Life Sciences
gregladen | November 15, 2007Repost from gregladen.com
One day, about six thousand years ago (or more like 15 thousand ... the timing of this is disputed) a volcano in the vicinity of Mwea, Uganda blasted a huge volume of stuff into the air, covering the surrounding landscape and choking off most of the life forms living in a nearby lake. (A very nearby lake ... the current configuration of the lake suggests that the volcano may have actually been beneath the lake at the time of the eruption).
Over a very short period of time, we can presume that the land animals that would have been wiped out by this eruption…
laelaps | November 15, 2007
Paleontologist Paul Sereno with the bizarre skull of the strange sauropod Nigersaurus taqueti, announced today in the open-access journal PLoS.
When you hear the word "sauropod," what's the first image that comes to mind? For many people it's an immense, dull colored behemoth lumbering across the landscape (or perhaps wallowing in a swamp if you were first introduced prior to the Dinosaur Renaissance), its long neck stretching out to crop conifers from the high branches of nearby trees. Edwin Colbert pins down this classical image of "Brontosaurus" in his book The Year of the Dinosaur (…
laelaps | November 14, 2007I originally wrote this post off the top of my head, groping (somewhat unsuccessfully) to find the right words to express my enthrallment with natural history. I edited it substantially here without changing the main points of the argument, and I feel that while it could use some improvement it stands as a much better piece of writing as it is now.
Up to my ankles in marl, the July sun blazing overhead, the remnants of an epoch long vanished from this earth see the light of day again for the first time in over 65 million years. There is nothing particularly spectacular about the chocolate-…
sporte | November 9, 2007Last year I wrote about an experiment where I compared a human mitochondrial DNA sequence to primate sequences in the GenBank. Since I wanted to know about the differences between humans, gorillas, and chimps, I used the Entrez query 'Great Apes' to limit my search to a set of sequences in the PopSet database that contained gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and human DNA.
A week ago, I tried to repeat this experiment and...
It didn't work.
All I saw were human mitochondrial sequences. I know the other sequences match, but I didn't see them since there are so many human sequences that match…
laelaps | November 9, 2007
A brief clip of a Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) vocalizing.
Some mornings in the forests of Indonesia, a male and female gibbon will perform a musical duet. The pair will call out, staking their claim in the forest, often answered by neighboring pairs, their treetop display the result of much practice so that the pair can get things "just right." In order to achieve an effective display the two gibbons need to form a pair bond, but the strength and permanence of the pair-bond between these apes has long been obscured by the sociological biases of the scientists studying them. Indeed…
tsmith | November 9, 2007 Tuberculosis in humans is most commonly caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a slow-growing, waxy, rod-shaped bacterium. Transmitted primarily via the air when an infected individual coughs or sneezes, it's estimated that a third of the world is infected with this agent, which causes approximately 2 million deaths every year. Though most infections are asymptomatic, infection is becoming increasingly deadly, due both to the spread of highly antibiotic-resistant strains and due to the increasing number of individuals with both HIV and TB.
While M. tuberculosis is primarily a human…
laelaps | November 7, 2007
The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for me it is the predators that are the most thought-provoking and impressive. Given this proclivity to ponder carnivory , I've chosen to write up my term paper for a seminar course I'm currently taking (Topics in African Prehistory) on the entrance of hominins into the "Carnivore Guild," especially in terms of hunting small prey in forests, scavenging…
pharyngula | November 7, 2007There has been another tragic shooting at a school, this time at Jokela secondary school in Tuusula, Finland. It was a single gunman on a rampage, and at least seven people have been killed.
We're going to hear much more about this because the murderer claims to have carried out this act in the name of natural selection. Some of the murderer's files are available online (so far; that link may not function for long), and they portray a sick man with a distorted view of evolution that he used to justify his actions.
He planned this action. One file is called "Attack Information", and contains…
gregladen | November 6, 2007Obviously, I have to work this both into tonight's talk in Grand Rapids, and blog about it:
Gene governs IQ boost from breastfeeding from PhysOrg.com
The known association between breast feeding and slightly higher IQ in children has been shown to relate to a particular gene in the babies, according to a report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...]
But for now, I'll just say this...
By way of cautionary notes. It is being said that this is evidence of intelligence being the result of "nature and nurture" interacting. This is because there is a gene that…
laelaps | November 6, 2007
The Fishing Cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) is a very interesting Indonesian species of felid that doesn't seem to mind getting wet. Living on the margins of rivers, swamps, and smaller bodies of water, these cats often swim and (as their name implies) are quite fond of freshly-caught fish. Indeed, they've become more adapted to this type of habitat and lifestyle than other cats that are just occasional visitors to the riverbank, developing larger inter-digital webs than other cats to help it get a grip on muddy surfaces (the other branch of the Carnivora, the canids, includes the Bush Dog of…
clock | November 5, 2007Circadian Disorders And Adjusting To The Night Shift: Guide For Professionals:
Practice parameters are a guide to the appropriate assessment and treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders (CRSDs). The standards will have a positive impact on professional behavior, patient outcomes and possibly health care costs.
Sleep-related Breathing Disorder Linked To Increased Heart Rate Variability:
A sleep-related breathing disorder, common in heart failure, increases one's heart rate variability. Further, central sleep apnea (CSA) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) produce different patterns of heart…
grrlscientist | November 5, 2007tags: parrots, pets, aviculture, bird breeding, avian, history
A reader, Natasha, asked a question in response to a recent blog entry I made that is probably no doubt on the minds of at least a few others of my readers;
Hi, Please don't take this badly, I really don't mean to troll. But I've noticed that a few Science bloggers, Jonah, Shelley and you, have parrots. I was wondering where you get them from, what their provenance is? Are they bred in the US? Or are they from the fairly huge amount of wildlife trade? If it is the second, does it make you in the least uncomfortable? Most of you…
grrlscientist | November 5, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Lesser flamingo, Phoenicopterus minor, in flight.
Lake Natron in Tanzania, Africa, is the only site in East Africa where Lesser Flamingos reliably breed.
Image: James Warwick[wallpaper size].
Birds in Science
The changing of the seasons finds millions of birds migrating over thousands of kilometres. How they find their way is a question that has perplexed biologists for decades. It is known that birds have built-in compasses attuned to the Earth's magnetic field. But how those compasses work and what they are made of…
tetrapodzoology | November 4, 2007
Welcome again to Frog Blog, as Tet Zoo is now affectionately known. In the previous froggy article we got through the so-called transitional anurans, and I finished by introducing the largest, most speciose, most diverse anuran clade: Neobatrachia Reig, 1958. It contains about 96% of all extant anuran species: most of these belong to one of two great assemblages (conventionally dubbed hyloids and ranoids). My aim here - mostly an effort to avoid discussing all the myriad groups that belong to Neobatrachia - was to briefly dash through all of neobatrachian diversity in just one article, but I…
laelaps | November 3, 2007
During the 1990's I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn't playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of the b-movies that was always making the rounds, and it's gratuitous special effects make it an easy target for this week's cheesy movie selection.
Although I didn't realize it as a kid, JAWS 3 picks up the story of the Brody family at a Sea World theme park (Sea World Orlando, a landlocked theme park,…
jjacquet | November 2, 2007Since Watson did not have authority, he made use of what he did have: publicity. For those of you who know Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, you won't be surprised to see this photo and long profile landed a cover story in this week's New Yorker.
Not that Paul Watson is not worthy of a long profile. Without a doubt, Paul Watson is one of the (if not the) most energetic and outspoken advocates against the wholesale destruction of the oceans, accompanied by some radical gestures. I first heard Watson speak a decade ago and his dynamism attracted me to his cause. I…
voltagegate | November 1, 2007Today we'll start this little experiment with one of the toons that gave me the idea (the other is a secret as of yet!), Empidonax from Ravencrest. Emp is spec'd holy with almost two dozen points discipline as well, presumably for mana sustainability in raids like Karazhan.
There are only two Empidonax's on all 200 of WoW's North American servers, none on the European servers. The other Empidonax is a level 10 Druid on Arathor.
IRL (in real life) the genus Empidonax, meaning "mosquito king" in Latin, collects a group of "tyrant flycatchers" from the family Tyrannidae. Our representative of…
tetrapodzoology | October 31, 2007
So here we are: anuran diversity part II - you have to have read part I (here) for the following to make proper sense. Yesterday I showed my video of Tiger the secretary bird (filmed at the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire, last week) to anybody that would watch, and in the wee small hours I even completed the first draft of a paper on yet another new Wealden theropod (as always, more on that in due time). I remain perpetually busy with those pesky ichthyosaurs. Oh yeah, and happy wedding anniversary me and Tone (yes, we got married on Halloween. Don't ask). Anyway, anurans…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2007Back in June, Brown University biologist Ken Miller published this review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution in Nature magazine. Considering the venue, Miller quite appropriately focused on Behe's rather dubious scientific arguments and showed that they were entirely incorrect.
Miller has now published a second review (not freely available online), this time in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The scientific flaws are hardly the only thing wrong with Behe's arguments, it seems. In Miller's view, Behe's arguments have disturbing theological consequences:
A hopeful reader…
purepedantry | October 31, 2007There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche.
Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can see from the picture, these ants are also huge.) These four species are all relatively similar lifestyles, going out to forage on daily intervals. The four species differ, however, on when they go out to look for food. Some of them go out in mid-day; some go out only at night.
The authors compared the time when the animals would forage with the size…