Life Sciences
denialism | July 18, 2007This article in PLoS caught my eye today. It's entitled, "Calories Do Not Explain Extension of Life Span by Dietary Restriction in Drosophila", and is an extension of the body of science showing that caloric restriction in a variety of animals, from fruit flies to non-human primates, may dramatically extend life-span.
Currently the mechanism is not well understood, but this surprising new result suggests that rather than absolute calorie restriction, decreased protein intake may be more critical for this beneficial effect.
In this study, fruit flies were fed a mixture of carbohydrate and…
tetrapodzoology | July 18, 2007
Long-time blog readers will know that I am atrocious at keeping promises. And I will confess that part of the reason for titling an article 'Goodbye Tetrapod Zoology' was to cause a burst of panic, a rash of visitors (the strategy didn't really work: look at the counter... no spike on the graph). In seriousness, fear ye not oh followers, as I will indeed keep the blog ticking over, it's just that the only things I'll post will be short and sweet. And, unfortunately/fortunately, some bits of news come in that just demand a quick write-up...
Lurking in the Tet Zoo shadows are a number of…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, birds, ornithology, evolution, radiation, Chernobyl
Normal Barn Swallow (a),
while the other pictures show signs of albinism (white feathers; b & c),
unusually colored feathers (d), deformed beaks (e & f), deformed air sacs (g),
and bent tail feathers (h & i).
Images: Tim Mousseau.
Twenty years after the Chernobyl reactor disaster, which released clouds of radioactive particles in April 1986, the uninhabited forests within the 19 mile (30 kilometer) "exclusion zone" around the disaster site are lush and teeming with wildlife, giving the appearance…
grrlscientist | July 16, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
This adult piping plover was on the beach at Kettle Point in the morning of 10 July 2007. The bird eventually flew off when beach strollers were approaching.
Image: appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Alf Rider.
Birds in Science
The love songs of 1979 just don't cut it anymore with the ladies -- lady sparrows, that is. Today's females are better wooed by the song of their contemporary male counterparts, according to Duke University researcher Elizabeth Derryberry, who is studying the attraction…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…
clock | July 14, 2007You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…
clock | July 14, 2007No other aspect of behavioral biology is as well understood at the molecular level as the mechanism that generates and sustains circadian rhythms. If you are following science in general, or this blog in particular, you are probably familiar with the names of circadian clock genes like per, tim, clk, frq, wc, cry, Bmal, kai, toc, doubletime, rev-erb etc.
The deep and detailed knowledge of the genes involved in circadian clock function has one unintended side-effect, especially for people outside the field. If one does not stop and think for a second, it is easy to fall under the impression…
denialism | July 13, 2007We've discussed the incompetence of cranks in their critical reasoning skills, and their inability to think about science in a lucid or productive fashion. But have we tried to help them? Have we moved beyond caddy criticisms and actually bothered to extend a hand to our fellow man? Clearly not. Rather than continuing to mock ID for being the intellectually-dishonest, crank-laden nonsense that it is, why don't we help them become a real science?
Genomicron has some suggested experiments to help ID get on the right track. Maybe, if they are legitimately interested in science, we'll be…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2007
Hooray: another of those articles that I've been promising to publish for weeks and weeks.
Thanks mostly to the importance of the species in the international pet trade, the Green iguana Iguana iguana is typically imagined as a rather uninspiring lizard that sits around on branches all day long, occasionally munching on salad or sitting in its water bowl. It's true that some captive individuals become remarkably charismatic and idiosyncratic, but for the most part the Green iguana is generally thought of as a rather dull animal that doesn't really do much of interest. Today we're going to…
bushwells | July 12, 2007When one thinks of a house mouse, a meek cheese-nibbling furry little critter is most often visualized Don't be fooled. These are nasty beasts. Just ask the chicks of the stormy petrel, Tristan albatross and Atlantic petrel.
The vast majority of avian extinctions have occurred on islands. Rats, an invasive species on many islands, are often blamed for such extinctions. Mice were thought to pose no threats to seabirds' nests. However, once their ratty brethren were removed from the competitive scene, the mice moved in on delicious territory. The little fiends have been caught in the…
clock | July 11, 2007Songbirds Prefer The Latest Music: Golden Oldies Just Don't Cut It With The Chicks:
When it's time to mate, female white-crowned sparrows are looking for a male who sings the latest version of the love song, not some 1979 relic. And territorial males simply find the golden oldie much less threatening. Duke University graduate student Elizabeth Derryberry played two versions of the white-crowned sparrow song to the birds as part of her thesis research and found that a 1979 recording didn't inspire them nearly as well as a 2003 recording of the very same song.
Birds Take Cues From Their…
bcohen | July 11, 2007Now he's a captive dolphin rescuer speaking about those training Navy dolphins to find enemy mines. Or was in 2003 at least. This is another from the vault, and like the last, another from someone else's vault. Brent Hoff interviews Richard O'Barry.
See below for full text, which originally appeared at McSweeney's, here. And find out some causes of death among the US Navy's dolphin corps.
FREE THE ADVANCED BIOLOGICAL WEAPON SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD O'BARRY
BY BRENT HOFF
- - - -
[Author's note: Navy dolphins are operating in the Gulf as we speak to locate enemy mines, to stop…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2007tags: recurve-billed bushbird, Clytoctantes alixii, ornithology, birds, avian, endangered species
Chris Sharpe, an Associate Researcher with ProVita in Venezuela, contacted me (initially through my friend, Ian) regarding this entry about the "smiling bird" that I wrote and he would like to clarify several things for all of you. This message is especially intended for the ornithological and conservation communities;
[I wish to thank my Seattle bird-pal, Ian, for his concern about this issue as well as his long-term attention to my Birds in the News newsletter. I am more than happy to set the…
razib | July 9, 2007In my previous post I highlighted the possibility that extremely light skin might have evolved in Europeans relatively recently due to selection for Vitamin D production in the context of a nutritional deficiency prompted by the shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one. I want to emphasize that the phenotype I was highlighting (skin color) was likely not the only response prompted by this selective force. For example, OCA2 seems responsible for about 75% of the variation in eye color in Europeans:
The TGT/TGT diplotype found in 62.2% of samples was the major genotype…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
A forest that is home to nearly one-third of Uganda's bird life, including the great blue turaco, is under threat, says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. There are plans to change laws protecting the Mabira Forest Reserve to allow huge sugar cane plantations to be grown inside its boundaries.
Image: Nature Uganda.
Birds in Science
New research has found that birds aren't sentimental when it comes to music. Songs from just 30 years ago are received with equanimity, while newer tunes make the males…
cortex | July 9, 2007So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution, and why it's so difficult for most Americans to believe in Darwinian theory.
Watching Planet Earth, I was stuck by the sheer difficulty of life. You can't help but feel for these animals, as they are forced to scrounge out a miserable existence in their ecological niche. I'm thinking of the desert kangaroos, who have to lick their paws to keep from overheating in 140…
tetrapodzoology | July 9, 2007
At last, I fulfill those promises of more temnospondyls. Last time we looked at the edopoids, perhaps the most basal temnospondyl clade: here we look at the rest of the basal forms. Scary predators, marine piscivores, late-surviving relics, and some unfortunate beasts burned alive in forest fires...
Studies on temnospondyl phylogeny mostly agree that 'post-edopoid' temnospondyls form a clade, the most basal members of which include Capetus, Dendrerpeton and Balanerpeton (Milner & Sequeira 1994, 1998, Holmes et al. 1998, Ruta et al. 2003a, b) [though some workers have found some of these…
clock | July 7, 2007Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005, also reposted here so you can see the comments):
Did A Virus Make You Smart?
I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it.
His is also some of the…
jjacquet | July 5, 2007 From the author of The HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came a wonderful book: Last Chance to See. Published in 1990, Douglas Adams (in photo) and zoologist Mark Carwardine head off with the BBC to make radio programs about some of the world's rarest species. Adams poses as the science novice, commentator, and weary traveler: I didn't notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.
I realize I am about 17 years late in this discovery, but better late than never (thank you KAB). Many of the animals Adams and Carwardine…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2007[More blog entries about science, medicine, biology, carnival, tangledbank; vetenskap, biologi, medicin.]
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 83rd Tangled Bank blog carnival! This is the blog where all of science -- natural, social and historical -- is just seen as one big bunch of adjunct disciplines to the study of societies of the past. "What about medicine?", I hear you ask. It is very good for prolonging the working lives of archaeologists. "Physics?" We do need dating methods, you know. "Zoology?" Help us classify faunal remains and reconstruct ancient economy. "Astronomy?" It'll get…