Life Sciences
nisbetmc | September 12, 2008Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin might dispute the human contribution to climate change, oppose embryonic stem cell research, and promote creationism, but in other ways she has been an advocate for science. As I wrote last week, while on a few issues bi-partisan support for science breaks down, on other issues, including financing for scientific research, many Republicans are leading advocates.
Palin, for example, as Governor championed several earmarks requests to fund environmental research in her state. From the Politico:
Many others, though, are of exactly the sort that McCain has made a…
laelaps | September 12, 2008
A female okapi (Okapia johnstoni), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
There are few animals that I find as charming as the okapi (Okapia johnstoni). During the warmer months no trip to the Bronx zoo is complete until I stop by to see them. (Once the temperature drops they are taken off exhibit so they do not freeze.) While they may not always measure up to our standards of good manners, sometimes sticking their long purple tongues into their ears and noses, the okapi is one of the most beautiful animals I think I have ever seen.
Given that the nearest okapi is only a few miles away from me (as…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008tags: Sandwalk, Darwin's Down House, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England
Light Shining into a Tangled Bank.
A view through a thicket of trees as seen from the Sandwalk near Darwin's Down House in Bromley, England.
Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view].
The last paragraph in Darwin's On The Origin of Species;
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008tags: Sandwalk, Down House, Darwin, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England
Darwin's Down House near Bromley, England, a short train ride away from London. This view of the house was snapped from the gardens in back of the house. If you look closely, you can see part of the cafe (under the blue umbrellas) to the right of the crooked tree in this picture.
I am really proud of this photograph, by the way.
Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view].
Sunday, the day after the Nature Network Science Blog conference had concluded, Mike, Mo and I caught a train to Bromley,…
edyong | September 11, 2008Some 230 million years ago, giant reptiles walked the Earth. Some were large and fearsome predators; others were nimble and fleet-footed runners; and yet others were heavily armoured with bony plates running down their backs. Their bodies had evolved into an extraordinary range of shapes and sizes and they had done so at a breakneck pace. They were truly some of the most impressive animals of their time. They were the crurotarsans.
Wait... the who and what now? Chances are you've never heard of the crurotarsans and you were expecting that other, more famous group of giant reptiles - the…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008tags: Okapi, Okapia johnstoni, camera trap, zoology, rare mammals, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo rainforest, African Wildlife, Zoological Society of London
This undated image provided by the Zoological Society of London, Thursday, 11 September 2008, shows an okapi, Okapia johnstoni, in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo proving that the species is still surviving there despite more than one decade of civil conflict. The Zoological Society of London says cameras set up in Congo have snapped the first photos of the rare okapi roaming wild. Okapi have…
tetrapodzoology | September 11, 2008
I've just been doing - if you will - Parasaurolophus for the day job. As in, writing about the history of its discovery and interpretation. William Parks first described Parasaurolophus walkeri (the first of several species to be named) in 1922, and noted in his paper that the skeleton was odd in possessing a weird roughened pad on the neural spine of one of the dorsal vertebrae. He proposed that this structure might have been connected to the tip of the bizarre tube-like crest: it was already thought by this time (thanks to Barnum Brown's Corythosaurus of 1914 and other specimens) that the…
laelaps | September 9, 2008"... for in all the boundless realm of philosophy and science no thought has brought with it so much pain, or in the end has led to such a full measure of the joy which comes of intellectual effort and activity as that doctrine of Organic Evolution which will ever be associated, first and foremost, with the name of Charles Robert Darwin." - Edward Poulton, "Fifty Years of Darwinism" (1908)
Edward Poulton and T.C. Chamberlin may have been impressed by evolution by natural selection during the centenary celebration of Charles Darwin's (portrait on the lower right) birth in 1908, but…
pharyngula | September 8, 2008I was sent the following argument by email.
A new breed of ID is in the process of supplanting the former fact-free versions on U.S. university
campuses. The new breed looks like this (from recent lectures on several University of California
campuses):
The following design argument does not require evolution to produce a specific result. It calculates the probability that evolution reaches a certain level of biological complexity (measured in terms of the number of protein-coding genes) and compares this probability with the number of trials available for evolution to that level.
Any of the…
clock | September 7, 2008Long-held Assumptions Of Flightless Bird Evolution Challenged By New Research:
Large flightless birds of the southern continents - African ostriches, Australian emus and cassowaries, South American rheas and the New Zealand kiwi - do not share a common flightless ancestor as once believed. Instead, each species individually lost its flight after diverging from ancestors that did have the ability to fly, according to new research conducted in part by University of Florida zoology professor Edward Braun.
Artificial Meadows And Robot Spiders Reveal Secret Life Of Bees:
Many animals learn to…
edyong | September 4, 2008The image on the right is both beautiful and exciting. Let me explain why. It's the paw of an embryonic mouse and a team of geneticists have inserted a fragment of human DNA into its cells. The fragment contains an "enhancer" element, a short span of DNA that switches other genes on and off; in this case, they put the enhancer in control of a gene whose activity creates a blue chemical.
This particular enhancer is called HACNS1. Throughout the course of animal evolution, its sequence has gone relatively unchanged in almost all back-boned animals, but it has evolved rapidly in the human…
clock | September 3, 2008Oldest Gecko Fossil Ever Found, Entombed In Amber:
Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved in life-like form after 100 million years of being entombed in amber.
Black-footed Ferrets Sired By Dead Males Via Frozen Sperm:
Two black-footed ferrets at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have each given birth to a kit that was sired by males who died in 1999 and 2000. These endangered ferrets--part of a multi-institutional breeding and reintroduction…
edyong | September 2, 2008
Love is all around us and love is in the air, and if I know my mainstream science reporters, today they will have you believe that love is in our genes too. A new report suggests that variation in a gene called AVPR1A has a small but evident influence on the strength of a relationship, the likelihood of tying the knot and the risk of divorce. It's news for humans, but it's well-known that the gene's rodent counterpart affects the bonds between pairs of voles. The story really starts with these small rodents and it's them that I now turn to.
Voles make unexpectedly good animals to study if…
clock | September 1, 2008'Armored' Fish Study Helps Strengthen Darwin's Natural Selection Theory:
Shedding some genetically induced excess baggage may have helped a tiny fish thrive in freshwater and outsize its marine ancestors, according to a UBC study published today in Science Express. Measuring three to 10 centimetres long, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 20,000 years - a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms - freshwater sticklebacks have lost their bony lateral plates, or "armour," in these new…
bioephemera | August 31, 2008My friend mdvlist sent me the link to some rather odd educational materials, called "Lyrical Life Science." They're folk songs set to familiar tunes, but the lyrics are all biology. I realize that folk songs about science have a storied history. But these are kinda weird - like "Sirenians" set to "Drunken Sailor," or "Oh Bacteria" set to "Oh Susanna" ("though lacking any nucleus, you do have a cell wall. . . ")
mdvlist claims that the kids in her party LOVED these CDs, although she was not impressed by the quality of the music. Nor was I - in fact, I couldn't understand half of what they are…
awild | August 29, 2008
Microphotus angustus - Pink Glowworm
California Coast Range
Believe it or not, this squishy pink thing is an adult beetle.
Now and again, evolution produces a species that loses the complexities of the adult form. These animals simply retain a larval appearance into their adult life, later gaining only the ability to mate and have offspring independent of the other trappings of maturity. Perhaps the adult traits of large eyes, large brains, long legs, and big wings are so expensive that just skipping all that extra development allows an animal to get on that much more efficiently with the…
laelaps | August 28, 2008If there is any author associated with the book title On the Origin of Species it is most certainly Charles Darwin, yet Darwin was not the only person to pen a book beginning with those words. The full title of Darwin's first edition was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but about two decades later another On the Origin of Species would be published bearing Thomas Henry Huxley's name. With the full title On the Origin of Species: Or, the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, the book was a compilation…
neurophilosophy | August 27, 2008
The patient lies on the operating table, with the right side of his body raised slightly. The anaesthetist sterilizes his scalp and injects it with Nupercaine to produce analgesia - the patient will remain fully conscious throughout the procedure. Behind the surgical drapes, three large incisions are made in his scalp. A large flap of bone is then cut from his skull, and turned downward to expose the surface of his brain. The ultraviolet lights which illuminate the operating theatre and keep the air sterile are positioned in such a way that they do not shine directly upon the cortex.
Using…
purepedantry | August 27, 2008There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi.
Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the life span of nematodes, yeast and most recently mice (though the mice in that study were on an unhealthy high calorie diet). Explaining how these compounds work is a more difficult challenge. We think that these compounds work by influencing pathways that regulate overall metabolism. We also think that these same pathways are altered by caloric-restriction -- a technique that…
sheril | August 27, 2008originally published May 23, 2007 by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
Much emphasis in traditional conservation is paced on 'charismatic megafauna,' meaning the species that we all know and love. The heroes of the big screen. Save the Oceans for Flipper and Free Willy. Keep those penguins marching and the polar bears drinking Coca-Cola. Market the smiling dolphins, the majestic blue whales, and those adorable baby seals. 'Save the Sea Cucumber' just doesn't have the same clout. Package your landscape or region of choice under the umbrella of huggable marine mammal and everyone's on board to clean up…