Life Sciences
edyong | August 12, 2008An international group of scientists have recruited a team of unlikely research assistants to help them study the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica - elephant seals. Boldly going where current buoys, satellites and ships cannot, the intrepid fieldworkers will help to fill blind spots in our knowledge of this most inaccessible of oceans.
Our knowledge of the effects of climate change at the planet's poles is heavily skewed towards the Arctic. There, it's clear that the sea-ice cover is gradually shrinking. But at the opposite end of the world, in Antarctica, data is harder to come by…
laelaps | August 11, 2008see more pwn and owned pictures
Growing up I spent a fair amount of time watching cheesy b-movies, mostly "revenge of nature" stuff. There was the walking commentary on the a-bomb known as Godzilla, the parable about dumping biomedical waste in Alligator, a mercury-created walking salami in The Prophecy, and many others, but the take home message was always "Don't mess with Nature." It's usually a rehash of the misunderstood Frankenstein mythos, offending "Mother Nature" instead of breaking the boundaries of "what God intended," and the atrocious film The Happening being only the latest…
grrlscientist | August 11, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
ABSTRACT: Chattering Lory, sometimes known as the Scarlet Lory, Lorius garrulus.
Image: John Del Rio [larger view].
Birds in Science News
The Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo, Chalcites basalis, specializes in laying a single egg in the nests of fairy-wrens, but sometimes parasitizes nests of other species such as thornbills or robins. The cuckoo chick has a shorter incubation period than the hosts' chicks, and after the cuckoo chick hatches, it pushes the host's eggs out of the nest and imitates the begging calls of the…
laelaps | August 8, 2008Was Charles Darwin a genius? He certainly was extremely bright, but if we are to call him a genius on the basis of coming up with the theory of evolution by natural selection then we must recognize the genius of A.R. Wallace (and perhaps William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth), as well. Although the idea of natural selection has developed independently several times in the past it was Darwin and Wallace who grasped the power of the theory as a driver for evolution, but even then it is Darwin who is the focal point of so many discussions about "transmutation." While there are…
cortex | August 7, 2008One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our neurons, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same ionic cells and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species share a similar design. Blood and flesh and skin are always constructed of the same elemental stuff. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimps.
The distinctions are just as murky from the perspective of behavior. Ants exhibit altruism. Parrots use symbolic logic. Gorillas mourn the death of a…
clock | August 6, 2008Continuing with asking for your help in fixing my Blogroll:
Every couple of days or so, I will post here a list of blogs that start with a particular letter, and you add in the comments if you know of something that is missing from that list.
Today brought to you by letter A. This is what is on the Blogroll right now. Check Housekeeeping posts for other A blogs I have discovered in the meantime. Check links. Tell me what to delete, what to add:
The Alternative Scientist
Academic Productivity
The Apprenticing Lab Rat
A Man With A Ph.D.
A Wallflower Physicist's Perspective
Advances in the…
edyong | August 6, 2008A good defence was a vital part of life in the Cretaceous. Plant-eaters needed effective ways of warding off the crushing jaws of Tyrannosaurus and its kin. Some species like Triceratops and Ankylosaurus had fairly obvious protective equipment, including horns, frills and armoured plates. But others lacked defensive armaments, and had to fend off predators through subtler means.
Take Hypacrosaurus. It was one of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs, and like most other members of the group, its soft body lacked any obvious protection. Its main advantage was size; a fully-grown adult…
sheril | August 6, 2008by Philip H.
DISCLAIMER - The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author alone. They do NOT represent the official opinion, policy, or action of any governmental agency the author may work for or have ever worked for at the county, state or federal level. If you do not like the content or opinions, contact the author, not your Congressmen.
PARENTAL WARNING - This post is about orgasm. That word is psychologically and socially loaded in American culture. If you don't want your kids to read about it, go to the next post. Just don't blame me if they ask you about it…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold with abstracts and my comments...
Evolution of reproductive isolation in plants
Heredity advance online publication 23 July 2008; doi: 10.1038/hdy.2008.69
A Widmer, C Lexer and S Cozzolino
Reproductive isolation is essential for the process of speciation and much has been learned in…
ejohnson | August 4, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Life Science. From Flickr, by Artiii
Physical Science. Ice crystals on a frozen window. From Flickr, by *clairity*
Reader comments of the week:
On the Life Science channel, Bora of A Blog Around The Clock is excited to hear about Okapi in NC! The North Carolina Zoological Park will soon add the African animal, a cousin of the giraffe, to its grounds.
Reader brtkrbzhnv, however, has eyes only for one type of animal:
Well, yeah, okapis are…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Brown Lory, also known as the Duyvenbode's Lory, Chalcopsitta duivenbodei. This species is endemic to the island of New Guinea.
Image: John Del Rio [larger view].
Birds in Science News
One of the challenges facing those who believe that evolution cannot create new species is explaining the problem of "ring species." Ring species are a group of geographically connected populations that can interbreed with nearby populations, but cannot breed with those populations that exist at each end of the cline. These populations…
tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2008Unless you've been hiding under a rock, or spending all your time on Tet Zoo, you will almost certainly have heard about the 'Montauk monster', a mysterious carcass that (apparently) washed up on July 13th at Montauk, Long Island, New York. A good photo of the carcass, showing it in right lateral view and without any reference for scale, surfaced on July 30th and has been all over the internet. Given that I only recently devoted a week of posts to sea monsters, it's only fitting that I cover this too. I'm pretty sure that I know what it is, and I'm pleased to see that many other people have…
gregladen | August 3, 2008 New Smithsonian Field Guide Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd is a newcomer to the bird field guide scene. This guide offers a new combination of features that may make it the best choice as the primary guide for a small number of birders, and as an excellent second (or third) guide for most birdwatchers. Given the guide's qualities and price (it is not expensive) if you are a North American birder (anywhere in the region) this is a must-have for your collection, and if you know a birder who is having a present-able event (birthday, etc.) any time in the…
tetrapodzoology | August 3, 2008Well, here we are at the end of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week. I hope you've all enjoyed it. We're going to finish with a bang by looking at a few - yes, not one, but a few - of the real way-out-there oddballs among the odontocetes. We start with a famous freak individual...
If you've ever read anything about sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus you'll have read the assertion that broken and deformed lower jaws have often been reported in members of this species. It's nice to know this, but why are these broken and deformed lower jaws never figured? Here is perhaps the ultimate…
gregladen | July 30, 2008Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I'm not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I think it was not long before Franz found the fossil.
The bones found in 1899 as well as other material have been sitting in an Austrian museum since.
Excavations at the same locality in 2003 recovered much more material from this species. Now, a team working mainly at a lab…
clock | July 30, 2008Searching For Shut Eye: Possible 'Sleep Gene' Identified:
While scientists and physicians know what happens if you don't get six to eight hours of shut-eye a night, investigators have long been puzzled about what controls the actual need for sleep. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine might have an answer, at least in fruit flies. In a recent study of fruit flies, they identified a gene that controls sleep.
Did Dinosaur Soft Tissues Still Survive? New Research Challenges Notion:
Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research that apparently showed that soft, pliable…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, animal migration, ecology, conservation, habitat destruction, global warming, overexploitation
Image: Makoa Farm Horseback Riding Safaris in Tanzania [larger view].
What do salmon, passenger pigeons, American bison and wildebeest have in common? They all are (or were) migratory, and their populations either are declining or have become extinct. In fact, the populations of nearly all migratory animals, from insects to fishes, birds to mammals, are suffering disproportionate population declines that sedentary species are not experiencing. This is hardly…
gregladen | July 29, 2008Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?
Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.
The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain…
edyong | July 29, 2008Imagine being able to drink ludicrous amounts of alcohol without getting drunk and without the nasty consequences in the morning. For some people, it would be a dream come true but for the pen-tailed treeshrew (Ptilocercus lowii), it's just part of everyday life.
The treeshrew lives in the rainforests of Malaysia and its local drinking establishment is a large plant called the bertam palm. The palm develops large stems a few metres in length, each of which sprouts about a thousand flowers. These are loaded with an alcoholic nectar with a maximum alcohol concentration of 3.8% - as strong as…
tetrapodzoology | July 29, 2008Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and sishumarch. There are two species: the Indus river dolphin P. minor Owen, 1853 of the Indus and Chenab in Pakistan, and the Ganges river dolphin P. gangetica Roxburgh, 1801 of the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the Karnaphuli in Bangladesh, and (possibly) the…