Life Sciences
clock | December 10, 2008There are 11 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:
Settling Decisions and Heterospecific Social Information Use in Shrikes:
Animals often settle near competitors, a behavior known as social attraction, which belies standard habitat selection theory. Two hypotheses…
clock | December 9, 2008There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today and they are, like, totally awesome!
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:
Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?:
Tool use is rare in wild animals, but of widespread interest because of its relationship to animal cognition, social learning and culture. Despite…
grrlscientist | December 8, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Female Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, sitting on her nest.
Notice her long tongue sticking out of her mouth and the uncommonly bright colors on her gorget.
This bird nested on Bainbridge Island in Washington state earlier this year.
Image: Eva Gerdts, May 2008. [larger view].
Christmas Bird Count News
The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count…
clock | December 7, 2008Food Can Affect A Cell In The Same Way Hormones Do:
VIB researchers connected to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have discovered an important new mechanism with which cells can detect nutrients. This happens in the same way - and with the same effects - as when cells receive a message from a hormone. This finding can teach us more about how food affects our body; and, furthermore, it can form the basis for new candidate targets for medicines.
Climate Change Wiped Out Cave Bears 13 Millennia Earlier Than Thought:
Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of…
grrlscientist | December 7, 2008tags: 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…
gregladen | December 5, 2008Allen's Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann's Rule and Cope's Rule. It is all about body size. Cope's Rule ... which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute ... says that over time the species in a given lineage tend to be larger and larger. Bergmann's Rule says that mammals get larger in colder environments. Allen's Rule has mammals getting rounder in colder climates, by decreasing length of appendages such as limbs, tails and ears.
All three rules seem to be exemplified in human evolution. Modern humans tend to be larger and rounder in cooler…
clock | December 5, 2008For almost 20 years, The Quagga Project has been working on recreating this extinct species of zebra:
The Quagga Project was officially launched in South Africa in 1987,
with Reinhold Rau at its helm. It has the aim of recreating quagga by
selective breeding from plains zebra; ultimately returning quagga to the
wild. What makes this project so innovative and revolutionary is that
this is a simple, selective breeding programme over generations. There
is no genetic manipulation, and no cloning. It's the only project of its
kind in the world.
"The important thing is that we're not creating a new…
tetrapodzoology | December 5, 2008Here's an interesting photo provided by Markus Bühler (of Bestiarium): it shows a bull Asian elephant Elephas maximus at Hagenbeck Zoo, Hamburg.
The picture is neat for a few reasons. For one, it emphasises the agility of elephants: despite their size and 'graviportal' specialisations, they can still do some pretty impressive bending and stooping. They're not bad at climbing slopes, albeit ones much shallower than the zoo trench shown here. Actually, people have reported (and even illustrated) elephants clambering down precipitous slopes. Tennent (1867) showed an Asian elephant clambering…
clock | December 4, 2008There 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:
Ecological Niche of the 2003 West Nile Virus Epidemic in the Northern Great Plains of the United States:
The incidence of West Nile virus (WNv) has remained high in the northern Great Plains compared to the rest of…
clock | December 4, 2008New Giant Toothless Pterosaur Species Discovered:
A researcher at the University of Portsmouth has identified a new species of pterosaur, the largest of its kind to ever be found. It represents an entirely new genus of these flying reptiles that ruled the skies 115 million years ago.
Antioxidants Are Unlikely To Prevent Aging, Study Suggests:
Diets and beauty products which claim to have anti-oxidant properties are unlikely to prevent aging, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust. Researchers at the Institute of Healthy aging at UCL (University College London) say this is because…
tetrapodzoology | December 1, 2008
Another one from the archives. It's one of several articles I wrote in 2006 on obscure tropical rodents, was originally published here, and appears here with new pics and a few new details...
If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-…
edyong | December 1, 2008You are not alone. Even if you're currently reading this in complete isolation, you are still far from a singular individual. You're more of a colony - one human, together with microbes in their trillions. For every one of your own genes, your body is also host to thousands of bacterial ones. Some of the most important of these tenants - the microbiota - live in our gut. Their genes, collectively known as our microbiome, provide us with the ability to break down sources of food, like complex carbohydrates, that we would otherwise find completely indigestible.
Peter Turnbaugh from the…
cwilcox | November 30, 2008Hello everyone! Happy Carnival!
evâoâluâtionâ [ev-uh-loo-shuhn or, especially Brit., ee-vuh-]ânoun1. A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. Most of the time, when we think 'evolution', we think about animals and genetic diversity. Sure, we've heard the term "Chemical Evolution" thrown around a bit, too, but only about events before life began. Well, not everyone uses such a narrow definition of evolution. For example, a group of scientists claim that Rocks Evolve, Too. The international team detailed their theory of…
pharyngula | November 30, 2008The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Creation Museum have made a joint marketing agreement and are selling "combo tickets" to get into both attractions for one price.
The Cincinnati Zoo is promoting an anti-science, anti-education con job run by ignorant creationists.
Unbelievable.
Here's a little bit about the Cincinnati Zoo. I've highlighted a few key words and phrases.
Part of the public school system in Cincinnati since 1975, the Zoo hosts a four-year college prepatory program - Zoo Academy. The Cincinnati Zoo is proud to serve as the leading non-formal science educator in…
grrlscientist | November 30, 2008tags: 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 | November 26, 2008 Clad in hard, armoured shells, turtles have a unique body plan unlike that of any other animal. Their shells have clearly served them well and the basic structure has gone largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But this unchanging nature poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how they evolved and until now, fossil turtles haven't provided any clues. All of them, just like their living descendants, have fully formed two-part shells.
But three stunning new fossils are very different. They belong to the oldest turtle ever discovered, which lived about 220 million years ago…
clock | November 25, 2008Old Flies Can Become Young Moms:
Female flies can turn back the biological clock and extend their lifespan at the same time, University of Southern California biologists report. Their study, published online this month in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, casts doubt on the old notion of a tradeoff between reproduction and longevity.
Flies May Reveal Evolutionary Step To Live Birth:
A species of fruit fly from the Seychelles Islands often lays larvae instead of eggs, UC San Diego biologists have discovered. Clues to how animals switch from laying eggs to live birth may be found in the well-…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
clock | November 24, 2008There are new articles published tonight in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - here are my picks:
A Social Amoeba Discriminates in Favor of Kin:
Though seemingly simple life forms, microorganisms can display surprisingly complex behaviors, such as altruism and cheating, that are more often associated with "higher" organisms. This paradox makes microorganisms--which are more amenable to laboratory investigations than, say, dolphins or elephants--ideal for investigating social evolution. Take the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. When food is…
grrlscientist | November 23, 2008tags: 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…