Life Sciences
gregladen | December 8, 2016A few suggestions for holiday gifts, or library upgrades, in the topic of birds.
Thinking About Birds Thinking
Some very interesting books came out this year that investigate bird brains.
Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence by Nathan Emery is the best current book on animal intelligence, and one of the best bird books you'll be able to lay your hands on right now.
My review of the book is here.
What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young is an exploration of nature via the senses (mainly visual and auditory) of birds, and of the…
gregladen | December 3, 2016Here is my selection of the top science books from 2016, excluding those mainly for kids. Also, I don't include climate change related books here either. (These will both be covered in separate posts.)
The number of books on this list is not large, and I think this was not the most prolific year ever for top science books. But, the ones on the list are great! For brevity, I'm mostly using the publisher's info below. Where I've reviewed the book, there is a link to that review. Click through to the reviews if you want to read my commentary, but in most cases, you can judge these books by…
gregladen | November 15, 2016The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals ,by Donald R. Prothero, is the first extinct animal book that you, dear reader, are going to give to someone for the holidays.
This book is an interesting idea. Never mind the field guide part for a moment. This isn't really set up like a field guide, though it is produced by the excellent producers of excellent field guides at Princeton. But think about the core idea here. Take every group of mammal, typically at the level of Order (Mammal is class, there are more than two dozen living orders with about 5,000 species) and ask for each one, "…
gregladen | September 20, 2016Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out.
But that is true of a lot of things. Your baby is smart (not really). Your dog is smart (not really). Ants are smart (sort of).
It takes a certain degree of objective research, as well as some serious philosophy of intelligence (to define what smart is) to really address this question. But when the research is done and the dust settles, crows are smart.
We were all amazed (or not, because we already knew that crows are smart) to find that New Caledonian crows made and used tools. Now, we know (see my most recent…
dr. dolittle | September 8, 2016 Image of a rat in the New York City subway By m01229 from USA, from Wikimedia commons
News out of Flagstaff, Arizona reports that a biotechnology company in the area, SenesTech, has developed a birth control for rats that was recently cleared by the Environmental Protection Agency. The new drug comes in the form of a sweetened liquid bait that has been shown to reduce rodent populations by as much as 40%. It works in female rats by inducing loss of eggs whereas in male rats it disrupts development of sperm.
The drug is also being tested in other feral animals such as dogs, cats, and mice.…
gregladen | August 27, 2016Wildlife of Southeast Asia by Susan Myers, is a new pocket identification guide covering "wildlife" in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, West Malaysia, and Singapore.
It covers birds, mammals, reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates. Considering that there must be tens of millions of inverts in Southeast Asia, the coverage here is very minimal, just the highlights, just a few pages. This is mainly a bird book, with pretty good coverage of mammals, a bunch of snakes, some of the more important frogs, and some of the more obvious insects, etc.
It is standard field guide size, and uses…
gregladen | July 15, 2016You can read this book review, or you can just go HERE and listen to our interview with author Christie Wilcox. I promise you in advance that you will want to read her book!
But, if you want to read the book review, here it is...
Did you ever do anything that hurt, then you had to do it again and you knew it would still hurt, and you didn't like that? Like getting your teeth cleaned, or licking a nine volt battery. OK, maybe you didn't have to lick the nine volt battery, but you get my point.
When I was working in the Ituri Forest, in the Congo, taking a walk in the forest was one of…
tsmith | May 27, 2016 E. coli, from Wikipedia commons
We've been expecting it, and now it's here.
Yesterday, two article were released showing that MCR-1, the plasmid-associated gene that provides resistance to the antibiotic colistin, has been found in the United States. And not just in one place, but in two distinct cases: a woman with a urinary tract infection (UTI) in Pennsylvania, reported in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and a positive sample taken from a pig's intestine as part of the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS), which tracks…
dr. dolittle | May 18, 2016
The Michigan Physiological Society, a chapter of the American Physiological Society, held their 3rd annual meeting last week. As mentioned in a prior post, the keynote address was given by Comparative Physiologist Dr. Hannah Carey (University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine). You can read about her research in the prior post.
Here are other highlights from the meeting:
Seminars:
Photo of crayfish by "Krebse in Österreich", own work, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=858592
...or as I prefer to view them:
Image of crayfish dinner By Игоревич (Own work…
gregladen | May 16, 2016The trick to understanding evolution is less about finding good answer to questions, but rather, finding good questions to answer.
Read that sentence twice, because it is very important.
Years ago, Niko Tinbergen developed a method of formulating questions about biology. I'm pretty sure the Tinbergenian method has not been integrated into most science standards and teaching curriculum. It should be.
There are four types of questions one could formulate about a biological system, trait, or observation.
1) Mechanistic. How does this thing work? What cellular processes are involved in a…
milhayser | April 4, 2016In January, Hillary Clinton still possessed the benefit of the doubt. Memories of her and Bill snarling at Barack Obama in 2008 had faded, and despite her long and dreadful record, it's always possible to turn over a new leaf. But Clinton's ongoing response to Bernie Sanders shows why she is unfit for the presidency. Even as the frontrunner, Hillary shows no leadership ability; she, too, follows Sanders, trailing him to the left as he takes meaningful positions on issues like income inequality and campaign finance reform. Her saccharine smile says "I can do that too!" but truly she should be…
gregladen | March 18, 2016There are three kinds of books that count as animal (usually bird) guides.
1) A pocket field guide of the critters of a reasonably circumscribed geographical area, like the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. This is a small book that can fit in a big pocket, and a classic guide like this one is something you'll want to have with you while bird watching in the eastern or central US.
2) A big book, not suitable for pockets, of the critters of a reasonably circumscribed geographical area. A great example of this is The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds . It…
pharyngula | March 17, 2016Robin Loznak
This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob -- he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel…
milhayser | March 16, 2016Would it surprise you to learn that the top movie at the North American box office, a computer-animated family film made for children, is a nakedly racist allegory, a celebration of the urban police state, and an insult to the entire animal kingdom and the natural world at large?
The premise of Zootopia is simple: a country bunny named Judy (yes, she's a rabbit) leaves her parents and her hundreds of siblings behind for a life in the big city. The difference between rural and urban living is the first ugly dichotomy the film establishes: farming carrots with your family is framed as a dead-…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2016 The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940.
I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power.
I don't give a damn about the US primaries.
A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art.
The surname Garfunkel means "carbuncle, garnet" and is thus…
oracknows | February 21, 2016If there's one thing I've learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it's that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the 2009-2010 influenza season, the Ebola outbreak in late 2014, and the Disneyland measles outbreak last year, when cranks of many stripes claimed that either the outbreaks themselves were due to conspiracies (usually, but not limited to, conspiracies to promote the "depopulation" vaccination agenda of—…
kkrisberg | February 12, 2016Manufacturers who market their products as “BPA-free” aren’t just sending consumers a message about chemical composition. The underlying message is about safety — as in, this product is safe or least more safe than products that do contain BPA. However earlier this month, another study found that a common BPA alternative — BPS — may not be safer at all.
“BPS works very similarly to BPA,” said Nancy Wayne, a reproductive endocrinologist and professor of physiology at the University of California-Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine. “We’re not the first to show this, but what’s captured…
pharyngula | February 12, 2016Larry Moran has heard the words of Michael Denton, and has come away with a creationist interpretation of structuralism. I have to explain to Larry that Denton, as you might expect of a creationist, is distorting the whole idea. Here's the Denton/Intelligent Design creationism version of structuralist theory.
As Denton says, the basic idea is that the form (structure) of modern organisms is a property of the laws of physics and chemistry and not something that evolution discovered. He would argue that if you replay the tape of life you will always get species that look pretty much like the…
milhayser | January 14, 2016On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski reports another crack in one of the pillars of modern life—antibiotics. New research in China shows that a family of bacteria called Enterobacteriaceae (which includes E. coli and Salmonella) have acquired a gene that provides resistance to a last-resort antibiotic known as Colistin. These species of bacteria do not have to evolve resistance individually—in fact, they can trade antibiotic-resistant genes with one another using "transmissible pieces of DNA–plasmids, transposons, phage." As Tara Smith writes, "Since the development of penicillin, we have been…
pharyngula | January 6, 2016Once upon a time, deep in the Precambrian, this was the planet of worms. Well, actually, this was, is, and always will be the planet of bacteria, but if you filter your perspective to just organisms above a particular size, and if you're an animal writing about it in the modern day with a chauvinistic attitude that allows you to ignore that it was also a planet of algae, that would become a planet of plants, on a world that also is built of soil formed by lichens and saturated with fungus…if you ignore all that, OK, it was a planet of worms.
Late in the Precambrian, the oceans were full of…