Life Sciences
grrlscientist | March 18, 2007
Adult Peromyscus eremicus, one of the animals that Matt studies.
The photo was taken near Palm Desert, California in 2006. Aside from being cute, these are interesting because they are one of the few monogamous mammals.
Image: Matthew D. MacManes
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it will be for forever), I shall continue to share them with my readership. My purpose for posting these images is to remind all of us of the grandeur of the natural world and that there is a world out there that is populated by millions of unique species. We are a part of this world whether we like it…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim. Given the recent slurs on evolutionary theory as the foundation for Nazism and the holocaust, it's a good point to make.
But is Nietzsche even a "Darwinist" (a term only the Discovery Institute, or as we like to call it, DIsco, seems to use these days, as it has no real meaning)? He certainly accepted that evolution occurred, and he managed to avoid some of the sillier philosophical claims…
tetrapodzoology | March 17, 2007
Readers in the UK might be aware of Primeval, an ITV drama series featuring a time portal that connects the present day with the past. The main premise of the series seems to be that various animals from the past - including a pareiasaur, a gorgonopsian, dodos, a mosasaur, pterosaurs and some giant arthropods - wander through the portal and get into various japes and scrapes in the present. I've cleverly managed to miss the entire series, so I'm not exactly the best person in the world to be talking about it. But due in part to the fact that I'm currently horribly ill, Will and I were in…
evolgen | March 17, 2007Genome size can be measured in a variety of ways. Classically, the haploid content of a genome was measured in picograms and represented as the C-value. People began to realize that the C-value was not correlated with any measures of organismal complexity and seemed to vary unpredictably between taxa. This was known as the C-value paradox, and it confused geneticists for quite a while. With an increased understanding of genome structure, however, came the resolution of the paradox: this measure of genome size does not correlate with gene content. The majority of many eukaryotic genomes…
zooillogix | March 15, 2007A new species of clouded leopard was identified today in the jungles of Borneo. In fact, over 400 new species of animals have been discovered in the rain forests of Borneo since 1994.
Most of the species shown below were found through the World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) spectacular Heart of Borneo Initiative.
Bornean Clouded Leopard, neofelis diardi
Catfish with suction cups on its belly and protruding teeth
Lizard - new species of skink
(By far our favorite), Unidentified "Mystery Mammel"
evolgen | March 15, 2007I'm really digging the interviews with high profile scientists that Current Biology has been publishing. Last November I quoted their interview with Michael Ashburner (ie, he who will not pose with Prof. Steve Steve) on his thoughts on open access publishing and pointed out that they were being published in a non-open access journal. In the most recent issue, they interview Stephen O'Brien, head of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute. O'Brien was trained as a Drosophila geneticist, and now works on topics as diverse as cheetah population genetics and HIV…
apalazzo | March 15, 2007Yesterday I posted something on that great graphic of scientific literature and paradigm clustering, it reminded me of a serries of posts from last year on a taxonomy of scientists for the layman. I'll repost each entry and the author (below the fold):
THE LIFE SCIENCES
Biochemist:
Basically biochemists play with proteins. Usually this involves fancy machines that cost a ton of money. Proteins are subjected to centrifugation, electrophoresis, fast protein liquid chromatography, gel exclusion chromatography .... Incidentally these techniques are just sophisticated ways of pushing and shoving…
cmcclain | March 14, 2007 Today is my birthday! And although I won't get the birthday spectacular that PZ did, I share my birthday with some magnificent company, Strauss, Ehrlich, Jones, Einstein, Jones, and Crystal.
Peter decided to get me riled up for the ol' b-day by sending a link to a website of the utmost stupidity. Let's just say Peter knows how to push my buttons!
Original Quinton marine plasma is not just seawater. It is nutrient-rich marine fluid harvested from the depths of an oceanic plankton bloom. When taken orally, this Original Quinton marine plasma can restore cellular homeostasis and mineral…
oracknows | March 14, 2007I need some β-blockers STAT.
I say that not because I'm hypertensive or because I'm having heart palpitations--at least not at the moment. I'm saying it because, after reading the latest brave foray into antievolutionary ignorance by--as much as I hate to admit it--a fellow surgeon named Dr. Michael Egnor, I need to do something for prophylaxis against such problems. Yes, Dr. Egnor is back again, hot on the heels of taking massive and much-deserved abuse from the science blogosphere (including a heapin' helpin' of Respectful Insolence⢠from me) over his spreading of misinformation and…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2007Welcome everyone to the 75th edition of Tangled Bank! There is plenty of material here to read so I think that you all will find something to interest you in this collection of the most recent stories about science, nature and medicine. So without further ado, I will let you jump right in.
Science and Religion
Tara at Aetiology wrote about a recent talk about Intelligent Design by Fred Skiff -- a presentation that was long on rhetoric, short on light.
I wrote a book review about God: the Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger. The book critically examines both empirical data and scientific…
clock | March 14, 2007A Rarity Among Arachnids, Whip Spiders Have A Sociable Family Life:
Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely. In two species of whip spiders, or amblypygids, mothers caress their young with long feelers and siblings stick together in social groups until they reach sexual maturity. This is surprising behavior for these arachnids, long-thought to be purely aggressive and anti-social, according to a Cornell researcher.
New Species Of Snapper Discovered In Brazil:
A popular game fish mistaken by scientists for a dog snapper is actually…
petnoyer | March 13, 2007National Geographic explorer-in-residence Dr. Robert Ballard led a team of scientists to explore the "twilight zone" near 100m depth around the Flower Garden Banks region in the Gulf of Mexico last week. Every cabin, van, and workspace on the support vessel SSV Carolyn Chouest seemed to be wired for communication to the shore via dedicated satellite and microwave feeds. The entire Secrets of the Gulf (SOG) expedition was broadcast live over the web through an emerging exploration technology Ballard calls telepresence.
Ballard coined the term telepresence to describe part of his mission at the…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2007
The photographer writes; On the same dive as I took the picture of the mullet (yesterday's image of the day), I took this one under the Port Noarlunga jetty. I came across this little character (length about 100-120mm and the siphons about 25mm diameter). I guess it is related to sea squirts/cunjevoi and I have been using the CSIRO website [to identify it] but there is not too much information there. Stolidobranchia(?), ascidiacea(?). Just another poorly recognised (at least by me!) coinhabitant of this planet. Port Noarlunga is about 10km south of Adelaide in South Australia.
Image:…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2007
Baltimore Oriole Icterus galbula.
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells.
Birds in Science
People have long wondered how cowbirds can get away with leaving their eggs in the nests of other species, who then raise the baby cowbirds. Why don't the hosts just toss the strange eggs out? Now researchers seem to have an answer -- if the host birds reject the strange eggs, the cowbirds come back and trash the place. "It's the female cowbirds who are running the mafia racket at our study site," Jeffrey P. Hoover, of the Florida Museum of Natural History and…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2007
Most of us have grown up with the idea that the Mesozoic Era was, excepting the Early Triassic, a time when dinosaurs dominated life on land. Or, put another way, a time when dinosaurs were the most ecologically significant and most obvious of all land animals. The familiar generalization, recounted in every book on Mesozoic life, is that dinosaurs were the only diverse big-bodied land vertebrates during the Jurassic and Cretaceous and, for as long as this was the case, other tetrapod groups were unable to achieve big body size. But in the same way that the modern world isn't really '…
sporte | March 11, 2007I don't often play these meme games but since none of the other female SciBlings have jumped on the bandwagon, and I've read at least as much science fiction as some of the other Scibs in the game (PZ, Mark, Afrensis, Orac, Joseph, Bora, and John), I just had to join in.
First, for the record, I think whoever came up with this "The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002" overlooked some truly wonderful authors. I'll share some of my favorites in a little bit.
How did I get started reading SF?
When I was a child, we lived in a house with a crawl space…
pharyngula | March 11, 2007
I was reminded of one of the more comical, but persistent misconceptions by creationists in a thread on Internet Infidels, on The Coelacanth. Try doing a google search for “coelacanth creation" and be amazed at the volume of ignorance pumped out on this subject. I've also run across a more recent example of the misrepresentation of the coelacanth that I'll mention later … this poor fish has a long history of abuse by creationists, though, so here's a brief rundown of wacky creationist interpretations.
Crystal Clear Creation: Unlock the secrets of nature, wildlife, the world, from a…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".
First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…
tetrapodzoology | March 9, 2007
It's not all dinosaurs, killer eagles, blue whales, vampires and giant feral cats you know... as planned, I did spend Wednesday evening out in the field looking for newts (for the purposes of this discussion, newt = any member of the amphibian clade Salamandridae that is aquatic during the breeding season). Admittedly 'the field' may not quite be the appropriate term, as the newts we were searching for were a rumoured population reported to inhabit an ornamental pond in the middle of Southampton city centre. It's great, the way people look at you, as you march through an urban area with your…
cmcclain | March 9, 2007Paula Moore is quite unhappy about the colossal squid capture.
None of this is necessary. Leaving fish (and other animals) off our plates is the most humane choice--and the best way to help replenish the world's fragile oceans. It is the only way to ensure that spectacular animals like the colossal squid, surely one of the most mysterious beings of the deep ocean, are spared the indignity of being violently hauled out of their watery homes and turned into the butt of cheap jokes.
The dialogue on vegetarianism and reducing fishing does not really bother me. My wife and I were vegetarian for…