Life Sciences
neurophilosophy | August 3, 2007In the English language, the term "bird brain" is often used in reference to intellectually challenged individuals. This is, of course, based on the notion that birds are dim-witted creatures whose behaviour is largely based on instinct.
The main assumption is that a six-layered neocortex, like that of humans, is a prerequisite for anything that might be classed as intelligent, and even ornithologists have generally believed that, because they have a "smooth" brain, birds aren't too clever.
However, it has in recent years become clear that we have grossly underestimated the cognitive…
clock | August 3, 2007This 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…
voltagegate | August 3, 2007Fairy rings are regarded in legends across Europe and North America. In Wales and much of Britain, people thought the rings were leftover from the merriment of fairies. In Ireland they are associated with leprechauns. In Germany, witches gathered around the rings at night. In Scandinavian tales (from which, by the way, Tolkien borrowed heavily), elves danced among the mushrooms in meetings called älvdanser.
In reality, fairy rings are the result of the natural tendency of mycelium (the underground "spreading" portion of the organism) to spread out in a ring shape.
Think of the mycelium like…
clock | July 31, 2007There are 32 new papers that just went live on PLoS ONE and here are a couple of titles that got my immediate attention:
Changing Hydrozoan Bauplans by Silencing Hox-Like Genes by Wolfgang Jakob and Bernd Schierwater:
Regulatory genes of the Antp class have been a major factor for the invention and radiation of animal bauplans. One of the most diverse animal phyla are the Cnidaria, which are close to the root of metazoan life and which often appear in two distinct generations and a remarkable variety of body forms. Hox-like genes have been known to be involved in axial patterning in the…
sporte | July 31, 2007I don't usually blog about work for wide variety of reasons. But, last week, since I wanted to write about bioinformatics software companies, I broke with tradition and wrote about Geospiza as an example.
Naturally, I got some feedback about this. Some people liked it, but one of the most opinionated people said that I had given the software engineering and IT side short shrift and that I should write about that side a bit more.
Today, is my attempt at a remedy.
tags: biotechnology careers, biotechnology, career+descriptions,
bioinformatics
The tip of the iceberg
This diagram was…
sheril | July 30, 2007Are carbon sequestration initiatives providing incentives that decrease land productivity and limit the habitat of endangered species?
We spend a lot of time here discussing wind and water, but I'd like to turn your attention to another force of nature.. FIRE! When I was in South Africa earlier this month, it struck me that carbon sequestration initiatives may actually be creating some unexpected arguably perverse externalities that are potentially troublesome. Maybe. I admit I'm no expert, but hear me out..
In many parts of the world, fires are set regularly to simulate the natural…
pharyngula | July 30, 2007
People are always arguing about whether primitive apes could have evolved into men, but that one seems obvious to me: of course they did! The resemblances are simply too close, so that questioning it always seems silly. One interesting and more difficult question is how oysters could be related to squid; one's a flat, sessile blob with a hard shell, and the other is a jet-propelled active predator with eyes and tentacles. Any family resemblance is almost completely lost in their long and divergent evolutionary history (although I do notice some unity of flavor among the various molluscs,…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, animals, predict death, Oscar the cat, New England Journal of Medicine
Oscar the cat provides comfort to the dying.
According to an article that was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a two-year-old cat that lives in Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, can correctly predict impending death among the residents. Oscar the cat has a habit of curling up next to patients who are in their final hours, and so far, he has been observed to be correct in 25 cases.
"He doesn't make many mistakes. He seems to…
clock | July 26, 2007Hypotheses leading to more hypotheses (from March 19, 2006 - the Malaria Day):
I have written a little bit about malaria before, e.g, here and here, but this is my special Malaria Action Day post, inspired by a paper [1] that Tara sent me some weeks ago and I never got to write about it till now.
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In a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" Kumar and Sharma [1] propose that jet-lagged travellers may be more susceptible to getting infected with malaria. They write:
Rapid travel across several time zones leads to…
cmcclain | July 26, 2007
No that's not real and neither are the others in the post! Argonauta Argo, National Museum& Gallery, Cardiff
Spending time at the Museum Comparative Zoology at Harvard (MCZ), a Museum of a Museum, I realize the potential for items to get lost in unvisited cabinets. This happens regularly in my own brainoffice. Eureka!
Paula Holahan, a curator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Zoological Museum, noting a series of keyholes under the exhibit cases decided to explore. After excavating the keys, she was quite surprised to find several boxes of glass sculptures of marine…
razib | July 25, 2007I was putting off commenting on this, and wondering whether I had any value to add. But a reader pointed me to Noah Feldman's Orthodox paradox, a piece in The New York Times Magazine where the author, a young Harvard law professor, reflects on his journey from the Modern Orthodox subculture into the wider world. The whole piece is worth reading. There is a problem in these sorts of articles insofar as Feldman is such an "insider," while most of the readers are such "outsiders," that one is totally dependent on the author for context and situation. For example, most gentiles have…
clock | July 24, 2007This 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…
clock | July 24, 2007Paleontologists Study A Remarkably Well-preserved Baby Siberian Mammoth:
University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher just returned from Siberia where he spent a week as part of a six-member international team that examined the frozen, nearly intact remains of a 4-month-old female woolly mammoth.
Steroids, Not Songs, Spur Growth Of Brain Regions In Sparrows:
Neuroscientists are attempting to understand if structural changes in the brain are related to sensory experience or the performance of learned behavior, and now University of Washington researchers have found evidence that one…
clock | July 23, 2007This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this post was first written on April 12, 2005.
A Phase Response Curve (PRC) can be made in three ways:
One can construct a PRC for a single individual. If you have a reasonably long-lived organism, you can apply a number of light pulses over a period of time. The advantage is that you will always know the freerunning period of your organism, and you will know with absolute…
cmcclain | July 21, 2007The phylum Porifera (sponges; "pore bearing) is divided into three classes, Hexactinellida, Demospongiae, and Calcarea. Calcarea is the oddball of the group, building skeletal elements out of calcium carbonate (like corals and snails) instead of silica. The Hexactinellids (glass sponges) of which I will focus on, are predominately a deep sea group. They are the oldest of the groups originating about 585-720 million years ago during the Snowball Earth period. During this time, soluble calcium carbonate and silica were formed by reaction with atmospheric carbon dioxide. These reactions provided…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2007tags: recurve-billed bushbird, Clytoctantes alixii, ornithology, birds, avian, endangered species
Female Recurve-billed Bushbird, Clytoctantes alixii. More images below the fold.
Image: Chris Sharpe 2004 [larger].
[listen to this species' song]
Chris Sharpe emailed me this following statement about the Recurve-billed Bushbird rediscovery, which I quote in full. I also present Chris's original 2004 images here, although some of the images will re-appear on this site soon (one will be the featured image for the next issue of Birds in the News, for example).
The Recurve-billed Bushbird,…
clock | July 18, 2007Synthetic Adhesive Mimics Sticking Powers Of Gecko And Mussel:
Geckos are remarkable in their ability to scurry up vertical surfaces and even move along upside down. Their feet stick but only temporarily, coming off of surfaces again and again like a sticky note. But put those feet underwater, and their ability to stick is dramatically reduced.
Monkeys Don't Go For Easy Pickings: Study Shows Primates Consider More Than Distance When Searching For Food:
Animals' natural foraging decisions give an insight into their cognitive abilities, and primates do not automatically choose the easy option.…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007Of course Denyse O'Leary defends Pivar — any crackpot in denial about evolution is a friend of the IDists. They do point out a bizarre flaw in Wikipedia, though, and a common mangling of a concept.
There is an idea that's been around for almost a century, the morphogenetic field. This is a concept in developmental biology that refers to a local domain of interactions that work independently of more global factors to assemble an organ. For instance, we can talk about a limb field or an eye field, and it identifies a patch of tissue that is dedicated to a particular developmental task, and that…
voltagegate | July 18, 2007
Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us.
I want to begin this edition with an important announcement. Aetiology's Tara Smith has some news about the Clergy Letter Project (and Evolution Sunday). This founder, Mike Zimmerman, is trying to create a list of scientists who would be willing to answer the more technical questions posed about science and evolution by participating clergy. Tara has all the…
oracknows | July 18, 2007I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the house organ of the Discovery Institute's propaganda arm, Evolution News & Views, as I did yesterday. I'm not as young as I used to be, have a family history of cardiovascular disease, and am not in the greatest of shape. Reading idiocy such as what regularly appears there surely cannot be good for my blood pressure or my general health, nor can it be good for my mind. Still, for you I nonetheless delve deeply into the muck of logical fallacies, half-truths, distortions, and misinformation that spews forth from the…