Life Sciences
grrlscientist | October 2, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
One of the highest poverty areas in America is in Washington DC, our nation's capital. That's just disgusting. But we do not need to let the kids who live there succumb to the rampant despair of broken dreams, poor health and poverty. This proposal seeks to give these kids wings by teaching them about birds. Birds are a magical gateway into biological sciences; drawing kids into learning about the wonders of evolution and behavioral ecology and conservation. I know…
razib | October 1, 2008During a conversation with Nick Matzke he asserted that Creationists weren't less intelligent necessarily. I contended that they were less intelligent. I based on this on snooping through the GSS when I was posting about the association between lower educational attainment and intelligence and religious fundamentalist & Biblical literalism. There are several variables in the GSS which ask respondents about their views on evolution, and the more intelligent and educated a person is the more likely they are to accept evolution. But this prompts a question: is this association simply due…
grrlscientist | September 29, 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
edyong | September 28, 2008
You are on a date and by all accounts, it's going well. Midway through dinner, you excuse yourself and head to the bathroom where, to your chagrin, the mirror reveals that you have a streak of sauce on the side of your face. Embarrassed, you wipe it away and rejoin your date.
It's a fairly innocuous scene but it requires an ability that only the most intelligent of animals possess - self-awareness. It's the understanding that you exist as an individual, separate from others. Having it is a vital step to understanding that others are similarly aware and have their own thoughts and…
clock | September 25, 2008Bats Pick Up Rustling Sounds Against Highway Background Noise:
When bats go hunting by listening for faint rustling sounds made by their quarry on a quiet night they don't have any problems. But what happens when a bat goes foraging next to a noisy highway? Can they still hear the faint sounds?
America's Smallest Dinosaur Uncovered:
An unusual breed of dinosaur that was the size of a chicken, ran on two legs and scoured the ancient forest floor for termites is the smallest dinosaur species found in North America, according to a University of Calgary researcher who analyzed bones found during…
grrlscientist | September 25, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Seychelles magpie-robin, Copsychus sechellarum, behavioral ecology, conservation biology, endangered species, population dynamics, ornithology, birds
Seychelles magpie-robin, Copsychus sechellarum.
Image: Tony Randell (Wikipedia) [larger view].
Every once in awhile, I read a paper that surprises me. Today, I read one of those papers, and it surprised me because it analyzes a phenomenon that is so obvious that I wonder why no one ever thought of studying it in a systematic and rigorous way before. I am referring to a paper that was just published by a team of…
tetrapodzoology | September 25, 2008
If you know anything about the literature on marine cryptids - or sea monsters, or sea serpents, or whatever - you will know of the Long-necked seal, a hypothetical mega-pinniped proposed by Bernard Heuvelmans (1968) as the explanation for sightings of giant long-necked sea (and lake) monsters. Based on a number of apparently reliable eyewitness reports, Heuvelmans suggested that this new species, which he dubbed Megalotaria longicollis, was a highly specialised otariid (Otariidae is the group that includes sea lions and fur seals). Giant compared to its relatives (4.5-19 m long), with an…
laelaps | September 24, 2008
During his 1876 tour of the United States, the famed anatomist and popularizer of science Thomas Henry Huxley stopped to see the American paleontologist O.C. Marsh at Yale. Marsh provided his esteemed guest with access to his ever-growing stores in the Peabody Museum, showing Huxley toothed Cretaceous birds and an array of fossil horses that convinced Huxley that the horse was a creature that had evolved in the New World, not the Old. Indeed, Marsh had collected an impressive array of fossil horses, from tiny forms with many toes to the familiar one-toed Equus. Given the transitions that…
edyong | September 23, 2008Imagine that you have been given responsibility over a tract of land. Your goal is to maintain its precious biodiversity (increasing it if at all possible), prevent the local habitats from becoming degraded and among all that, find a way to eke out a way of life. Of the many possible ways of doing this, regularly and deliberately setting fire to the local plants might be low on the list. But that's exactly what Aborigine populations in Australia have been doing for centuries and a new study shows that this counter-intuitive strategy does indeed work.
A team of American anthropologists led by…
sa smith | September 22, 2008Okay, so there are like 20,000 polar bears left.
4,000 tigers.
1,600 Pandas.
Meh, who cares, right? I mean, there are still some. 1,600 plus the ones in zoos. 'Endangered' animals are fine! Yeah... No. Minor problem with decreasing population numbers: Its more than just the numbers. Its genetic diversity within those numbers. If those 1,600 pandas are all we have left, and those 1,600 pandas are genetically similar, they are in big trouble.
Easy example? Tasmanian Devils. While there are still 20,000-50,000 Tasmanian Devils left, they are being slaughtered by an infectious tumor. An…
clock | September 19, 2008Political Views Affect Firms' Corporate Social Responsibility, Study Finds:
A new study in The Financial Review establishes a relationship between political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating tend to be located in Democratic states, while companies with a low CSR rating tend to be located in Republican states.
Finger Lengths Linked To Voluntary Exercise:
If you find yourself lacking in motivation to go for a run or hit the gym, you may want to check your fingers. According to a joint University of…
clock | September 16, 2008There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today and all nine are amazing and quite bloggable (hint, hint).
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 Fastest Flights in Nature: High-Speed Spore Discharge Mechanisms among Fungi:
A variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi. Those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include "squirt guns" that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota.…
clock | September 16, 2008 Before the days of Times Select, David Brooks used to provoke long rants twice a week. This post from October 24, 2004 is one of those.
David Brooks is so predictable. Every week or so, he comes up with a new scheme to explain the polarization of America. Each time he uses what seems to be different criteria, but are really just different terms. The funniest (and the worst) so far was the division into "spreadheet" and "paragraph" people (link: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/9660863.htm?1c ). This week, he came up with yet another one (link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
clock | September 15, 2008How Corals Adapt To Day And Night:
Researchers have uncovered a gene in corals that responds to day/night cycles, which provides some tantalizing clues into how symbiotic corals work together with their plankton partners. Corals are fascinating animals that form the largest biological constructions in the world, sprawling coral reefs that cover less than 0.2 % of the seafloor yet provide habitats for more than 30% of marine life. In shallow waters that don't have abundant food, corals have developed a close relationship with small photosynthetic critters called dinoflagellates.
Giant…
sb admin | September 15, 2008by Sarah Vogel
On Friday, August 15, the FDA released its draft assessment of the safety of bisphenol A (BPA). To the frustration and deep consternation of many, the regulatory agency upheld the current safety standard for human exposure to BPA in food. The agency based their decision on two large multigenerational studies funded by the American Plastics Council (part of the American Chemistry Council) and the Society of the Plastics Industry.[1]  As for the large body of literature on low dose effects of BPA that originally raised concerns about the chemicalâs ability to disrupt…
tetrapodzoology | September 14, 2008
For a long time now I have been, shall we say, gently encouraged by two of my friends to write about a subject that is both familiar, and yet also strangely alien and poorly understood. Sleep behaviour. We still know comparatively little about this subject: not only about the big stuff like its function, but even about its distribution within animals. I am not, by the way, about to tackle the big questions about sleep, nor am I going to discuss the different types of sleep (e.g., REM vs NREM sleep) and on how they differ from creature to creature. Instead I'm interested in the more…
clock | September 14, 2008 This was an early post of mine building upon George Lakoff analysis of the psychology underlying political ideology. It was first published on September 04, 2004 (mildly edited):
I keep going back to George Lakoff's "Moral Politics", as I did "here"
and "here", because I believe this book provides very important insights into the psychological sources of ideology, or worldview, from which all political stances logically follow. As I stated "before", it is not a perfect book. First, it is written in a pretty dry academic style. Long lists, in my opinion, should be taken out of the main body…
clock | September 13, 2008
This was first posted on http://www.jregrassroots.org/ forums on July 10, 2004, then republished on Science And Politics on August 18, 2004. That was to be just the first, and most raw, post on this topic on my blog. It was followed by about a 100 more posts building on this idea, modifying it, and changing my mind in the process. You can see some of the better follow-ups here. Also, I have since then read Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz, which is a much better and more scholarly work than E.J.Graff's book. Below the…
edyong | September 13, 2008
As you read this post, your computer is probably busy. You may have multiple programs running in the background, with email clients, anti-virus software or file-sharing software all competing for valuable memory. The ability of computers to multi-task has grown substantially in recent years, as processors have become increasingly powerful.
Evolution has chartered a similar course, and humans are particularly talented at dividing our attention among multiple priorities. Now scientists are showing that the asymmetrical differences between the two sides of our brain are essential for this…
clock | September 12, 2008There are 10 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:
Circadian Control of the Daily Plasma Glucose Rhythm: An Interplay of GABA and Glutamate:
The mammalian biological clock, located in the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), imposes its temporal structure on the organism via neural and endocrine outputs. To further investigate SCN control of the autonomic nervous system we focused in the present…