grrlscientist | January 10, 2007Have you ever wondered what is the inactivation temperature of the avian influenza virus? How far a flea can jump? How long a royal albatross incubates its egg? How many stomata are on the leaf of a geranium? How many ommatidia are in the compound eye of a dragonfly? If these and other questions keep you awake at night, now you can find the answers that you seek in a new book, Amazing Numbers in Biology by Rainer Flindt (New York: Springer Verlag, 2003). Basically, this delightful book is the Guiness Book of World Records for the natural world.
Even though much of this data has long been…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007
In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn and slightly scattering sunlight, in the above exaggerated color image. Saturn's rings light up so much that new rings were…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007After my own experience with feces on my airplane seat cushion on US Airways, I was hardly surprised to learn that a scorpion had made its way onto a plane .. except this was a United flight rather than US Airways. Anyway, this scorpion stung a man twice, once on his leg and then on his shin.
A scorpion stung David Sullivan on the back of his right leg, just below the knee, then continued up that leg and down the other, he believes, before getting him again in the shin.
It wasn't what he was expecting on a flight from Chicago to Vermont.
[ .. ]
"My right leg felt like it was asleep, but that…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007There is a new study in Sweden that was just published showing a relationship between sleep disturbances, mainly nightmares, and suicide attempts.
Most (89 percent) patients reported having at least one type of sleep problem, with difficulty falling asleep as the most common problem (73 percent), the researchers report in the journal SLEEP. In addition, 69 percent said they had trouble staying asleep and nearly 60 percent said they experienced early morning awakening.
Two out of every three patients (66 percent) also reported experiencing nightmares, study findings indicate. "Frequent…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time:
And all out yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-- William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, Act V Scene V
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tags: Shakespeare, Tomorrow,poetry, literature
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007From the archives ...
New York City (AP) - After an unsuccessful year-long search for funds to support two years of research and living expenses, a scientist and freelance writer has offered to fund her research by selling access to her internationally televised death by electrocution and by auctioning all body parts on ebay.
GrrlScientist, a molecular evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, and a freelance writer, researches and writes about speciation in birds and the evolution and historical geographic movements of parrots among the islands of the south Pacific Ocean. These islands…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007
Moonlit Beach.
Orphaned Image. Please contact me for proper creditation.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: moonlight, beach, nature, geology
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007tags: birds, book review, conservation, Hawai'i
Conservation is all about saving endangered species, right? Well, not always. In this book, Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawai'ian Island by Mark Jerome Walters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), the author tells the heartbreaking story of how people who were fighting to save the endangered `alalâ, the Hawai'ian raven, Corvus hawaiiensis, actually hastened the bird's extinction in the wild.
The `alalâ is the Hawai'ian name for a sacred bird; a indigenous raven that is honored by Hawai'ians as a guardian spirit that…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007A large flock of dead grackles, sparrows and pigeons scared the poop out of Texas officials, causing the shutdown of a 10 block area in downtown Austin, Texas this morning. People dressed in Hazmat suits cleared up the birds, whose bodies will be tested to identify the cause of their untimely deaths.
Some experts said the most likely cause of the die-off was a deliberate poisoning. "It happens quite frequently," said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society in Washington.
Grackles are a crowlike bird regarded as a major pest in Texas, with Austin sidewalks…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007According to a recent news story, two NASA space probes that visited Mars in 1976 and 1977 might have discovered life there, but then killed it, according to a hypothesis presented by Dirk Schulze-Makuch at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington. This is based on the fact that the probe was only seeking earth-like life;
Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Schulze-Makuch.
That's because a water-hydrogen peroxide mix stays liquid at very…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007As you watch these videos, you can almost imagine what a dromaeosaur might do something similar in self defense or against each other in battles for mates or territory. You sometimes hear about cassowaries disemboweling other animals, such as dogs.
But because dromaeosaurs had a much sharper claw than cassowaries, it is easy to imagine dromaeosaurs disembowelling smaller prey more easily than a cassowary might. By comparison, the cassowary claw is surprisingly dull and straight, almost hoof-like in nature.
Another video depicting cassowary attacks ...
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tags: cassowary, attack, streaming…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007I have been trying to update my blogroll for the past three days without success. Spercifically, I am trying to update my "drinking pals" section since I now have three new blog writers who are new drinking pals of mine; John, Brent and Jim, whose beautiful house I visited while I was in Phoenix -- all of which is due solely to SICB.
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007
Woodland Skipper, Poanes melanae,
puddling at a seep in the Deschutes National Forest
on 18 July 2006.
Skippers are ubiquitous. This is a fairly small, compact
butterfly. When a large number are nectaring in a
concentrated fashion, one can hear the fast flutter
of their wings.
Image: Biosparite.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2007
Recently emerged Eastern Pondhawk dragonfly, Erythemis simplicicollis.
Image: Bev Wigney.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, amigos bonitos, and I am overwhelmed by the beauty of these images and the creatures and places depicted. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: Eastern Pondhawk dragonfly, entomology
grrlscientist | January 7, 2007Today is the last day of SICB. The meeting ends at noon, and since I stayed up until three in the morning, writing up summaries of the bird posters, I slept in a little bit this morning, so I am missing the last few presentations today. Overall, the meeting was excellent, with lots of fascinating and well-done talks and interesting people to talk with. I also got to speak with many of my grad school colleagues while I was here, which was great fun.
The people living in Phoenix really went out of their way to make us "bloggers" feel welcomed, and my thanks especially go out to Jim and his…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2007
Following (below the fold) are a few of the bird posters that I saw yesterday at SICB.
Class. Substantial data exists on the behavioral endocrinology of temperate-zone birds, yet ornithologists are just beginning to examine and compare tropical birds to temperate zone birds. In a recent comparative study, tropical birds had lower mean peak testosterone levels on average than temperate birds. However, several tropical species in the study had comparable or higher peak testosterone levels than temperate species. In contrast, in a study of peak testosterone levels in three species of the…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2007
I also managed to see a lot of posters today -- some of which I will tell you about below the fold (I primarily focused on those posters that discussed birds or molecular evolution of certain characters);
Albers. The mosquito larvae of the genus Ochlerotatus actively regulate of the osmotic pressure of their body fluids so as to maintain homeostasis of the body's water content, a process known as osmoregulation. For this reason, some species are restricted to freshwater habitats while others can successfully osmoregulate in saline waters that greatly exceed the concentration of seawater.…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2007
The internet connection was down for nearly 24 hours at the hotel, so I was unable to update you all on the talks I attended yesterday afternoon, which caused me to express much crankiness. Hopefully, I will be able to get that done sometime within the next 24 hours (i.e.; before I return to NYC). Today is the third day of the conference and I am getting tired and overwhelmed by the intense flood of presentations and posters, so now I am attending only presentations that focus explicitly on evolutionary biology or ornithology. Below the fold are the bird presentations that I attended;
Beck…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2007
Caterpillar of the Pandora Sphinx Moth Eumorpha pandorus,
strikes a defensive pose. Photographed along the Cataraqui Trail in eastern Ontario.
Image: Bev Wigney.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, amigos bonitos, and I am overwhelmed by the beauty of these images and the creatures and places depicted. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: caterpillar, entomology
grrlscientist | January 5, 2007
I spent my morning going to presentations in the Hormones, Brain and Behavior section, which is the area that I studied for my doctoral degree before I switched fields to evolution and phylogenetics. Some of the presentations I saw included;
Hau. Evidence from studies in temperate-zone male vertebrates has accumulated that the endocrine regulation of aggressive territorial behavior differs seasonally. During the breeding season a combination of androgenic and estrogenic mechanisms appear to regulate male aggressive behavior, while during the non-breeding season either only estrogenic or…