gregladen | January 25, 2008Remember this post on chimpanzee food sharing? Over a PLoS, where the original paper is published, you can get involved in a discussion of the paper. I posted something over there in response to someone else'
Go have a look, here.
Access to the discussion is on the right side bar.
gregladen | January 25, 2008The Hagfish, or Slime Eel, is said to be an aphrodisiac. Hard evidence that hagfish can enhance sexual prowess is lacking, but this fish can get evolutionary biologists very hot.
A recently published paper, reviewed here, on Pharyngula, addresses the interesting evolutionary question. In general terms, it is this: Hagfish possess traits that appear to be ancestral to vertebrates, but that in fact might be derived. Therefore, they are either a sister group to the living vertebrates, or are correctly placed within the vertebrates (i.e., with the lampreys). If the latter, it is correct (…
gregladen | January 24, 2008Pasteurella multocida is a bacterium often called Avian cholera (though it is a different organims than the disease that affects humans). It is estimated that about 15,000 birds have died over the last few weeks in the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. A similar epidemic occurred in 1994, killing 10,000 birds.
There are writeups here at the New York Times and here at the USGS.
gregladen | January 24, 2008Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, photojournalist James Nachtwey talks about his decades as a war photographer. A slideshow of his photos, beginning in 1981 in Northern Ireland, reveal two parallel themes in his work. First, as he says: "The frontlines of contemporary wars are right where people live." Street violence, famine, disease: he has photographed all these modern WMDs. Second, when a photo catches the world's attention, it can truly drive action and change. In his TED wish, he asks for help gaining access to a story that needs to be told, and developing a new, digital way to show these…
gregladen | January 24, 2008A hopeful monster is a mutant born with a genetically determined and large novel trait (compared to its parents) which confers enhanced fitness on that individual. This enhanced fitness increases the likelihood that the new mutant gene that determines this trait will be passed on and spread throughout the evolving population, so in a single generation a rapid process of speciation is initiated. For example, a fish with a mutation that causes both its eyes to grow on one side of its head could become the flounder of a new generation of flatfish. Well, just for the halibut, it might be fun…
gregladen | January 24, 2008The amount of ice lost to the sea from Antarctica has increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years. This is the result of an increase in glacial flow. It had previously been thought, and perhas was the case, that Greenland ice loss outpaced the Antarctica. This is no longer the case.
An article coming out in the next issue of Nature Geoscience, by Rignot et al ("Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling") is the most detailed study of this phenomenon to date.
There are two factors that affect the flow of ice into the sea at the edge of the…
gregladen | January 23, 2008In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.
gregladen | January 23, 2008So far no reliable reports seem to be available of a new and potentially interesting, but not necessarily earth-shattering, find in China.
China finds 100,000-year-old human skull: report from PhysOrg.com
An almost complete human skull dating back 80,000 to 100,000 years has been unearthed in central China, state media reported Wednesday.
[...]
gregladen | January 23, 2008This was one of many questions debated at the Second Annual Scientific Blogging Conference in North Carolina this weekend which I attended together with over 200 other folks who work in scientific communication.
When I told my friends I was going to North Carolina this weekend to attend a blogging conference they either said, "cool - why?" or "you're weird - why?".
Read this thing by Liz Allen
gregladen | January 23, 2008For the geeks only: An overview of D, a programming language that gloms C and C++.
Here.
gregladen | January 23, 2008Check out Tangled Up in Blue Guy's LOL creationist school board yahoo, here.
gregladen | January 23, 2008The end-Permian mass extinction event was the big daddy of all the known mass extinction events. Life on the planet Earth was almost entirely wiped out. A new paper explores the post-extinction recovery of ecological systems.
Post extinction dynamics can be understood in relation to several dimensions: Taxonomy (the range and structure of different taxonomic groups); ecology (the interrelationship between the new species and the niches available, as well as the structure and distribution of those niches); and morphology (the overall morphospace filled by the new taxa). The present study…
gregladen | January 23, 2008Ebola is a nasty virus that causes an often fatal hemorrhagic fever. It crops up most of the time in The Congo (nee Zaire) but there have been significant outbreaks and isolated cases in The Sudan and South Africa. It is very virulent, passed on via bodily fluids. There may be a cure on the horizon.
From a University of Wisconsin Press Release:
a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has figured out a way to genetically disarm the virus, effectively confining it to a set of specialized cells and making the agent safe to study under conditions far less stringent…
gregladen | January 23, 2008Careful scanning of recent Mars rover imagery shows a sentient being. The best explanation for this is that the sentient being or beings have been following around the Spirit Rover for some time, always ducking behind a rock when the cameras swung their way. But this photograph shows a sentient being caught in the act:
[source]
What is especially interesting about this case is that we can clearly identify this being as Bigfoot. Compare with this photograph of Bigfoot:
Coincidence? I think not.
(Thanks to Virgil Samms for this tip)