Life Sciences
voltagegate | May 15, 2007Welcome to the 5th edition of Oekologie, the 'sphere's only blog carnival focusing on ecology and environmental science. We are always looking for hosts (especially for October) and contributors, so please check out those tabs if you're interested in either.
Some of you may know that I have a tendency to mix in some history when hosting science carnivals. So, for the first themed edition of Oekologie, we will be using ancient and medieval Arabic nature writing to frame our moving monthly mag of biological interactions in the environment.
Zoology One of the most famous Arabic zoological…
chaoticutopia | May 14, 2007
Lady beetle eggs (Coccinellidae, unknown genus/species) on a cedar fence.
(Two animal species in one shot: There was a squirrel lurking in the trees behind, if you can make out the fuzzy gray shape in the background of the full-sized image.)
CHAOS: Complex Habitats Around Our Suburbs isn't just a geeky acronym; it is a gallery of often-unnoticed life. Each week, I'll add a new photo of a complex habitat found near my home. We often think of nature as something that exists outside of our neighborhoods, away from the cities. It is easy to forget that cities and neighborhoods are, indeed,…
clock | May 12, 2007
Venomous Brown Widow Spiders Making Themselves Known In Louisiana:
A dangerous spider is making itself known to Louisiana residents. The brown widow spider is becoming more common, according to entomologists with the LSU AgCenter.
Bat Flight Generates Complex Aerodynamic Tracks:
Bats generate a measurably distinct aerodynamic footprint to achieve lift and maneuverability, quite unlike birds and contrary to many of the assumptions that aerodynamicists have used to model animal flight, according to University of Southern California aerospace engineer Geoffrey Spedding.
Could Carrots Be The…
tfk | May 11, 2007In honor of the local paper's attempt to get an in-depth look at events around Lawrence for 24 hours, I spent a little time outside city limits with a bug net and a camera. While a bug-on-the-street interview is less traditional than other coverage the day generated, I think that a look at the activities of our tiniest residents is as important.
Below the fold: Craneflies, spiders, snakes, beetles and dragonflies comment on May 10 in Lawrence. Dialup users, beware!, there are copious photographs. Nature lovers, rejoice!, there are copious photographs.
I took a walk through an oldfield…
loom | May 11, 2007Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point.
Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it's cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells in the skin and other surface layers of the body, including the vagina and throat. On rare occasion it causes its host cells to start replicating madly, creating growths that sometimes progress into full-blown tumors. It's a major menace: the American Cancer Society estimates that it causes 17…
loom | May 9, 2007There was a time when the publication of the entire sequence of a genome--any genome--was exciting news. I don't have any particular passion about Haemophilus influenzae, a microbe that can cause the flu various infections. But in 1997 it was the first species to have its genome sequenced. It became immensely fascinating, simply because we could now, for the first time, scan all of its genes. Now the global genome factory is cranking away so quickly--with over five hundred sequences published and over two thousand in the pipeline--that a new genome is not necessarily news. There has to be…
clock | May 8, 2007I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it.
Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches
I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the reference to the good old song Back to the Big, Dirty…
tetrapodzoology | May 8, 2007
I've returned several times on this blog to the Slow-worm Anguis fragilis, a legless anguid lizard that occurs across Europe and Asia as far east as western Siberia. I find slow-worms very charismatic animals. Part of the appeal might be that they are easy to find in the places where I've lived, part of it might be that we Brits have such a poor reptile fauna that we hold those few species we do have in special regard, and part of it might be that they're really cute and cool to look at. Slow-worms (there are actually two species: A. fragilis, and A. cephallonica of the Peloponnese and…
pharyngula | May 8, 2007My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let's add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula.
First, though, a few general remarks on developmental stages. In some ways, these are somewhat arbitrary: development is an ongoing process, a real continuum, and what we're doing is picking recognizable moments where we think we see real transitions and highlighting those as significant markers. They can be somewhat fuzzy, although in early development in particular, when the organism is simple, we can…
tetrapodzoology | May 4, 2007
As some of you now know, finally I have something that might be considered close to a dream job: I'm now a researcher for Impossible Pictures, the company that did Walking With Dinosaurs, Primeval and a host of other things (website here). This job isn't going to be forever, but it's a start, and it doesn't make me feel any less bitter about being unable to get a job in academia. It means lots of expensive commuting (I don't live in London, where the company's based), and it also explains the recent lack of blog posts. But I'm not complaining. So, after turtle genitals and ostrich dinosaurs…
chaoticutopia | May 3, 2007
As my week of bioblitzing was wrapping up, so were my classes. Add to that an eager 6-year-old, who wanted to help with spring preparations by cleaning the pond-with windex-and you can see, I've been busy.
I never did get around to counting the flora in my two bioblitz locations, but I have no regrets. This has been a wonderfully enlightening experience for me. While my counts don't show it, I managed to stumble onto one of the richest ecological niches in my area. I've visited site A at Standley Lake regularly since moving to this part of town. Now, I'll be visiting site B (B is for…
clock | May 2, 2007Of course, I was not the only one commenting on the recent duck phallus paper. You should check out the other blogospheric responses, e.g., by Carl, PZ, RPM, Grrrl, Laelaps, Neil, Belle, Zuzu, Guru and many others.
Unfortunately, most people link only to each other, or to the press release, or to the NYTimes article. The articles are fine, but they are simplified for the mass audience. If you are a scientist, you should read the original paper to get all the details.
Furthermore, many commenters on blogs have asked some very good questions about the research which remained unanswered, e.…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007
Newly described species, Goodman's mouse lemur, Microcebus lehilahytsara.
is is a new species of Lemur that they've identified in Madagascar. They named it after Steve Goodman. The scientists say; Lehilahytsara means "good man" in Malagasy. The German primatologists chose this name to honor Steve Goodman, scientist with The Field Museum in Chicago and WWF in Madagascar. "Goodman's field research in all remote parts of Madagascar has contributed enormously to our knowledge about the diversity of Madagascar's unique and threatened fauna and flora," Kappeler says.
"It is truly an honor to have…
clock | May 2, 2007Corals -- More Complex Than You?:
The humble coral may possess as many genes - and possibly even more - than humans do. And remarkably, although it is very distant from humans in evolutionary terms, it has many of the immune system genes that protect people against disease. In fact, it is possible some of these were pioneered by corals.
Lizards Prefer Islands, At Risk With Climate Change, Survey Suggests:
A comprehensive survey of lizards on islands around the world has confirmed what island biologists and seafaring explorers have long observed: Animals on islands are much more abundant than…
clock | April 29, 2007Wing Morphing Of The Swift Could Inspire New Aircraft Designs:
A swift adapts the shape of its wings to the immediate task at hand: folding them back to chase insects, or stretching them out to sleep in flight. Ten Dutch and Swedish scientists, based in Wageningen, Groningen, Delft, Leiden, and Lund, have shown how 'wing morphing' makes swifts such versatile flyers. Their study, published as cover story in Nature on April 26, proves that swifts can improve flight performance by up to three-fold, numbers that make 'wing morphing' the next big thing in aircraft engineering.
Female Ticks Have…
tetrapodzoology | April 27, 2007
So, on to more ornithomimosaurs, aka ostrich dinosaurs (part I here). This time, the ornithomimids: this is the ornithomimosaur clade that includes only the edentulous arctometatarsalian taxa. Yes, I said arctometatarsalian*. However, note that some authors have incorrectly regarded Ornithomimidae as synonymous with Ornithomimosauria... and one author has even included therizinosauroids and alvarezsaurids within Ornithomimosauria. For those who don't keep up to date with the phylogeny of non-avian theropods, character evidence indicates that ornithomimosaurs are stem-group coelurosaurs,…
clock | April 27, 2007Dogs Copy Other Dogs' Actions Selectively, The Way Humans Do:
A distinguishing feature of human intelligence is our ability to understand the goals and intentions of others. This ability develops gradually during infancy, and the extent to which it is present in other animals is an intriguing question. New research by Friederike Range and Ludwig Huber, of the University of Vienna, and Zsofia Viranyi, of the Eötvös University in Budapest, reveals striking similarities between humans and dogs in the way they imitate the actions of others. The phenomenon under investigation is known as "…
cortex | April 26, 2007Christof Koch makes a compelling argument:
My empirical studies into the neurobiology of consciousness have convinced me that many species share the sights and sounds of life with us humans. Why? First, except for size, there are no large-scale, dramatic differences between the brains of most mammals (including humans). Second, when people experience pain and distress, they contour their face, moan, cry, squirm, and try to avoid anything that would trigger a reoccurrence of the pain. Many animals do the same. Likewise for the physiological signals that attend pain--like changes in blood…
tetrapodzoology | April 25, 2007
As events conspire, I again find myself unable to devote time to completing any new blog posts. That's a shame, as I'm desperate to finish and publish my article on the terrifying sex organs of male turtles (yes really: stay tuned). In desperation, I've opted to dig out and recycle some old text. If you like dinosaurs, you might be pleased...
We've seen before that - perhaps more than most scientist-authors - I've lost/wasted an unbelievable amount of time on projects that ultimately failed, or have yet to come to fruition. There was the taphonomy book, and there are a long string of…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2007tags: Solomon Islands Frogmouth, Rigidipenna inexpectatus, Podargus ocellatus inexpectatus, birds, birding, ornithology
Gone are the days when animals were classified to taxon based solely on bone structure (osteology), body structure (morphometrics) or behavior (ethology), or some combination of these characters. Currently, scientists have a suite of powerful tools for classifying creatures to taxon, and analyses using a combination of these methods is allowing us to come to a deeper understanding of all animal life. As a result of using these techniques, a new species of bird has been…