Warren's view) the world a colder, darker place. The removal of the supernatural from science threatened all Warren held dear;
For many years the public mind has been schooled in a narrow naturalism, which has in its world-view as little room for the extraordinary as it has for the supernatural. Decade after decade the representatives…
clock | February 18, 2009There are 12 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, 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:
Estimating Mass Properties of Dinosaurs Using Laser Imaging and 3D Computer Modelling:
Body mass reconstructions of extinct vertebrates are most robust when complete to near-complete skeletons allow the…
clock | February 18, 2009Air-filled Bones Extended Lung Capacity And Helped Prehistoric Reptiles Take First Flight:
In the Mesozoic Era, 70 million years before birds first conquered the skies, pterosaurs dominated the air with sparrow- to Cessna-sized wingspans. Researchers suspected that these extinct reptiles sustained flight through flapping, based on fossil evidence from the wings, but had little understanding of how pterosaurs met the energetic demands of active flight.
In Flurry Of Studies, Researcher Details Role Of Apples In Inhibiting Breast Cancer:
Six studies published in the past year by a Cornell…
laelaps | February 17, 2009Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like sabercats and mammoths) had lived alongside one another in ancient Europe. This may not seem like a particularly controversial point now (who today could imagine "cave men" without mammoths and woolly rhinoceros plodding about the landscape?) but during the first half of the 19th century it was…
clock | February 17, 2009Rote Memorization Of Historical Facts Adds To Collective Cluelessness:
As fans of talk-show host Jay Leno's man-on-the-street interviews know, Americans suffer from a national epidemic of historical and civic ignorance. But just because most Americans know more about "American Idol" than they do about American government doesn't necessarily mean it's entirely their fault. Americans' historical apathy is also an indictment of the way history is taught in grades K-12, according to a University of Illinois professor who studies and teaches historical instruction.
Baboons And Pigeons Are Capable…
bleimanb | February 16, 2009The Census of Marine Life has just released a study of the ocean creatures living in the Arctic and the Antarctic with a startling revelation: 235 identical species thrive in the waters around the North and South Poles, despite the distance 11,000 kilometers between them.
The nemertean pelogonemertes rollestoni and its oddly shaped see-through stomach
While some of the animals migrate to the different areas from warmer seas (whales, birds, etc.) there are some creatures that are too small to migrate and thus are evidently identical species who are born and die in their separate poles.…
laelaps | February 16, 2009
An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
sheril | February 16, 2009All the tropics folks have a habit of going on and on about species diversity, but it turns out the poles aren't as desolate as many expected. The Census of Marine Life has just released a report documenting about 7,500 species in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the Arctic including several hundred critters possibly new to science.
Stories circulating the media call the tally 'astonishing', but I'm honestly not surprised given how little we know about these regions. The most interesting revelation... Despite the 8,000 miles between them, at least 235 species live in both polar seas. Pretty…
gregladen | February 13, 2009Genesis 2 ends with Adam and Eve being naked yet not ashamed. In Genesis 3, the Serpent, who is wiser than average, tricks Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit of one of god's two magic trees. This results in Adam and Eve recognizing their own nakedness, and compelling them to produce the first clothing. The word "naked" in the original Hebrew is either eromim or arumim. The former means naked (no clothes) and the latter means exposure as in exposing lies. The original Hebrew for the "clothing" that they put together, "chagowr" probably means "belt." The parallel (and probably…
ddobbs | February 12, 2009Despite the rain on my window, it's a fine day indeed, with many wonderful celebrations of Darwin's 200th ringing throughout the blogoshere.
Most of these, naturally, focus on Darwin's theory of evolution and its many implications and reverberations. I much admire that theory. But what I find most fascinating about Darwin is not his theory of evolution but his method of empiricism. For as vital as was Darwin's theory of evolution was, his impact on how we view ourselves is rivaled by his impact on how we view and do science.
This and many other perverse oddities struck me when I was…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question:
How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems,…