grrlscientist | March 14, 2006Welcome to the 49th issue of Tangled Bank. Honestly, I was blown away by the large number of contributions that I received (if I counted correctly, there are 34 essays in this issue). This response was unexpected, and I was awake almost all night preparing this for you, so I hope you are ready to settle in with a glass of wine while you devote your time and brain space to reading and thinking about science, nature and medicine. If there are any broken links, please notify me via email and I will fix as soon as humanly possible (well, after I wake up from my nap).
Evolution
My drinking pal and…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006
The Extreme Survival Quiz is very nicely formatted, so I thought you might enjoy playing with it while I work on Tangled Bank. My score? 15/17. According to this quiz, this means I have what it takes to be an extreme survivor, and I am allowed to wear an "I Will Survive" Gloria Gaynor t-shirt in good faith. My wrong guesses and accompanying comments are below the fold. How did you do?
I did really well with the animal attack (not surprisingly) and the man-made disasters questions. Even though I got all the shark questions correct, for example, I wonder, what would I really do if I was being…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006Welcome to everyone who came here via Daily Kos! Please indulge me by looking around for a few minutes.
Daily Kos just linked to a photo and story about NASA that I posted yesterday. According to my statmeter (which I expect will crash any second now), I am receiving approximately 100 hits every 5 minutes, to start.
It's so exhilarating that it's almost scary.
And best of all, the word from DarkSyde is, my peeps, that Daily Kos will link to Tangled Bank tomorrow in an open thread. This will not generate quite as many hits as today's link, but it's still gonna be quite a party for all the…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006As some of you might suspect, employment -- especially those shit jobs to keep me alive until I find a position in academics -- receives far more attention and energy from me than it deserves. But I thought I had seen everything in the realm of employment possibilities, ranging from being a professional fluffer at a Westchester fertility clinic to a Manhattan dwarf hamster laughter therapist. So I thought it was a joke when I was told that I could be paid to work as an insurgent! All I have to do is carry a machine gun and let the American military shoot at me. Wow! I always wanted to dodge…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006Unfortunately, I am not one of them!
Can water be transformed into beer? Wouldn't it be some sort of modern-day biblical-style miracle if one evening, you discovered that beer flowed from your kitchen tap instead of water? Well, that's what happened for one lucky couple in Norway.
Unfortunately, as with all miracles, this one has a reality-based explanation. In this case, a "really creative" (drunk?) bartender made a mistake when connecting the beer hoses for the pub that was downstairs from the lucky couple.
Okay, I will leave you with that story for now while I go back to writing my…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006My friend, Sara, sent me two Yellow Ibis t-shirts so I could postpone, by a couple more days, that long and lonely trudge through ten foot high snowdrifts to the laundromat. Yellow Ibis is a small company that sells science-based products such as mugs, engravings, prints and t-shirts. The shirt that I am wearing today is light blue with Darwin's "I Think" Tree of Life on it. This tree is copied from the first one ever drawn by Darwin (pictured) in his notebook, Transmutation.
As I see it, this shirt is essential apparel for any practicing evolutionary biologist. I am anticipating that PZ…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."
-- Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species By Natural Selection.
Tomorrow at roughly this same time, my issue, #49, of Tangled Bank will be published. If you have written an essay about science,…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006
The short story: it's melting!!
Meltwater stream flowing into a large moulin in the ablation zone
(area below the equilibrium line) of the Greenland ice sheet.
Photo by Roger J. Braithwaite, The University of Manchester, UK.
Well, despite the fact that the George Bush Gang has been shushing scientists who dare to disagree with his administration's fantastical world view, now an entire governmental agency has come out and stated that global warming is occurring.
Two studies were recently published, documenting changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, confirming that climate warming…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006The apparent rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis (pictured), in 2005, which thrilled birdwatchers around the globe and was hailed as one of the great conservation triumphs of recent times, causing the US government to commit more than $10 million to rescue the species, may actually be merely a case of mistaken identity, according to a new study.
According to a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of 4.5 seconds of blurry video (.mov, Quicktime required), it was concluded that the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker. But intensive searching this past winter for more…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006I have been writing my class syllabus (conservation genetics) for awhile today and as a reward, I thought I'd peek in on you all to see what you are doing. I just learned that, for reasons that escape me, the Koufax Awards voting deadline has been extended until tonight. I think this is great!
So, just to prove to you all that I did not win the first runner-up in the BoB Awards' "blog whore" category for nothing (badge at top of left sidebar), here I am again, asking for your vote for the 2005 Koufax Awards. This round of voting is simply to identify those 6-10 top vote recipients for each…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006As some of you might recall, I am an ant farmer. But did you know that today is the 50th anniversary of the ant farm? Fifty years ago today, Milton Levine began selling the first of more than 20 million of his Uncle Milton's Ant Farms (pictured), which is still reasonably priced at $12-20 each. As a result, more than one billion ants have found homes with ant farm customers.
Thanks, Mike!
Also, while I am writing about ants, there is an amazing story about aquatic ants below the fold.
North Queensland scientists have discovered a new type of ant, believed to be the only species that can live…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006Okay, you have to guess which Simpson's character I am before you can read below the fold. Then, after you take the test, you must tell me which Simpson's character you are.
You Are Lisa Simpson
A total child prodigy and super genius, you have the mind for world domination.
But you prefer world peace, Buddhism, godlessness and tofu dogs.
You will be remembered for: all your academic accomplishments. [GrrlScientist note: these test writers do have a sense of humor, don't they?]
Your life philosophy: "I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth."
The Simpsons…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006
NYC pair of Red-tailed hawks, Buteo jamaicensis. Pale Male (left) and Lola (right).
Photo Courtesy of Lincoln Karim.
Click image for a much larger view in its own window,
or go to PaleMale.com to purchase it.
Spring is in the air and, as of 8 March 2006, Pale Male and Lola are incubating eggs on their Fifth Avenue Penthouse overlooking Central Park! The eggs should hatch approximately 28 days from now.
Here is a NYTimes story about our celebrity birds.
tags: Pale Male, NYCLife
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006
The Ultimate Cure for Bird Flu!
Striving always to keep the public informed as to our current state of knowledge (and lack thereof) regarding bird flu!
tags: bird flu, Influenza, humor
Thanks, Ian!
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006
I have 14 submissions right now. Where are your words of wisdom?
Tangled Bank: Only four days away!
Article Submissions: email links to your submission(s) to PZ Myers, or to the Tangled Bank host [at] tangledbank [dot] net by 14 March 2006. Please write "Tangled Bank" in the subject line. All submissions will be acknowledged by email within 24 hours, so if you do not receive a response from me in that time frame, please resubmit (this is to avoid loss of any submissions to an overactive spam filter). I wish to encourage lots of "new faces" and third-party nominations, so please let me know…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2006If you live in Illinois, a heart attack could be in your future.
A friend sent me an article that describes Baseball's Best Burger that you can get only at an Illinois ballpark. This gut-busting artery-clogger is comprised of a hamburger patty topped with sharp cheddar cheese and two slices of bacon, all of which are nestled inside a "bun" made of a sliced Krispy Kreme Original Glazed donut.
Since this er, thing, delivers 1000 calories, 45 grams of which are fat (the average person consumes 2000 calories per day, and fat should not provide more than 30% of those calories), I think it…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2006
I have been collecting links to all the birthday wishes that were posted for PZ so everyone can enjoy them (yes, things are a little crazy at the moment because I have a job interview today, too).
If I have missed the link to your birthday wish, please do send it to me so I can add it to the list.
Note: Squid photo by Adam Laverty (I am no expert on squishy creatures, but isn't that really a cuttlefish in the photo and not a squid? The photographer identified it as a squid, which is why I named it as such, too).
10,000 Birds managed to post a birthday wish, despite the fact that Mike, the…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006
Barred Owl, Strix varia, with mouse.
Photo by AJ Hand.
Click on image for a larger view in its own window.
Voting has commenced for the 2005 Koufax Awards and Birds in the News was nominated for the Best Series award. Voting is occurring RIGHT NOW to identify the 6-10 top finalists for this category, so get over there and vote for Birds in the News for the best series award!
Birds in Science
Although they have brains about the size of a grain of rice, hummingbirds have superb memories when it comes to food, according to recently published research. "To our knowledge, this is the first…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006Like something ripped bleeding from headline news, Intuition (2006, Dial Press) by Allegra Goodman is a timely story about scientific fraud. Even though the pivotal point of the story is one event, it is Goodman's careful and empathetic exploration of the relationships between the researchers and their families that is the most compelling aspect of this story.
When the story begins, it is a snowy afternoon at the fictional Philpott Institute, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The talented and ambitious postdoctoral researcher, Cliff Bannaker, has failed to produce publishable results…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006Salon has a fascinating article on their site about nanobiobots. Nanobiobots are the fusion of nanotechnology and biotechnology, which presumably will eliminate of the barrier between living and nonliving materials. As the result of this new technology, we will produce not mere cyborgs, but true hybrid artificial life forms, manifestations of synthetic biology. The potential biomedical benefits are astonishing, but the risks are at least as horrible to contemplate. Are we really ready for this? Is this the next step of evolution? What do you think? I linked to a long but very interesting…