Life Sciences
tetrapodzoology | July 4, 2007
Today I submitted another one of those long-delayed manuscripts. Yay. I also got to work preparing one of the three conference talks I'm supposed to be giving this year - how the hell I'm going to pull off all three I'm not sure. Anyway, leaving well alone the whole picture-of-the-day debacle, it's time for a proper post. Last time we looked at the edopoids, one of the most basal clades of temnospondyls, and in the next post I plan to write about some of the other basal temnospondyls.
Ever trying to recycling old text that sits, un-used, on disks, drives and memory-sticks, here I'm going to…
j7uy5 | July 4, 2007Recently, a friend asked my opinion on an article that
appeared in Life Extension magazine: How
Congress Is Being Misled to Think That DHEA Is an “Anabolic
Steroid”.
title="Dehydroepiandrosterone">DHEA has been
a topic here before; I wrote about it (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/10/tepid_water_thrown_on_a_hot_pr.php">Tepid
Water Thrown on a Hot Product: DHEA); Tara wrote about it (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/10/failure_of_alternative_med.php">The
failure of alternative medicine); and Orac wrote about it (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/…
tetrapodzoology | June 29, 2007
Like plethodontid salamanders, Wealden dinosaurs, and rhinogradentians, the remarkably successful and diverse tetrapods known as temnospondyls have been riding the Tet Zoo wagon right since the earliest posts of ver 1. But, to my shame, I've never gotten round to completing one of the ten or so posts that I plan to publish on them. If you're interested in tetrapod evolutionary history and haven't heard of temnospondyls before, it's time to get learning, as they were one of the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant tetrapod groups of the Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic [adjacent…
revere | June 29, 2007Emerging infectious diseases don't appear out of thin air. Mostly (75%), they come from animals. In the language of science, they are zoonoses. So veterinary pathologists see themselves on the front line of early warning against emerging disease and runaway pandemic disease. Consider bird flu:
So is the threat real? "Whether the bird flu virus will spread to North America is unpredictable at this time," says Corrie Brown, Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP) and a University of Georgia professor of veterinary medicine. "Although the likelihood of this mutation…
tfk | June 26, 2007
In today's big section on evolution in the New York Times, John Noble Wilford explains the explosion of new material and new understanding of the human family tree. Through the 1990s and into this century, new fossil discoveries have pushed our understanding of hominid origins back in time, and refined our knowledge of how we got from those origins to our current form.
Those new fossils are helping molecular biologists trace the ways that our genes evolved over millions of years, and those insights are sending anthropologists and systematists back to the bone to test new hypotheses.…
mikethemadbiologist | June 26, 2007Well, they're not my suggestions, they're David Hillis' But they are still pretty good.... In the June 2007 issue of Evolution, Hillis writes about how to make general biology textbooks discuss evolution better. He has a list of ten suggestions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through them (italics original; boldface mine; I cut a great deal of text*):
1) Demonstrate that evolutionary research is current and ongoing.... Post-Darwinian findings also present an excellent opportunity to teach about the process of science, and to show that the methods of evolutionary biology are…
hrynyshyn | June 26, 2007The New York Times Science section today is devoted entirely to evolution. Wonderful stuff, including a review of the idea that it is possible to encode messages in DNA, and the news that a team of biologists has done just that with E=mc2. For the essay's author, Dennis Overbye, the whole thing brings to mind fjord architect Slartibartfast of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy. But there's an even better sci-fi tie-in:
In the Star Trek: TNG epsiode "The Chase", Picard and the gang race to re-assemble bits of a message encoded in the genomes of disparate species throughout the galaxy…
worldsfair | June 25, 2007
Don't you think it's twisted that so many kids know what
this creature is, but so few can go about naming the birds in their backyard?
- - -
Well, I had briefly talked about this before, more as a whimsical train of thought, but there you have it - we're going to give it a go.
Not sure what I'm talking about?
Well, basically, this was inspired by a letter published in Science in 2002, entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon.." It starts:
According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms.…
pharyngula | June 25, 2007The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He's afraid we're going to put a human brain in a rodent's head. No, really — it's not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals "before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie." Now, seriously, his worry isn't that mice…
oracknows | June 25, 2007Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…
sheril | June 22, 2007For a few years now, folks have been up in arms trying to come up with a universally accepted definition for Ecosystem Based Management - a goal about as realistic as an episode of Laguna Beach. At best, it's a theoretical approach, so instead of debating what it means, we should be asking how to implement strategies that incorporate the broad principles of this concept. At the '07 Society for Conservation Biology conference next month, I'll be speaking about just that - moving from theory to practice. Allow me to elaborate..
The green and blue planet where we live is a very complicated…
clock | June 22, 2007
Prey Not Hard-wired To Fear Predators:
Are Asian elk hard-wired to fear the Siberian tigers who stalk them" When wolves disappear from the forest, are moose still afraid of them? No, according to a study by Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Dr. Joel Berger, who says that several large prey species, including moose, caribou and elk, only fear predators they regularly encounter. If you take away wolves, you take away fear. That is a critical piece of knowledge as biologists and public agencies increase efforts to re-introduce large carnivores to places where they have been exterminated…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
denialism | June 21, 2007Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm.
For those who haven't heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the GI tract, copulate, work their way to the skin, and the adult worms then cause a painful, burning blister as they emerge. The human host, seeking relief, will often seek to immerse the blister in water - and when it bursts the cycle continues as the…
clock | June 20, 2007Are Rattlesnakes Entering Suburbia?:
A researcher for Washington University in St. Louis, along with colleagues at the Saint Louis Zoo and Saint Louis University are tracking timber rattlesnakes in west St. Louis County and neighboring Jefferson County. They are investigating how developing subdivisions invade the snakes' turf and affect the reptiles.
Reconstructing The Biology Of Extinct Species: A New Approach:
An international research team has documented the link between the way an animal moves and the dimensions of an important part of its organ of balance, the three semicircular canals…
grrlscientist | June 18, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
American redstart, widespread throughout North America, is under threat from climate change and future land-use changes.
Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [larger]
Birds in Science
Scientists in China revealed that they found a giant bird whose fossilized bones measure 8 meters (26 feet) in length, 5 meters (16 feet) tall and which weighed 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds) and lived 85 million years ago. The fossil was uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China's Inner Mongolia, said Xu Xing, a paleontologist at…
loom | June 16, 2007Today I jump sections at the New York Times. In the Week In Review, I take a look at the news of a bowhead whale that carried a harpoon tip for 115 years. It's a cool discovery, but 115 years is actually not extraordinarily long for a bowhead whale--or a rockeye rockfish. Both those animals can live over 200 years. In today's essay, I reflect on the evolution of old age (as well as the evolution of fleetingly short life spans). If you want to head for some scientific sources, check out the web site of Linda Partridge, a leading thinker on the evolution of aging at University College London.…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2007Ronald Reagan famously defined the eleventh commandment to be, “Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican.” I'm a big fan of the spirit, if not the substance, of that statement. Generally speaking, I try to avoid criticizing my own side. The way I see it, there are dozens of bloggable items that come across my desk every day, and I can only write about a tiny fraction of them. So why should I waste time on some obscure commentator or blogger who defends something I believe in with somethng less than complete rigor? There are plenty of other bloggers on the other side perfectly happy…
grrlscientist | June 14, 2007tags: bowhead whale, whaling, aging whales
This bomb lance fragment, patented in 1879, was removed from the neck of a male bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, killed near Barrow, Alaska, in May 2007. The shiny scars are the result of a chain saw cut.
Image: AP.
Here's an interesting twist to a sad story: In May of this year, eskimos killed a 49-foot male bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, off the coast of Alaska and unexpectedly discovered that he had survived a similar hunt more than a century ago. While butchering the whale's body with a chainsaw, they found that he was carrying a 3 1/2-…
clock | June 14, 2007Why Was The Racehorse Eclipse So Good?:
Scientists from the Royal Veterinary College and the University of Cambridge are researching what made the undefeated 18th Century horse, Eclipse, such a great champion. The genetics research is giving insights into the origins of the world's thoroughbred racing stock, including the sensational 1867 Derby winner, Hermit.
'Divorce' Among Galapagos Seabirds Investigated:
Being a devoted husband and father is not enough to keep an avian marriage together for the Nazca booby, a long-lived seabird found in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.…