These are some carnivals of science—read about invertebrates, genes, or genetics this morning.
More like this
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.
How was your High School education? "100 Words That All High School Graduates -- And Their Parents -- Should Know"
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/100words/
There were two that I didn't know and two or three others that I wasn't too sure of.
Thanks for the plug, PZ!
There's also the Ninth Carnival of Mathematics. . . .
. . . for which you'll need the appropriate background music. :-)
> Circus of the Spineless #21
For a moment there, I thought this was about DC Democrats.
Cool looking newly discovered frog species. The fish is kind of neat too, even to an invert fan like myself!
The carnivalia are wonderful, and scienceblogs is like a permanent science arcade.
I thought of this blog (or was it, um, some other guy's?) when I saw The Economist's latest foray into paleontology. It looks better than average for them.
With only an Intro to Paleo class, and, from what I can gather, a rather poor one at that, I couldn't say for sure, but I'm thinking the findings about carbonic anhydrase published in Science look pretty interesting for evolutionary biology and portend further dismay to the ID movement. Carbonic anhydrase, so important in many physiological processes today, or its precursors, may have set off the Cambrian explosion. If so, you've got to love the one-two punch. The findings deliver a knockout blow to spurious claims of a sudden Cambrian "creation" of complex life forms. They deliver another crippling blow in the form of strong evidence that the last common ancestor of the metazoans had genes which can be traced through the shelled organisms to modern humans, serving different functions along the way.
Debate evolves into religious discussion
The science has been checked very carefully and repeatedly. As for your faith, you can check it at the door.