Thirty years ago yesterday, "the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMR) published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California." (see This Blog Post for details). Morbidity and Mortality Weekly is a really fun journal to read. It contains the latest reports of, well, death and serious illness as a means of disseminating information in a way that will allow quick response. So, if there are suddenly a bunch of cases of some disease scattered across the country, this kind of reporting may…

I'm sitting here looking at Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor's Guide. I've never been to the Antarctic so I can't tell you what I think of this book from the pragmatic angle of how well it works as a guide, but I can tell you that I've learned a number of things just looking at the book. For one thing, I had no idea that almost all tourist visits to Antarctica go to the same general area of the continent. I guess that makes sense given the geography of the region, but it had not occurred to me before. I've guided a number of tours in Africa and some of my clients were very serious world…

Life History, Genetic Relatedness, and the Evolution of Menopause Imagine you're on the Serengeti Plateau and your children are hungry. For miles in every direction there's nothing but dry scrub grass with the occasional flat-topped acacia tree marking the landscape. Your oldest has found a spot to dig for tubers but he and your daughter aren't strong enough to scrape away the hard, baked earth by themselves. Your husband is tracking a wounded gazelle and could be gone for days. Meanwhile, the infant slung to your hip has started screaming and the distinctive sound triggers a release of…

Don't forget to tune in to Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio on Sunday AM (click the link for details) to hear Desiree Schell and I settle whatever differences we may have on how to BE A SKEPTIC!!! I warn you, this could be gruesome. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Office of Homeland Security have set up checkpoints on the border. Listen in, call in, email in.

On of my favorite books is A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story set in at the junction of a native and expat community in an African rain forest country with a not very despotic leader (the "Big Man") at a time when a civil war was about to arrive on the scene. I like the book because of the writing, because of the story, because one of the character is supposedly based on someone I vaguely know (that's always fun) and because I was there .... living at the juncture of an expat and native community in a rain forested African country with a not-to-despotic leader named Mobutu…

As you know, the NCSE brokers free chapters and sometimes entire books for people to download and read, in order to disseminate knowledge about Important Stuff. They just released a chapter of Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life by Martin Brasier. Click here to download the PDF file.

A hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology, with songs about Sexual Selection, Artificial Selection, Altruism, Morality, and Unity of Common Descent. The Rap Guide to Evolution by Baba Brinkman More here.

The West Indies includes the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands); the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola [Dominican Republic and Haiti], Jamaica, Cayman Islands); the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands [the Virgin Islands of Saint Croix, Saint Thomas, Saint John, Water Island, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Jost Van Dyke], Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, Saint Martin, Saba, Saint Eustatius, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Montserrat Guadeloupe); the Windward Islands (Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines…

There are many fascinating stories linked to the early days of evolutionary biology and geology, and more than one of them is intertwined with our understanding of coral reefs. I had always thought that Darwin's interaction with the question of how coral reefs form was central to Darwin's own formation as a scientist, in part because of Charles Lyell. Lyell was the Big Kahuna of geology and earth science of the day, and had more or less established the standing theory of how coral reefs formed. Darwin, on observing reefs "in the wild" very quickly realized that Lyell was mostly wrong, and…

Even as the situation at the troubled Fukushima Nuclear Reactors ... well, remains troubled ... the post-game analysis of what went wrong and what could have been done better develops. It is becoming clear that the plant had no real plan for the event of a tsunami even though it was built at an elevation within that affected by historically known and documented tsunami waves, and there is post-hoc confusion and denial related to early screw ups in trying to avoid a meltdown in the reactors (which ended up occurring), for instance. Highly radioactive water continues to leak out of at least…

It is Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that US citizens and I'd bet some Canadians will be receiving the annual Brown Recluse Spider Warnings via Email. In order to reduce the negative effects of this email spamish meme, I hereby inoculate you. If you get the email, which usually comes with dire warnings and lots of photographs of bad things happening to people's flesh allegedly because of a recluse spider bite, just delete it. Look at this map and read the caption: This map is based on data collected by arachnologists and is provided courtesy of Rick Vetter. Generally,…

Moms and Dads: Are your children idiots? There is a distinct possibility. Better check your paperwork from school, see if there's any warning notes in there. Here's the thing. For some reason, over the last week, I've been the unwitting recipient of mis-dialed text messages from giddy tweens. In each case there was a series of indecipherable messages that I ignored for a while. Eventually, in each case, I finally sent back a text saying "U have the wrong number." In each case the child did not understand the meaning of that phrase and proceeded to explain how they have the correct…

I recommend The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds. It was written by three serious bird experts and it will serve any bird watcher in North America very well. Here's how you use it. You go bird watching and later, you look up one or two of the birds you saw, read the entries on them, read the entries cross referenced in those first entries, and otherwise explore around this compendium of information about bird ecology and biology. The Book For instance, you spy a Clapper Rail. So you look that up and see the reference to the essay on rails.…

Welcome to the Thirty Sixth Carnival of Evolution. The world of blog carnivals is in a state of flux and uncertainty these days, with the distinct possibility of a mass extinction just around the corner. One of the oldest, longest running, and most important carnivals, I and the Bird, issued its last issue only a few days ago, and the Keepers of the Carnival of Evolution themselves are said to be thinking about ways that this whole carnival thing can be made to work better. That could, I suppose, mean killing it and replacing it with something else. We are hopeful that this will not be…

Louisiana Senate Bill SB 70 would have repealed Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which in turn imposed the inappropriately named Louisiana Science Education Act which, as Barbara Forrest recently noted "was promoted only by creationists. Neither parents, nor science teachers, nor scientists requested it. No one wanted it except the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a religious organization that lobbies aggressively for its regressive agenda, and the Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think tank in Seattle, Washington, that couldn't care less about Louisiana children." Despite the…

Zack Kopplin, the high school senior who led the fight to repeal the creationist Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) on MSNBC: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This much: Benchmark map of carbon stored in Earth's tropical forests, covering about 2.5 million hectares of forests over more than 75 countries. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/Winrock International/Colorado State University/University of Edinburgh/Applied GeoSolutions/University of Leeds/Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux/Wake Forest University/University of Oxford. Click image for slightly larger version . Click HERE for very much larger version. A NASA-led research team has used a variety of NASA satellite data to create the most precise map ever produced depicting the amount…

This is funny. Have you noticed that lately there has been some interesting synchronization between ads on Scienceblogs.com and our blog posts? Just now, DrugMonkey wrote a blog post concerning discussions in the professional community of scientists who use animals in research. Here is a screen shot of the blog post showing the banner ad that appeared above it: (Click the picture to get a larger version.) Interesting idea. You write a blog post defending a particular point of view, and Google figures out how to put an ad for a training program to generate specialized cops to…

We three had somehow wound our way down into the canyon without experiencing any really steep slopes, but having walked for several miles in the sandy dry riverbed, Trusted Companion, Young One, and I were now looking rather hopelessly at unsafe-to-climb cliffs on both sides, covered with imposing vegetation of the kind that sports a thorn every few inches. The sun was low enough that the canyon floor was in a dark shadow, and the air was beginning to chill down. We were far enough from the vehicle, lost enough, and sufficiently plan-free that it would be perfectly reasonable to worry that…