grrlscientist | May 4, 2007
I am a great admirer of nudibranchs, having worked with them for a little while as a graduate student, but this is the first one that has appeared on this blog. Does anyone know the species?
The photographer writes; It's a nudibranch with a nice purple sea urchin in the background.
I don't know what sort, but I saw two of them yesterday at Port Noarlunga (Australia). This one was about 120mm long. It was in about 2m of water at low tide on the limestone reef.
[much larger image]
Image: Stephen Kittel, stephenk at internode dot on dot net.
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: Venus flytrap, plant, biology, mechanics
A Venus flytrap lies open, waiting for an insect to set off its trap. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and colleagues have shown that the plant uses stored elastic energy to operate its hinged leaves.
Image: Yoel Forterre.
How does the venus flytrap accomplish what most people cannot? How does a mere plant capture live flies? The mystery of the Venus flytrap's rapid movement lies in storing and releasing elastic energy, says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Harvard University.…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: mental health, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, children
How many of you are survivors of childhood verbal abuse? I am not talking about an occasional parental outburst, but rather, consistent full-scale verbal assaults by your parents? According to a recent study by Harvard University psychiatrists, these so-called verbal beatings are as hurtful to an individual as sexual abuse and may also have long-lasting effects on the brain and behavior.
"Exposure to verbal aggression has received little attention as a specific form of abuse," notes Martin Teicher, associate professor of psychiatry at…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: shampoo, Kaye Effect, streaming video
Scientists of the University of Twente in The Netherlands won a prestigious place in the 'Hall of Fame' of videos about fluid-in-motion. They made a streaming video of "leaping shampoo", in which they reveal the details of the so-called Kaye effect. Scientifically interesting but also of great aesthetic beauty!
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: blog carnival, education
The 117th issue of the Carnival of Education is now available for you to read. Despite the fact that the school year is nearly over, so everyone is quite busy, there are plenty of pieces here to read.
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: parrot, birds, illegal trade, endangered species, Mexico
The Defenders of Wildlife have published their 121 page report on The Illegal Parrot Trade in Mexico by Juan Carlos CantuÌ GuzmaÌn for you to download for free. I just downloaded a copy myself so will not be ready to discuss it with you for a few days, but I am interested to learn what you have to think about it so I will likely write something in the near future about my reactions to it. [PDF].
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: blog carnival, birds
The 48th issue of the blog carnival, I and the Bird is available for your reading pleasure. This, as usual, is a big carnival and should keep you busy reading for at least a week. As an added bonus, there are two pieces from me included in this issue .. not sure how I snuck in two of my many submissions, but I am pleased by this nonetheless!
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: paralysis, nanotechnology, medicine
A group of lab mice were intentionally paralyzed by cutting their spinal cords. As a result, they ended up dragging their hind legs behind them instead of scurrying around as mice do. But a group of these mice have partially recovered movement in their hind legs without the aid of surgery or drugs, thanks to a new field of medical research known as regenerative medicine.
Samuel Stupp and his colleagues are several of the pioneers in the field regenerative medicine, and they have developed a liquid that is injected into the severed spines of these…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007
Old Wives Enoplosus armatus.
The photographer writes; A very common fish in South Australia. They can be found in small schools or individually. Yesterday (25 April, actually), there were a number of pairs sitting quietly along the bottom edge of the Port Noarlunga reef. This pair were sheltering under an old ship's anchor located on a SCUBA diver's trail. There were several other pairs just out in the open above the sandy floor. This pair was at about 4-5m depth at low tide. I was only snorkelling but I was able to dive down a number of times to get several shots. The fish didn't swim away…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: South Pacific Islands, Indonesia, rainforest destruction, environment
Southwestern region of the island nation, Indonesia. The pale land mass to the bottom, right is Australia while the pale region to the upper left is southeast Asia.
Image source.
Partially because many species of my research birds are endemic there, Indonesia is my most favorite country which I've never visited. So I am saddened and disturbed to learn that Indonesia is being awarded a rather dubious distinction. In fact, so tremendous is the destruction of its rainforests, that Indonesia will be listed in the 2008…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: Harry Potter, JK Rowling, books, environment
I have written about this once before, but like most good news, one never gets tired of repeating it. In this case, Harry Potter fans will be most pleased to learn that the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will print a version that will contain a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer waste fiber. In short; this book will be forest-friendly.
Additionally, nearly two-thirds of the 16,700 tons of paper will be approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international organization with a mission to "promote…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: sloths, humor, streaming video
This is a streaming video that shows you a little bit about those forgotten mammals, sloths. These animals are native to Central and South America. They belong to the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae, in the taxonomic order Pilosa. They are omnivores, eating insects, small lizards and carrion whan they can find it, but their diet mainly consists of buds, tender shoots, and especially leaves. Because they subsist primarily on leaves, which have little nutritive value and are difficult to digest, sloths have multichambered stomachs filled with…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: day of reason, religion, secular humanist, politics
In response to the federally-supported National Day of Prayer, which is an abuse of the constitution, a group of nontheists and traditional religious allies who value the separation of church and state, have declared today the National Day of Reason. This day is being observed on the first Thursday of May, which is the National Day of Prayer.
What is the purpose of the National Day of Reason? It exists to encourage the secular and religious organizations to effect positive change in their communities. The goal of this effort is to…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007tags: MacDonald, USFWS, endangered species, politics
Some of you might not yet know this, but in the highly charged atmosphere that that existed at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary who oversaw the USFWS endangered species program, finally has resigned. After an egregious and ongoing abuse of power, MacDonald was finally rebuked for altering scientific documents to reduce protections for endangered species and for providing internal documents to lobbyists.
MacDonald is a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences and who clearly…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007tags: ducks, birds, phallus, vagina, evolution, reproduction
An interesting article was published today by a group led by Patricia Brennan in the open-access journal, PLoS One, about the structural co-evolution of duck phalluses and vaginas. What, you ask? Ducks have phalluses? Yes, indeed they do. Further, ducks are also famous for forced copulations -- as many as 30% of all copulations are forced -- so it only makes evolutionary sense that females have co-evolved a method for excluding sperm they don't want fertilizing their precious eggs.
This paper examines the reproductive and…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007
Newly described species, Goodman's mouse lemur, Microcebus lehilahytsara.
is is a new species of Lemur that they've identified in Madagascar. They named it after Steve Goodman. The scientists say; Lehilahytsara means "good man" in Malagasy. The German primatologists chose this name to honor Steve Goodman, scientist with The Field Museum in Chicago and WWF in Madagascar. "Goodman's field research in all remote parts of Madagascar has contributed enormously to our knowledge about the diversity of Madagascar's unique and threatened fauna and flora," Kappeler says.
"It is truly an honor to have…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007tags: tainted pet food, melamine, Food and Drug Administration, FDA, Andrew von Eschenbach, politics
In view of the current problems with melamine-tainted pet foods, and the fact that these foods escaped detection by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for so long, a growing number of people are concerned about the safety of human foods as well. Obviously, based on this tainted pet food fiasco, the FDA is ill-equipped to test imported foods for safety and as a result, who is to say that these poisoned pet foods are not a "trial run" for something bigger, something that can cause wholesale…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007tags: McDonald's food, science experiment, streaming video
So, this video of a science experiment is especially for those of you who enjoy eating at McDonald's. I thought you would enjoy it, but to cut the suspense, I'll tell you that the fries won, okay? They won!
grrlscientist | May 1, 2007
Can you image how much patience is required to photograph ants?
Formica aserva
Northern Sierra Nevada, California, USA
Formica aserva, a slave-raiding ant.
Photographer: Alexander Wild, 2003.
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 or not: we have a choice to either preserve these…
grrlscientist | May 1, 2007tags: preying mantis, mouse, streaming video
Do you think it is weird that an insect could eat a mammal? Well, it happens, although not commonly. In this case, I have a streaming video that shows a preying mantis hunting and then eating a mouse. I sure wish I had a flock of preying mantids in my apartment; they'd defintely be well-fed there!