Life Sciences
thusspakezuska | March 28, 2008In the spring a suburban homeowner's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of lawn.
Originally uploaded by garethjmsaunders.
Fertilize! Break out the emergent herbicide! Fire up the sprinklers! Here comes the lawn mower and weed whacker! The relentless battle to maintain a time-, energy-, and resource-consuming monoculture that provides a perfect habitat for Japanese beetle grubs has begun!
Or maybe...just maybe...you could try something different this year. Douglas Tallamy, University of Delaware professor of entomology and wildlife ecology, hopes you will, and tells you why you…
jjacquet | March 28, 2008A chain of undersea volcanoes
Rumbled and then rose
Erupted on the equator
And thousands of years later
We call the islands Galapagos.
Birds flew in and built their nests
On shores sea lions came to rest
Reptiles by way of floating plants
Sharks and rays swam through by chance
And us. But we are merely guests.
Like Darwin we should go explore
But unlike him, not on the shore.
The underwater world waits
With fish, seahorses, nudibranches,
Corals, whales, sharks and more.
Because from fire these islands were born
Fumeroles the bottom adorn
These bubbles seep from the seascape
As volcano's…
clock | March 27, 2008Reason For Almost Two Billion Year Delay In Animal Evolution On Earth Discovered:
Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth's ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.
Brain's 'Sixth Sense' For Calories Discovered:
The brain can sense the calories in food, independent of the taste mechanism, researchers have found in…
grrlscientist | March 27, 2008tags: Orthoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
A locust/grasshopper species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
tetrapodzoology | March 27, 2008
Continuing the theme of discussing 'things in the news', we arrive, finally, at dinosaurs. The previous 'late news' pieces looked at fossil anurans and pterosaurs, and assorted mammals. So what news has been announced recently-ish in the world of dinosaurs? Well, frankly, there are always so many newly announced dinosaurs that it's difficult to keep up. But...
... particularly cool is the recent description of the basal abelisaur Kryptops palaios and the carcharodontosaurid Eocarcharia dinops, both from the Aptian-Albian Elrhaz Formation of Niger (Sereno & Brusatte 2008) [in adjacent…
clock | March 26, 2008Living Upside-down Shapes Spiders For Energy Saving:
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Spain and Croatia led an investigation into the peculiar lifestyle of numerous spider species, which live, feed, breed and 'walk' in an upside-down hanging position. According to their results, such 'unconventional' enterprise drives a shape in spiders that confers high energy efficiency, as in oscillatory pendulums.
Space Tourism: Suborbital Vehicle Expected To Fly Within Two Years:
A small California aerospace company has just unveiled a new suborbital spaceship that will provide affordable…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2008tags: aves, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
A hummingbird species
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
grrlscientist | March 25, 2008tags: Diplopoda, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
I think this is a millipede species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
clock | March 25, 2008Bunch of new, cool stuff in PLoS ONE today - here are the titles that piqued my curiosity (and you know the spiel: rate, note, comment, trackback):
Australia's Oldest Marsupial Fossils and their Biogeographical Implications:
We describe new cranial and post-cranial marsupial fossils from the early Eocene Tingamarra Local Fauna in Australia and refer them to Djarthia murgonensis, which was previously known only from fragmentary dental remains. The new material indicates that Djarthia is a member of Australidelphia, a pan-Gondwanan clade comprising all extant Australian marsupials together with…
awild | March 24, 2008
Tribolium castaneum - Red Flour Beetle
The genome of the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum was published today in Nature. This latest insect genome is interesting not for what it says about beetles but for what it says about another model species, the venerable fruit fly. The more we learn about other insect genomes- the honeybee, the mosquito, and now the flour beetle- the more we see that the famed Drosophila fruit fly is an odd little beast. The bee and now the beetle, it turns out, are both rather normal. They share a lot of proteins with mammals, and fish, and other animals we…
gregladen | March 24, 2008
Take a deer's body, attach a camel's head, add a tapir's snout, and you have a saiga--Central Asia's odd-ball antelope with the enormous schnoz. Unfortunately, these animals are as endangered as they are strange looking. The problem is over-hunting. Now, according to a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) study, the saiga's migration routes are in jeopardy as well.
Conservationists tracked saiga with GPS collars in Mongolia and discovered a "migration bottleneck"--a narrow corridor of habitat that connects two populations. Local people herding livestock and increased traffic from trucks and…
grrlscientist | March 24, 2008tags: arachnida, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Spider species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
edyong | March 24, 2008Bdelloid rotifers are one of the strangest of all animals. Uniquely, these small, freshwater invertebrates reproduce entirely asexually and have avoided sex for some 80 million years. At any point of their life cycle, they can be completely dried out and live happily in a dormant state before being rehydrated again.
This last ability has allowed them to colonise a number of treacherous habitats such as freshwater pools and the surfaces of mosses and lichens, where water is plentiful but can easily evaporate away. The bdelloids (pronounced with a silent 'b') have evolved a suite of…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2008tags: Hymenoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Hornet/wasp species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
grrlscientist | March 23, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history 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 Paulsen, which lists bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Lamb, Andy and Bernard P. Hanby. Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Encyclopedia of Invertebrates, Seaweeds, and Selected Fishes. 2005. Harbour Publishing. Hardbound: 398 pages. Price: $69.95 US [Amazon: $44.07]. SUMMARY: A comprehensive…
grrlscientist | March 22, 2008tags: arachnid, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Scorpion species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
grrlscientist | March 21, 2008tags: Osteichthyes, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
These are tropical marine anenomefishes, Amphiprion species,
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the downtown-bound landing of the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
tsmith | March 21, 2008If one over-arching theme came out of this conference, it was the concept noted in the title: "one medicine, one health." In one of the early lectures, a speaker polled the audience to find out how many attending were veterinarians, and how many worked in human health. The room was divided pretty evenly, which attests to the importance of animals in the emergence of new diseases in humans. Regular readers, of course, will know that these diseases that cross species boundaries--zoonoses--make a large proportion of the emerging diseases we see (~75% by several estimates). Early Monday…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2008tags: Decapoda, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
These are two marine crab species (which ones?
and the one on the left appears to have eggs coating her upper carapace)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the downtown-bound landing of the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
loom | March 20, 2008Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I've searched far and wide. I've looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference--to viruses:
A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. It has recently been ascertained that a minute portion of the mucous discharge from an animal affected with rinderpest, if placed in…