Life Sciences
clock | October 22, 2008There are 26 new articles published last night and 12 new articles published today in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Sexual Cannibalism: High Incidence in a Natural Population with Benefits to Females:
Sexual cannibalism may be a form of extreme sexual conflict in which females benefit more from feeding on males than mating with them, and males avoid aggressive, cannibalistic females in order to increase net fitness. A…
bioephemera | October 22, 2008
"Migration"
Doug Aitken
Last year, on a brisk, cool day much like today, I was jogging near the National Zoo when I noticed a good-sized young deer ambling out of the Zoo, toward a busy road only a few carlengths away. Two passersby were frozen on the path; they could clearly foresee the pending disaster, but had no idea what to do about it.
I jogged right up to the buck, yelled at him, and made as if to slap him on the rump. He looked at me dumbfounded, as did the walkers. Then he ambled back into the bushes. Easy enough. But I think the concerned walkers expected the buck to gore me, or…
clock | October 22, 2008Voters In Battleground States More Ambivalent About Presidential Candidates:
Heavy advertising by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates may actually make voters in battleground states more confused about which candidate to vote for, a new study suggests.
Amphibian Diversity Decreases Chances Of Parasitic Disease, Study Shows:
American toads who hang out with gray tree frogs reduce their chances of parasitic infection, limb deformation.
Earth In Midst Of Sixth Mass Extinction: 50% Of All Species Disappearing:
The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both…
edyong | October 22, 2008
Humans are a funny lot. While we seem to be relentless voyeurs, we generally frown on eavesdropping as an invasion of privacy. But in the animal world, eavesdropping can be a matter of life or death. Animals rarely communicate in isolation. Often it pays for one species to monitor the dialogues of others, particularly when predator warnings are involved.
Small animals in particular do well to pay attention to the alarms of other species, as they are often preyed upon by the same larger hunters. Even very unrelated species can listen in and understand each other's signals. Vervet monkeys…
laelaps | October 20, 2008Some days I just want to scream. For years I believed what the textbooks and teachers told me about the history of science, taking in their arguments from authority, but when I started to look into the same events myself I found they were much more complex than I had previously known. I cherish the new knowledge I have gained, but it comes with a price. When someone spews out a bit of textbook cardboard, I cringe as if fingernails were being drawn across a chalkboard.
Today's tidbit was that Charles Darwin could never account for apparently maladaptive characteristics displayed by animals, i.…
tetrapodzoology | October 20, 2008
Within recent years, the Palaearctic tortoise fauna has undergone a radical change. If you're interested in the recognition and discovery of new species, in controversy and argument about the status of species, in neat evolutionary stuff such as resource polymorphism and resource-mediated dwarfism, and, least of all, in tortoises, then you should find this a fascinating area. I shall point out to start with that I'm referring specifically to the testudinid tortoises of the genus Testudo, an Old World taxon most closely related to the Asian tortoises (Indotestudo) and the Pancake tortoise…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2008tags: Tiktaalik rosea, sarcopterygian, fishibian, fishapods, transitional fossil, evolution, vertebrate terrestriality, vertebrate evolution
A new study on the internal anatomy of the skull of the extraordinary fish, Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago, provides more evidence of how vertebrate life transitioned from water to land. The head showed changes from more primitive fish that helped adapt to the new feeding and breathing conditions presented by a terrestrial environment, scientists said.
Image: Ted Daeschler, Academy of Natural Sciences [larger view].
A paper was…
edyong | October 17, 2008
In the Ivory Coast, a small stream called Audrenisrou winds its way through the lowland rainforest of the Tai National Park. On the floodplain of this stream, at a site called Nuolo, lie several stones that seem unassuming at first glance. But to the trained eye, they are a window to the past.
Their shape is different to other stones that have been worn away by natural erosion. They have been flaked in systematic ways and many are flattened and sharp. Clearly, they were shaped by hand for a purpose - they are tools. Their creators were not humans, but close relatives who lived in these…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2008tags: Helsinki Finland, travel, sightseeing
Helsingin Luonnontieteellinen museo (The Helsinki Natural History Museum).
This museum is affiliated with the University of Helsinki
and is located in an old Russian gymnasium.
Image: Wikipedia [larger view].
As the title says, one month from today, I will be on an eight-and-a-half hour flight from NYC to Helsinki, Finland! I will be there for eight days and I am very excited! Even though I am of Finnish ancestry, I know exactly nothing about Finland, so I am asking you, the experts, about what I should plan to see and do while I am there.
So…
clock | October 16, 2008There were 6 new articles published last night and another 14 new articles published today in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Effect of Diet Quality and Wing Morph on Male and Female Reproductive Investment in a Nuptial Feeding Ground Cricket:
A common approach in the study of life-history trade-off evolution is to manipulate the nutrient content of diets during the life of an individual in order observe how the…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2008Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used?
Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2008tags: ethics, endangered species, conservation
Woman with a Parrot by Gustav Courbet (1866)
Oil on canvas
51 x 77 in. (129.5 x 195.6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [larger view].
A little while ago, I received an odd question from a reader, and I was slow in responding (my bad!), but her question has bothered me ever since I first read it and responded. First, her question:
You have to save the world (and I assume you also want to). You are the only one who can do so, and to do so, you have to destroy one or the other:
The Louvre (with everything inside but people)
or
one…
clock | October 14, 2008There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Detection and Molecular Characterization of 9000-Year-Old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean:
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the principal etiologic agent of human tuberculosis. It has no environmental reservoir and is believed to have co-evolved with its host over millennia. This is supported by…
edyong | October 13, 2008
Many animals use poisonous secretions to protect themselves from predators. But poisons are complex chemicals and can take a lot of energy to make. Why invest in them, when you can steal someone else's?
Poison thieves are well-known in the animal kingdom. Many species of brightly coloured poison arrow frogs acquire their poisons from beetles, while some sea slugs make a living by hunting for jellyfish, transporting their stinging cells into their own limbs. Now, another species joins this guild of thieves - the tiger keelback snake, Rhabdophis tigrinis (image right, by Deborah…
clock | October 10, 2008Can Genetic Information Be Controlled By Light?:
DNA, the molecule that acts as the carrier of genetic information in all forms of life, is highly resistant against alteration by ultraviolet light, but understanding the mechanism for its photostability presents some puzzling problems. A key aspect is the interaction between the four chemical bases that make up the DNA molecule. Researchers at Kiel University have succeeded in showing that DNA strands differ in their light sensitivity depending on their base sequences.
Journey Toward The Center Of The Earth: One-of-a-kind Microorganism Lives…
laelaps | October 10, 2008Eight years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, J. Stanley Grimes issued his book Phreno-Geology: The Progressive Creation of Man, Indicated by Natural History, and Confirmed by Discoveries That Connect the Organization and Functions of the Brain With Successive Geological Periods. It seems to have been forgotten, perhaps because the "science" of phrenology fell out of favor, but as we approach the "evolution year" it is profitable to look back on other ideas of evolution that have largely been forgotten. Charles Darwin was not the first to think that organisms evolve, even if…
chaoticutopia | October 8, 2008Some folks say that bison belong here, not the ’burbs. The great herds once covered the plains, shaping the prairie in their nomadic graze. They were a keystone species, holding the ecology of the plains in a state of equilibrium. Native Americans who lived on the plains depended on the bison for survival, using the animals as a primary source of materials and food. Hides were used as clothing and shelter, bones were used as weapons, tools, and farming impliments. It may have been the most healthy lifestyle on earth at the time, at least nutritionally, if height is a judge of health. These…
clock | October 8, 2008There are 8 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Hemispheric Specialization in Dogs for Processing Different Acoustic Stimuli:
Considerable experimental evidence shows that functional cerebral asymmetries are widespread in animals. Activity of the right cerebral hemisphere has been associated with responses to novel stimuli and the expression of intense emotions, such as aggression, escape behaviour and…
bleimanb | October 6, 2008Scientists in England working with an international conservation group have compiled a sample list which will be used much like the Dow Jones Industrial Average to track the overall status of endangered and threatened species in the world.
Andrew and I should never have sunk our life savings into Steller's sea cows!
You may have seen the news today that according to "Red List" released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 1 in 4 species of mammel is on the edge of extinction, due to habitat loss, overhunting, pollution and the effects of global warming. Every known…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Red-crowned Amazon parrot, Amazona viridigenalis, at Elizabeth Street Parrotry, Brownsville, Texas.
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 7 April 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/750s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Birds in Science
Scientists have found a new huge and well-preserved fossil of a goose and duck relative that swam around what is now England 50 million years ago flashing sharp, toothy smiles. The skull, discovered on the Isle of Sheppey off the southeast coast of England in the…