Life Sciences
jrosenhouse | May 14, 2008That's the title of a truly excellent article by Stephen Pinker for The New Republic. The subject is the 500+ page report by the President's Council on Biotheics attempting to define what human dignity actually is. I despair of selecting just a few quotes, since the whole article is superb, but I will give it a try beneath the fold.
Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
The report's oddness begins with…
clock | May 14, 2008The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock - at least they have clock genes, thought to have arived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.[continued under the fold]
It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya - Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals - originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock…
clock | May 13, 2008There are 57 articles this week in PLoS ONE - look around for yourself, these are my own picks:
The Secret World of Shrimps: Polarisation Vision at Its Best:
Animal vision spans a great range of complexity, with systems evolving to detect variations in light intensity, distribution, colour, and polarisation. Polarisation vision systems studied to date detect one to four channels of linear polarisation, combining them in opponent pairs to provide intensity-independent operation. Circular polarisation vision has never been seen, and is widely believed to play no part in animal vision.…
clock | May 13, 2008College Student Sleep Patterns Could Be Detrimental:
A Central Michigan University study has determined that many college students have sleep patterns that could have detrimental effects on their daily performance.
When Following The Leader Can Lead Into The Jaws Of Death:
For animals that live in social groups, and that includes humans, blindly following a leader could place them in danger. To avoid this, animals have developed simple but effective behaviour to follow where at least a few of them dare to tread -- rather than follow a single group member. This pattern of behaviour reduces the…
edyong | May 13, 2008
Three-toed sloths have a reputation for being some of the sleepiest of all animals, largely due to a single study, which found that captive sloths snooze for 16 hours a day. That certainly seems like a sweet deal to me, but it seems that the sloth's somnolent reputation has been exaggerated.
A new study - the first ever to record brain activity in a wild sleeping animal - reveals that wild sloths are far less lethargic than their captive cousins. In their natural habitat, three-toed sloths sleep for only 9.6 hours a day, not much more than an average first-year university student.
Wild…
laelaps | May 12, 2008
Standing in front of a small tank of mudskippers in the special "Water" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, I heard a gentleman next to me comment to his friend "You know, if evolution is true, it's really amazing how many different kinds of animal there are." I have to admit that the first thought to pop into my mind was "If?" but after my twinge of arrogance passed I had to agree; it really is fantastic that evolution has produced such diverse forms of life.
Present diversity is only half of the evolutionary equation, though. Without an understanding of common descent we…
clock | May 11, 2008Dying Bats In The Northeast U.S. Remain A Mystery:
Investigations continue into the cause of a mysterious illness that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats since March 2008. At more than 25 caves and mines in the northeastern U.S., bats exhibiting a condition now referred to as "white-nosed syndrome" have been dying.
'Early Birds' Adapt To Climate Change:
Individual birds can adjust their behaviour to take climate change in their stride, according to a study by scientists from the University of Oxford. A study of the great tit (Parus major) population in Wytham Woods, near Oxford,…
pharyngula | May 10, 2008
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is "weird" or "odd" or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — "the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal". No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as…
loom | May 9, 2008Here's the second winning question about Microcosm, from Kevin:
E. coli is a bacteria commonly found in the intestines of some animals. What distinguishes the common and harmless strains from those that can cause illness and death?
A lot of people asked this question in the contest. But my sense is that most people think that E. coli is just a nasty germ. When I would tell people I was going to write about E. coli, they thought I was going to pen an expose of the food industry. It came as a surprise to them when I told them that they were carrying billions of E. coli inside them. [More below…
laelaps | May 8, 2008
The articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus (AMNH 5428) found in the Belly River Formation near the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada. From Matthew & Brown 1923.
In 1913, an American Museum of Natural History expedition led by Barnum Brown (with P.C. Kaisen and George Sternberg as assistants) searched the Cretaceous Belly River Formation in Alberta, Canada for dinosaurs. Although there had been an expedition to the same area the year before, the 1913 trip yielded "more exhibition material," including the articulated skeleton of Gorgosaurus*. When it arrived in New York it was prepared by…
clock | May 8, 2008Why Face Symmetry Is Sexy Across Cultures And Species:
In humans, faces are an important source of social information. One property of faces that is rapidly noticed is attractiveness. Research has highlighted symmetry and sexual dimorphism (how masculine or feminine a face is) as important variables that determine a face's attractiveness.
Platypus Genome Explains Animal's Peculiar Features; Holds Clues To Evolution Of Mammals:
The duck-billed platypus: part bird, part reptile, part mammal -- and the genome to prove it.
Biodiversity: It's In The Water:
What if hydrology is more important for…
clock | May 7, 2008There are 56 new articles published in PLoS ONE this week and it was hard to make the picks as this seems to be a very, very good week with lots of cool papers. Here are some of the highlights - please post ratings, notes and comments on the papers, write blog posts and send trackbacks:
Seed Dispersal and Establishment of Endangered Plants on Oceanic Islands: The Janzen-Connell Model, and the Use of Ecological Analogues:
The Janzen-Connell model states that plant-specific natural enemies may have a disproportionately large negative effect on progeny close to maternal trees. The majority of…
clock | May 6, 2008Dinosaur Bones Reveal Ancient Bug Bites:
Paleontologists have long been perplexed by dinosaur fossils with missing pieces - sets of teeth without a jaw bone, bones that are pitted and grooved, even bones that are half gone. Now a Brigham Young University study identifies a culprit: ancient insects that munched on dinosaur bones.
Saving Frogs Before It's Too Late:
With nearly one-third of amphibian species threatened with extinction worldwide, fueled in part by the widespread emergence of the deadly chytrid fungus, effective conservation efforts could not be more urgent. In a new article,…
pharyngula | May 6, 2008I just got this announcement for a new series to appear on the History Channel in June. This has the potential to be really good — at least it sounds like the focus is on the biology — and we'll have to tune in.
SERIES PREMIERE!
EVOLVE:
EYES
Eyes are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in…
loom | May 5, 2008In tomorrow's New York Times, I take a look at the evolution of intelligence. Or rather, I look at its flip side. Scientists and the rest of us are obsessed with intelligence--not just the intelligence of our own species, but any glimmer of intelligence in other animals. I've written plenty of stories myself on this research, from the social brilliance of hyenas to the foresight of birds. But if these faculties are so great, then why aren't more animals smart? The answer, experiments suggest, is that learning and memory have nasty side-effects. They can even shorten your life (at least if you…
grrlscientist | May 5, 2008tags: National Pet Week 2008, companion pets, birds, parrots
Odysseus, screaming his fool head off.
Yellow-bibbed lory, Lorius chlorocercus
Image: GrrlScientist 2008 [larger view].
Okay, as I promised yesterday, I am going to write a series of articles about parrots as pets. Even though I have lived with, bred, raised, trained and researched a variety of birds, I am focusing on parrots as pets because they are generally what people think of first when they talk about pet birds.
The first thing to consider before you ever add a parrot to your household is whether a parrot would make a…
grrlscientist | May 4, 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 bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Hölldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson. The Ants. 1990. Belknap/Harvard University Press. Hardbound: 732 pages. Price: $108.50 U.S. [Amazon: $86.60]. SUMMARY: This title was the winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction…
clock | May 4, 2008This post from March 27, 2006 starts with some of my old research and poses a new hypothesis.
The question of animal models
There are some very good reasons why much of biology is performed in just a handful of model organisms. Techniques get refined and the knowledge can grow incrementally until we can know quite a lot of nitty-gritty details about a lot of bioloigcal processes. One need not start from Square One with every new experiment with every new species. One should, of course, occasionally test how generalizable such findings are to other organisms, but the value of models is hard…
kevin z | May 3, 2008Welcome to the 32nd edition of the Circus of the Spineless. It our distinguished pleasure to be host here at Deep Sea News. To make it easier for you to navigate through 95%+ of the diversity of animal life, I've developed a dichotomous key to help you work through it. Naturalists will undoubtedly be familiar with such a tool, but for the beginner I provide a brief overview. Read both parts of the number and follow path that best describes the post you are looking for. If there is a number at the end, go to that number and repeat until you come to a post you are attempting to identify. Simple…
clock | May 3, 2008This April 09, 2006 post places another paper of ours (Reference #17) within a broader context of physiology, behavior, ecology and evolution.
The paper was a result of a "communal" experiment in the lab, i.e., it was not included in anyone's Thesis. My advisor designed it and started the experiment with the first couple of birds. When I joined the lab, I did the experiment in an additional number of animals. When Chris joined the lab, he took over the project and did the rest of the lab work, including bringin in the idea for an additional experiment that was included, and some of the…