Life Sciences
clock | June 17, 2008There are 61 cool new papers in PLoS ONE this week - take a look at these for starters:
Risk and Ethical Concerns of Hunting Male Elephant: Behavioural and Physiological Assays of the Remaining Elephants:
Hunting of male African elephants may pose ethical and risk concerns, particularly given their status as a charismatic species of high touristic value, yet which are capable of both killing people and damaging infrastructure. We quantified the effect of hunts of male elephants on (1) risk of attack or damage (11 hunts), and (2) behavioural (movement dynamics) and physiological (stress…
clock | June 16, 2008Humor Shown To Be Fundamental To Our Success As A Species:
First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.
Male Bird At Smithsonian's National Zoo Has Special Reason To Celebrate Father's Day:
How…
laelaps | June 16, 2008If you were to ask someone walking along the street what a fossil is, they'd probably tell you that fossils are the bones of ancient creatures that have turned into stone (or something similar). This isn't wrong, prehistoric bones that have been replaced by minerals are certainly fossils, but bones are not the only kind of fossils. Fossils are any trace of prehistoric life found in the strata of the earth, from the bones of vertebrates to the shells of brachiopods to body impressions. Within the last category footprints and trackways are abundant trace fossils, and a new paper published in…
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a…
laelaps | June 13, 2008[Note: I know I'm about a month late coming to this one, but it still provided for some good blog fodder. It seems that the initial response at Pharyngula ended up changing the summary I discuss [see comments section], and that's definitely a good thing. The show has also been pushed back to July, it seems. Rather than scrap the post due to relative irrelevancy, I'll leave it up as I think it still speaks to some continuing problems in science communication.]
About a month or so ago I was contacted by someone from the History Channel about where to find some good images of prehistoric life on…
tetrapodzoology | June 13, 2008
You'll recall me saying recently that 2007 was a good year for publications on phorusrhacids, aka terror birds. And as I discussed in the previous post, one of the most interesting contentions made about phorusrhacids last year was that one of the most remarkable members of the group (super-robust Brontornis from the Miocene) is actually not a phorusrhacid at all. Here we look at recent work on a group of birds that, while initially suggested to be part of the phorusrhacid radiation, now, also, seem not to be. They are the ameghinornithids...
Originally named as a phorusrhacid 'subfamily'…
gregladen | June 12, 2008Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children's book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones.
Author Gregory Wenzel does a good job in few words explaining life in the Jurassic, how bones get to become fossils, and something about how they are found. Most of the riveting several hundred words in this 32 page book are about the real stars of the show, the dinosaurs themselves.
Not every single dinosaur in this book is truly giant,…
clock | June 12, 2008Woolly Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory:
A large genetic study of the extinct woolly mammoth has revealed that the species was not one large homogenous group, as scientists previously had assumed, and that it did not have much genetic diversity.
Fossils Found In Tibet Revise History Of Elevation, Climate:
About 15,000 feet up on Tibet's desolate Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, an international research team led by Florida State University geologist Yang Wang was surprised to find thick layers of ancient lake sediment filled with plant, fish and animal fossils typical of far lower…
clock | June 10, 200860 new articles just got published in PLoS ONE a few minutes ago. Here are some of the greatest hits (IMHO):
Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players:
In tennis, as in many disciplines of sport, fine spatio-temporal resolution is required to reach optimal performance. While many studies on tennis have focused on anticipatory skills or decision making, fewer have investigated the underlying visual perception abilities. In this study, we used a battery of seven visual tests that allowed us to assess which kind of visual information processing is performed…
clock | June 9, 2008Sheep's Sex Determined By Diet Prior To Pregnancy:
Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring. New research has demonstrated that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month prior to conception have a significantly higher chance of giving birth to male offspring.
Fossilized Burrows 245 Million Years Old Suggest Lizard-like Creatures In Antarctica:
For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods -- any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages -- in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Male prothonotary warbler, Protonotaria citrea in breeding plumage.
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [OMG view].
Birds in Science
New research led by Dr Melanie Massaro and Dr Jim Briskie at the University of Canterbury, which found that the New Zealand bellbird is capable of changing its nesting behaviour to protect itself from predators, could be good news for island birds around the world at risk of extinction. The introduction of predatory mammals such as rats, cats and stoats to oceanic islands has led to the extinction…
loom | June 8, 2008
Imagine that mad scientists defied nature and violated the barriers between species. They injected human DNA into non-human creatures, altering their genomes into chimeras--unnatural fusions of man and beast. The goal of the scientists was to enslave these creatures, to exploit their cellular machinery for human gain. The creatures began to produce human proteins, so many of them that they become sick, in some cases even dying. The scientists harvest the proteins, and then, breaching the sacred barrier between species yet again, people injected the unnatural molecules into their own bodies…
grrlscientist | June 8, 2008tags: giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, Beijing Zoo, WoLong Panda reserve, mammals, image of the day
A giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, plays at Beijing Zoo on 2 June 2008 in Beijing, China.
Eight giant pandas were relocated to Beijing zoo, after their WoLong nature reserve was damaged by the earthquake on May 24, 2008. They will spend the next six months at the zoo on a special Olympics visit.
Image: Cai Daizheng (ChinaFotoPress & Getty Images) [larger view].
China's panda keepers are using an unusual method of intervention to help their charges -- eight two-year-old giant…
grrlscientist | June 8, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Arora, David. Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi. 1986. Ten Speed Press. Paperback: 959 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Amazon: $26.37]. SUMMARY: A very detailed guide to North American…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2008tags: New Guinea, Papua, deforestation, satellite analysis, biodiversity, field research, endangered species
Before and After: Forest area near Milne Bay in 1990 (top) and 2005 (bottom).
Image University of Papua New Guinea.
I have been fascinated by New Guinea ever since I first read about this unique island in Wallace's marvelous book, The Malay Archipelago, when I was just a kid. My fascination with New Guinea led to my passion for the birdlife there, especially my love for the Birds of Paradise, and the lories and other parrot species. I had always secretly dreamt of visiting this…
ejohnson | June 4, 2008Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual channels. To kick it off, please enjoy the photo, comment, and a few particularly outstanding posts below:
Life Science. From Flickr, by angela7dreams
Reader comment of the week:
In Who needs sex? - Rotifers import genes from fungi, bacteria and plants, Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science reports a new finding that bdelloid rotifers, a peculiar freshwater animal…
loom | June 3, 2008A caterpillar's life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts for their young. These parasitoid wasps are among my favorite creatures (see my post on the emerald cockroach wasp, which attacks cockroaches like a neurosurgeon). So it was with eye-popping delight that I read a new paper in PLOS Biology One about how another species of wasp in Brazil attacks another caterpillar. Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles is more than just…
clock | June 3, 2008There are 56 new articles published in PLoS ONE a few minutes ago. Please comment, rate and send trackbacks. Here are some of my personal favourites of the week:
East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees:
The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct 'dialects' of the waggle dance, remains…
laelaps | June 2, 2008Of all the concepts of nature I have so far encountered in my research on the history of evolution as an idea, few (if any) are as virulent as the Great Chain of Being. Although Stephen Jay Gould claimed that White's 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables represents the last gasp of the Great Chain of Being the idea was not simply discarded or forgotten. While the concept ultimately failed to make sense in terms of the ordering of nature it found a refuge in evolutionary theory, particularly in considerations of how humans are related to…
edyong | June 1, 2008
You inherited your genes from your parents, half from your father and half from your mother. Almost all other animals contend with the same hand-me-down processes, but not the bdelloid rotifers. This intriguing group of small freshwater creatures are not content with their genetic hand-me-downs; they import genes too. A new study shows that their genomes are rife with legions of foreign DNA, transferred from bacteria, fungi and even plants.
The swapping of genetic material is all part of a day's activity for bacteria but it's incredibly rare in animals. But bdelloids are bringing in…