clock | September 11, 2007Was Ability To Run Early Man's Achilles Heel?:
The earliest humans almost certainly walked upright on two legs but may have struggled to run at even half the speed of modern man, new research suggests.
Tasmanian Tiger No Match For Dingo:
The wily dingo out-competed the much larger marsupial thylacine by being better built anatomically to resist the "mechanical stresses" associated with killing large prey, say Australian scientists.
A Dog In The Hand Scares Birds In The Bush:
New research showing that dog-walking in bushland significantly reduces bird diversity and abundance will lend support…
clock | September 11, 2007Learning, Playing, Cooking...
tHE tiDE cHAsER
Pulau Hantu - A celebration of marine life
Manta Blog
Sea Slug Forum
The bird ecology study group (Singapore)
Nature Spies
clock | September 11, 2007Holy Cow! Every Tuesday night I like to link to 5-6 of the brand new papers on PLoS ONE that I find personally most intriguing. But today, it is so difficult to choose - I want to highlight something like 20 out of today's 39. So, here are a few and you definitely go and see the whole list for yourself (and you know the drill, as I parrot it every week: read, rate, comment):
Impedance-Matching Hearing in Paleozoic Reptiles: Evidence of Advanced Sensory Perception at an Early Stage of Amniote Evolution
Insights into the onset of evolutionary novelties are key to the understanding of amniote…
clock | September 11, 2007Carnival of the Professoriate #1 and #2 are up on ACRLog.
Grand Rounds are up at The Efficient MD
Carnival of Homeschool #89 is up on Why Homeschool
clock | September 11, 2007The Triangle blogging season has started, so I hope many of you locals and visitors join us for the first meetup of the year:
The Durham bloggers meetup will be the second Wednesday of each month at 6pm at Tyler's Tap Room in the American Tobacco Warehouse District. First meetup will be Sept.12th. Anton will coordinate. Duke is rapidly taking to blogging, and we've discovered some cool food bloggers in Durham -- and Pam Spaulding has represented the city well -- so we hope this meetup gets good attendance.
I bet there will be a lot of science and health bloggers there! What with Anton's new…
clock | September 11, 2007Device To Predict Proper Light Exposure For Human Health:
Scientists have long known that the human body runs like clockwork, guided by a circadian system that responds to daily patterns of light and darkness. Now a team of researchers is developing a personal device to measure daily light intake and activity, which could allow them to predict optimal timing for light therapy to synchronize the circadian clock to the 24-hour solar day and relieve psychosocial stress.
Pivotal Hearing Structure Revealed:
Scientists have shed light on how our bodies convert vibrations entering the ear into…
clock | September 10, 2007My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
clock | September 10, 2007In PLoS Biology:
High-Resolution Genome-Wide Dissection of the Two Rules of Speciation in Drosophila:
The evolution of reproductive isolation is a fundamental step in the origin of species. One kind of reproductive isolation, the sterility and inviability of species hybrids, is characterized by two of the strongest rules in evolutionary biology. The first is Haldane's rule: for species crosses in which just one hybrid sex is sterile or inviable, it tends to be the sex defined by having a pair of dissimilar sex chromosomes (e.g., the "XY" of males in humans). The second rule is the large X…
clock | September 10, 2007Encephalon #31 is up on Dr.Deb's blog.
The 15th Edition of The International Carnival Of Pozitivities is up on Living Mindfully with HIV/AIDS.
The carnival of the Green #94 is up on Camphor's.
clock | September 9, 2007Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.
- Marcus Aurelius
clock | September 9, 2007Randy Olson's movie had a very short and limited release. Reed rallied the troops so NCSU library got a copy and there was a public viewing that I could not attend.
But now, everyone can watch it, as Jennifer reports. It is available, for instance, on amazon.com. I'll put it on my wishlist for now, so it is there, ready for me to buy it when I get some money next time.
clock | September 9, 2007Primates Expect Others To Act Rationally:
When trying to understand someone's intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University.
Brain's Timing Linked With Timescales Of The…
clock | September 9, 2007First edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival is up on BayBlab.
Gene-Genie #15 is up on Cancer Genetics.
Mendel's Garden #18 is up on Balancing Life.
Carnival of Mathematics XVI is up on Learning Computation
clock | September 9, 2007Sniffing the beaker
Bonobo Handshake
All of My Faults Are Stress Related
Inorganics
Ripples in Sand
Brilliant Mediocrity
Apparent Dip
Becky's Guide To Blogging
clock | September 9, 2007Today on Quotes of the Day:
Harland David Sanders was born at Henryville, Indiana on this day in 1890. His father's death six years later led to Harland doing all the cooking for the family. He left school early and led a varied career including street-car conductor, a soldier in China at sixteen, a railroad fireman, justice of the peace (after a correspondence course in law), he operated an Ohio River ferry line, sold insurance, and operated a service station. At the service station, he fed hungry travelers in his quarters above the station. When the food proved more popular than auto…
clock | September 8, 2007In former times it took dozens of clerks, secretaries, and administrators to create a bureaucratic milieu capable of diffusing responsibility for misinformation and disservices. Today thanks to desk-top information processors, small firms and agencies down to the neighborhood hardware store are finding it possible to emulate the bureaucratic style by blaming their disservices on their computer.
- Marvin Harris
clock | September 8, 2007Force For Democracy -- Or Information Chaos? Expert Forum Spotlights Blogging:
Controversial Internet entrepreneur turned cultural critic Andrew Keen, who says the revolution of interactivity and user-generated content on the internet is leading to 'less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information' is one contributor certain to ignite debate at the two-day conference at the University of York. The conference is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through its e-Society programme.
Future Career Path Of Gifted Youth Can Be Predicted By Age 13 By SAT:
The…
clock | September 8, 2007This story is making the e-mail rounds and I cannot resist posting it here. I started rolling on the floor laughing about a quarter into the story. See how far you can go and still keep a straight face (under the fold)....
If you have raised kids (or been one), and gone through the pet syndrome, including toilet flush burials for dead goldfish, the story below will have you laughing out LOUD!
Overview: I had to take my son's lizard to the vet.
Here's what happened:
Just after dinner one night, my son came up to tell me there was "something wrong" with one of the two lizards he holds…
clock | September 8, 2007Two recent examples of successful and aggressive defense against carnivores - the first one was everywhere, but I watched it first on Stranger Fruit (African buffaloes chasing away the lions - with a crocodile playing a supporting role) and the second one just got posted on Anterior Commissure (wildebeest mother chasing away African wild dogs). What great examples of strong parental behaviors - worth your time watching both videos in their entirety: