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Defending Science

There's a long list of things that scientists do that are unpopular. The creation/evolution argument rages on, the stem cell fight still provokes legislative skirmishes, genetic research raises discrimination concerns, neuroscience questions the very sense of self, and that's just the tip of the research iceberg. In broader science culture, there's nuclear energy, Yucca mountain, wind turbine locations, navy sonar, ballistic missile defense, wildlife habitat preservation, the space program, oil exploration, public funding... But as far as I can tell, there's only one research subject that…

Venomous shrews and lizards evolved toxic proteins in the same way

The Northern short-tailed shrew is a small, energetic mammal that lives in central and eastern North America. The Mexican beaded lizard is a much larger reptile found in Mexico and Guatemala. These species are separated by a lot of a land and several million years of evolution, yet they share astonishing similarities. Not only are they both venomous, but the toxic proteins in their saliva have evolved in very similar ways from a common ancestor, converging on parallel lethal structures independently of one other.  This discovery, from Yael Aminetzach at Harvard University, shows that…

Physics, Rockets, and Iron Man

I'm not quite convinced Iron Man is entirely realistic. "Proposterous!", you say, "Hollywood makes its superhero films to near-documentary accuracy!" No, hear me out. Iron Man can fly, using rockets in his hands and feet. We know from the commercials that the suit can in fact fit in a briefcase and be carried around by hand, so as an estimate let's say the Iron Man suit + Tony Stark weighs 200 pounds even. In more proper physics-style units, that's 889.6 newtons. Just to hover, let alone fly into the air at high speed, his rockets are required to generate at minimum 889.6 newtons of…

In Which Your Host Witnesses a High-Speed Chase

Last night I saw a classic conservation of momentum problem in person. It was about midnight, and I was on a service road beside west Houston's Beltway 8 (avoiding the tolls) when I slowed down to stop at a red light. In my rear view mirror I saw the red and blue flash of emergency lights approaching, so with the room I had left I crept over a bit to the right to let them by. Whoosh! A car blew by my left side at high speed, swerving in front of me and speeding into the intersection heedless of the light. My neurons barely had time to start cooking up some surprise when a black pickup…

My Most Used iPhone Apps

The iPhone is a great gadget (as a phone, it's okay. Personally I wish it could be made a bit louder as my ears, they ain't so good at that hearing thing.) Here are the apps I've found that I use the most. (Excluding google maps, the built in email and browser, and the phone functions, of course. Having google maps available so easily really is an amazing piece of functionality to have in a phone, I must say.) Urbanspoon (free): Restaurant guide with cool select a random place by shaking the iPhone. Links to lots of reviews, which is nice. A friend feature to spy on your friends…

Water: more complicated than previously thought

I had not thought that water was a poorly understood substance. Here are two interesting water articles that show that there is still more to learn. Who knew. First, if you put water in a high DC current it can form a bridge between two beakers: When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another…

Friday Grey Matters: Why Are Pet Birds Banded?

If you buy a parrot from a breeder in America, chances are it has a small metal ring around its leg. My African Grey, Pepper, also has one of these (I call it his "bling.") I'd never really given it a lot of thought, but have recently become curious as to why it is placed on a captive bird and what the code on it means. A closed band appears to be a flat solid piece of metal wrapped around the bird's leg. It may have letters and numbers embossed in the surface. Most breeders eventually start banding the baby birds they raise. Banding is a good idea because it shows that the babies have been…

LOCKED IN A POLITICAL KNIFE FIGHT? Huffington Post Responds to Framing Science on the Challenge of Communicating Global Warming

Over at the Huffington Post, David Roberts concedes my point about why the Pandora's Box frame of looming catastrophe may not be the best way to communicate the urgency of climate change. Yet he disagrees that environmental advocates should be concerned about opening themselves up to claims of "alarmism" from climate skeptics. This is a classic earnest progressive concern, as though if we just keep all our p's and q's in order, we'll render ourselves immune to criticism. Guess what? There's a whole class of people with careers and reputations built around criticizing greens and casting…

Nice take down

A while back I mentioned Dan Ely, the University of Akron physiologist who seems to be unsure about the age of the earth. According to Red State Rabble, three of his departmental colleagues have written to the Kansas BoE to fix two of Ely's "misrepresentations". Their first correction ultimately attacks the modus operandi of the Discovery Institute in supporting the likes of Ely, Philip Skell, and other know-nothings. Dr. Ely implies in his testimony that he has background in evolutionary biology, and that his current research is related to evolutionary biology. Both of these notions are…

Live Webcast of Neuroimaging Summer School @ UCLA

The UCLA Neuroimaging Summer Education Program starts today at 8:30 am Pacific. Standard Time - and is going to be streaming live at this address (video embedded below). The schedule is quite impressive, including talks from Rick Buxton, Mark Cohen, Russ Poldrack, Vince Calhoun, and Jose Hanson among others. Topics include everything from causal modeling to network analysis and multivariate pattern recognition. Monday, July 20 08:30 Intro & overview (Russ Poldrack & Mark Cohen) 09:30 MRI acquisition: basics (Mark Cohen) 11:00 Ethical issues in cognitive neuroscience (Russ Poldrack…

Attention vs. Intention: Dissociations in Parietal Cortex

Andersen et al discuss both the attentional and intentional aspects to the function of the intraparietal sulcus. What's the distinction between attention and intention? First, let's talk about attention. The modal view, based on the biased competition model of Desimone and Duncan, and the Miller & Cohen model presented yesterday, is probably that prefrontal regions actively bias particular spatial locations, as represented in parietal cortex, in accord with the current task or goal. However, some evidence apparently conflicts with this modal view: Anderson et al. review two studies…

Quantifying the Unconscious: New Methods in fMRI Pattern Classification

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has captured the popular imagination since its introduction in the early 1990s, at least partially because of the stunningly beautiful images it generates. Although it has mostly used to identify brain regions involved in specific cognitive operations, new pattern classification techniques have been applied to fMRI data in what some have called "mind reading technology." These techniques go beyond simply showing which brain areas are more active than others during a particular task to reveal functional relationships among multiple brain areas,…

Dumb or dissembling? We report, you decide

There was a piece of good news on vaccine front this week. The first judgments from the Autism Omnibus Trial were announced, and the special masters (who served as judges) agreed with the rest of the reality-based community in ruling that vaccines do not cause autism. The rulings weren't subtle, using phrases such as "misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment". This is the Dover of the "other" ID promotion movement.* Like any cult, however, the infectious disease promotion movement is unlikely to be persuaded by any level of evidence. This, despite…

New Futures

I never cease to wonder about the vast amount of futures we have in store. While there is only one past, albeit an eternally contested and subjective one, the future is manifold and unfuckwithable. Recent pulpy science fiction binges and forays into blockbuster cinematic media have proven this indubitably; After all, maybe the main reason Science Fiction works as a storytelling medium is because no one can prove it wrong. Who's to say that the Pre-Cogs, soaked in some primordial slime, will not be able to see crimes before they occur or that Rama, hollow and the size of a moon, is not…

Who you gonna believe, me -- or my lyin' fMRI?

Would you believe this brain? Every few months, sometimes more often, someone tries to ramrod fMRI lie detection into the courtrooms. Each time, it gets a little closer. Wired Science carries the latest alarming story: A Brooklyn attorney hopes to break new ground this week when he offers a brain scan as evidence that a key witness in a civil trial is telling the truth, Wired.com has learned. If the fMRI scan is admitted, it would be a legal first in the United States and could have major consequences for the future of neuroscience in court. The lawyer, David Levin, wants to use that…

100 books meme

Because it's easier than thinking and composing thoughtful essays, I am forced to follow Grrlscientist's example: The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown) Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (JRR Tolkien) The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien) The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (JRR Tolkien) Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling) Angels and Demons (…

Can soccer goalkeepers influence penalty kicks?

Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games get decided by a penalty kick competition. But penalty kicks offer such an advantage to the shooter that it often seems like dumb luck when a goalkeeper manages to make a save. The usual strategy is simply to dive randomly to the left or right, and hope you guessed right. Why not just flip a coin to…

Tiny treasures - 100 million year old mammal hairs trapped in amber

Mammal hairs preserved in amber specimen ARC2-A1-3. a - First fragment; b - Line drawing of first fragment; c - Second fragment; d - Line drawing of second fragment; e - Close-up of second fragment to show the cuticular surface. About 100 million years ago, in a coastal forest located in what is today southwestern France, a small mammal skittered up the trunk of a conifer tree. As it did so it lost a few of its hairs, and this minor event would have been entirely unremarkable if two of those hairs had not settled in some tree sap and, in the course of time, become entombed in a piece of…

Megarachne, the Giant Spider That Wasn't

Megarachne, (changed to Mesothelae for broadcast) restored as an enormous spider in the series Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters. Imagine that you are are standing in a massive junkyard with the remains of cars strewn all about you. A few are relatively complete, but most of the heap is made up of bits and pieces of models from the entire history of automotive innovation. If you were to reach down and pick up one of the scraps, would you be able to tell the make and model of the car it came from? The challenges a paleontologist faces in reconstructing the life of the past are…

Do fearful faces make us look faster?

Babies as young as three months old will follow the eyes of an adult to look at the same thing the adult is looking at. This behavior makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a predator or other danger looms, we can learn from the actions of others (though it's unclear exactly what a three-month old would do to escape a ravenous bear). But if the gaze-following behavior is really a survival adaptation, wouldn't we be more likely to follow someone's gaze if they also had a fearful facial expression? After all, if someone's glancing to the side with a cheerful smile, we don't expect…

Lungs with taste, or lungs with a fortuitous receptor?

Researchers in Maryland have discovered an interesting quirk: lung smooth muscle expresses on its surfaces a protein that is the same as the bitter taste receptor. This could be useful, since they also discovered that activating that receptor with bitter substances causes the muscle to relax, opening up airways, and could represent a new way to treat asthma. That's a fine discovery. But man, it really tells us something about human psychology. I'm getting all this mail right now, and just about all of it asks the same question: Why do lungs have taste receptors? What is the purpose of sensing…

Humans to Undergo Speciation?

PZ has already href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/dont_worry_kids_curry_is_just.php">written about this, primarily to dismiss it as nonsense.  He is correct, but there is one point (or two) that I want to add. Oliver Curry  is described in WIkipedia as an evolutionary theorist as well as a political theorist.  He was granted a Ph.D., on the topic of morality as natural history,  by the Government Department of the London School of Economics.  Apparently, he is fond of saying that humans will divide into two species, approximately 100,000 years from now. The article PZ…

Do insects feel pain?

Using sophisticated techniques to silence or activate specific neurons, researchers from Stanford University have established that a simple behaviour used by fruit fly larvae to evade attack from parasitic wasps is triggered by a type of sensory neuron that is similar to the neurons which respond to painful stimuli in mammals. Although little is known about the somatosensory system of fruit flies, several lines of evidence have implicated sensory cells called multidendritic neurons as nociceptors (cells that are responsive to noxious chemical, mechanical or thermal stimuli). First, with…

Stroke causes woman to feel sounds

In the Annals of Neurology, a team of physicians, led by Tony Ro of the Department of Psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, report the unusual case of a woman who began to feel sounds following a stroke The woman, a 36-year-old professor, suffered a rare type of cerebrovascular accident: a lacunar infarct, in which a small blood vessel deep within the brain became blocked. This led to damage in the ventrolateral thalamic nucleus (VL) on the right side of her brain.  When first examined, some 9 months after her stroke, the woman reported significant changes in her sensations and…

Neuronal receptor linked to mild cognitive impairment & Alzheimer's

Mild cognitive impairment affects many cognitive functions, particularly memory. People with mild cognitive impairment are 3-4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease; hence, it is regarded as a transition stage between normal age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's Disease. Researchers Emory University School of Medicine and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago now report that reduced levels of a receptor found in nerve cells is associated with the onset of mild cognitive impairment. A strong correlation between receptor levels and cognitive performance was also found.…

Jessica Joslin: steampunk taxidermy

Silvio, 2005 turtle shell, brass hardware, beads, bone, antique vestment trim, leather, glass eyes Jessica Joslin I sat down on the Metro this morning and read a most inauspicious horoscope: "Your interest in things unusual, unexplained, bizarre and at times tasteless is likely to make it difficult for you to find a friend." Hey! That's not nice! But then I realized that next up on my blogging to-do list was the new book by artist Jessica Joslin, Strange Nature. Joslin makes incredible sculptures fusing dead animals, scrap metal, and eerie staring glass eyes. And I began to wonder if my…

Cool Visual Illusions: The Flying Bluebottle Illusion

From Anstis & Casco, 2006, Movie 1, p. 1088 OK, here's a really, really cool illusion published last year, and that I learned about only recently. To see it, go to Stuart Anstis' page here, watch the first movie only, and then come back here. You should have seen two flies moving in circles with the same radius. The flies' rotations are offset so that one is at 6 o'clock when the other is at 12, but otherwise, the circles they're tracing are identical. Now go back and watch the second movie. As the caption notes, the two flies are still moving on identical circles, except that they're…

Cult Book Meme.

I'm still grading, but Bikemonkey tagged me on a book meme and I really want to cross something off my to-do list tonight, so here it is. The rules: books you've read in bold and books you started but never quite finished in italics. (In that latter category, I'll include books from which I've read substantial excerpts without prodding myself to double back to read the whole thing.) And now for the books: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884) Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) The Beauty…

Friday Sprog Blogging: psychoanimalists.

Of all the Looney Tunes characters, I was never a fan of the Roadrunner. (I liked Wile E. Coyote well enough, and wish him well in his lawsuit against the Acme Company.) However, there was one Roadrunner cartoon where the focus pulls back from the eternal struggle between coyote and prospective dinner and shifts instead to two little cartoon kids watching the Roadrunner on their TV. If I recall correctly, at least one of these kids expresses a less-than-favorable opinion of the Roadrunner. And, one of the kids (might be the same one) mentions that he wants to be a psychoanimalist when he…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Bioblitz!

Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, can you guys draw me a picture with some of the wildlife you've seen in the last week? Elder offspring: Sure! Younger offspring: But ... I haven't seen any wildlife in the last week. Dr. Free-Ride: What are you talking about? We see wildlife every day when we walk to school. Elder offspring: Yeah, the squirrels and the different kinds of birds and the snails. Younger offspring: That counts as wildlife? OK, I can make you a picture. As mentioned last week, the sprogs and I tried to undertake some noticing-of-wildlife as part of the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz.…

Andrew Bolt: making it up?

One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households: Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after. In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong: Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt's erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him,…

The Australian's War on Science 71: Mitchell Nadin misrepresents

Stop me if you've heard this before -- The Australian has published a story with a picture of a bloke standing on a beach to prove that sea levels aren't rising. Mitchell Nadin tells us: At 73, former CSIRO engineer Denis Whitnall has seen many things -- but rising sea levels isn't one of them. Looking out over the Pacific Ocean from the back of his waterfront property at Avoca, on the NSW central coast, Mr Whitnall shakes his head as he talks about a grim report commissioned by his local council in 1995 that predicted some houses along the beachfront, including his own, would be subject to…

Beginning to take the shape

On Friday, I did something I never thought I'd have the guts to do: I looked a patient in the eye and told her I was not going to treat her pain. It was hard. She had been admitted the previous day with nausea, vomiting, and epigastric pain. Although she had some marks of a drug seeker--she was rude and demanding, she had a long history of vague chronic pain syndromes, and she had a habit of switching doctors--her initial bloodwork showed an indisputably real and concerning abnormality. "Even crazy people get real disease," said my upper level resident, and we offered her the diagnostic…

Saving the Shortnose Sturgeon, a Look at Eutrophication

I found the following article on the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) this morning on ScienceDaily, and due to the conservation problems we're having with the endangered fish, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss eutrophication and hypoxia, two huge issues in marine and aquatic sciences. Dwindling numbers of shortnose sturgeon in Georgia's blackwater Ogeechee River system have prompted an effort to quantify the causes and prioritize recovery efforts. Yetta Jager and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are conducting a population viability analysis, which…

So that's what chemistry is good for…

Stinky stuff! This fits perfectly with my biased preconceptions. So here are two examples of chemistry used to analyze things you'd normally run away from. The oldest traces of human poop have been dug out of a cave in Spain — and it's Neandertal poop. It's about 50,000 years old, and it's been reduced to a compressed, thin smear of organic compounds, so I guess it isn't actually so stinky anymore, but there was enough of it to analyze chromatographically. In case you've wondered your whole life about what Neandertal poop would look like, here you go. Microphotographs of a slightly burned…

Spin, baby, spin

In a recent discussion on this blog, an interesting thread appeared: the idea that BP's heavy use of chemical dispersants to break up the Gulf oil spill was as much damage cover up as damage control. Here are a few examples: My suspicion is that the main reason they used these dispersants was to hide the oil from view.... Anything that will keep the oil out of site below the surface allows them a certain measure of plausible deniability regarding their knowledge of the spills true magnitude. I think there is a big effort on the part of BP to minimize the aesthetic and…

"Nobody knows, the trouble I've seen..."

The great Dr. Sandy Templeton once asked his pathology class, "Why do people go to the doctor?" People came up with all sorts of responses, but to each he gave his best British, "No, no, no, no!" Then he would tell us, "They come to the doctor because they don't feel well and they want you to make it better!" So obvious. So simple. And yet, so complicated. As physicians, we have a number of ways of helping patients, only some of which make the patient feel better. Primary and secondary prevention of disease don't necessarily make people feel better in the short run, so they can be…

Tom and Jerry: A nefarious Jewish plot

You can't make stuff like this up. You really can't. Did you know that Tom and Jerry are in reality a clever secret nefarious plot by the Jews? That's what Professor Hassan Bolkhari, who teaches philosophy of art at Tabatabaei and Al-Zahra Universities in Iran and is a member of the Film Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, asserts (if you understand the language, feel free to check out the original video here): There is a cartoon that children like. They like it very much, and so do adults - Tom and Jerry. [...] Some say that this…

Pallacken Abdul Wahid is back!

You just can't shut this crank up. You may recall that he earlier published a paper in an Elsevier journal claiming that all of genetics is wrong, oh, and by the way, the Quran and Bible are right because chromosomes look like ribs. He has a new paper out (only it's actually the same old word salad, freshly tossed), Molecular genetic program (genome) contrasted against non-molecular invisible biosoftware in the light of the Quran and the Bible. The current perception of biological information as encoded by a chemical structure (genome) is critically examined. Many features assigned to the…

Baiji dolphin, R.I.P.

China's white dolphin called extinct after 20 million years: An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team's leader saying one of the world's oldest species was effectively extinct. The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction. A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China…

Meet the new Speaker of the Kansas House: self-described "jerk"

Melvin Neufeld: even though the November election results produced a more moderate House, the Republican caucus went further to the right in selecting Neufeld, who was seen as the most conservative of the three speaker candidates, which included Mike O’Neal of Hutchinson and Kenny Wilk of Lansing. … In 1994, Neufeld grabbed headlines when he was accused of blackmailing a legislator on a House vote by calling the legislator’s wife about allegations of sexual misconduct. Neufeld acknowledged making the call but said he wasn’t trying to blackmail anyone. KS RINO helpfully dredges up the decision…

Restating the obvious

Yesterday a short notice was printed in the journal Science describing where Tyrannosaurus fell in relation to birds on the basis of molecular evidence (i.e. proteins recovered from a Tyrannosaurus femur). Surprise, surprise, the study found that Tyrannosaurus is more closely related to birds than the American alligator or the green anole lizard. Not everything came out perfectly, however. The phylogenetic tree created by the molecular data but Tyrannosaurus in the same group as the birds, meaning that (in the words of the authors) it "leaves Dinosauria unresolved." An even more obvious error…

Feral Cats Aren't All That Bad

Feral cats are often portrayed as the scourge of of island ecosystems, killing off or pushing out endemic species at an alarming rate. To an extent such a reputation is deserved, but a new study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the elimination of a top-level introducted predator can lead to an explosion in the numbers of other predators that were being controlled by the "top cat." While cats are certainly a problem in many areas where they were introduced, often preying upon adults and chicks in the nest, rats attack the birds from the other side of the…

Studs Terkel

This American Life recently featured an astonishing series of recordings from Hard Times, the radio series created by Studs Terkel. It featured a variety of American voices, from the short order cook in Arkansas to the migrant worker in Texas to the wealthy elite of Manhattan, talking about what it was like to live through the Great Depression. The sheer suffering was astonishing. People talked about hunger and living off oily brown water and stale bread. They described what it was like to have no heat in winter and spend years in the unemployment line. The rich guy was hilariously greedy.…

Referee Bias

On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits. A paper published this month in Psychological Science reports that referees and umpires subconsciously favor competitors in red uniforms. The experiment was clever: the scientists showed 42 experienced tae kwon do referees video clips of five different male competitors. Each clip featured one athlete in red and another athlete in blue. At first, the referees…

Could geothermal drilling cause an eruption?

Canlaon volcano, Philippines Geothermal energy is one of those sources of energy that might be able to solve a lot of the planet's energy problems - heck, the Earth has a lot of heat it is trying to get rid of, so taking that heat and turning into energy seems like an easy (and clean?) way to stop using fossil fuels and the like. Of course, like any supposed panacea, it has its problems. However, one aspect that gets people are riled is whether drilling into areas of active magmatism might actually cause volcanism. Just in the last few weeks, a controversy was sparked in the Philippines…

Anti-abortion terrorist convicted

Scott Roeder found guilty of first-degree murder in death of George Tiller: A jury took less than 40 minutes Friday to find Scott Roeder guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting of abortion provider George Tiller in a [Wichita] church [â¦] last May. [â¦] The murder conviction carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison, though under Kansas law, parole is possible. Mr. Roeder, 51 years old, will be sentenced in March. [â¦] Defense attorney Mark Rudy acknowledged in his closing statement Friday that there was no question his client had killed Dr. Tiller and had been planning to do so…

Thanks

An anonymous lurker in Wyoming sent a generous contribution to help me recover from the loss of my laptop, etc. Since all I know is that you live in or near Cheyenne, WY, I just have to thank you publicly. Of possible relevance to ongoing discussions here, the note accompanying the generous gift says: Not that it matters, but I am one of those dreaded "creationists" that many science bloggers love to mock. My own personal views fall somewhere between id [sic] (not ID the whole DI anti-evolution political movement) and TE [theistic evolution] or EC [evolutionary creationism, the evangelical…

The dolphins with the massive jagged bony crests

Welcome to day 2 of seriously frickin' weird cetacean skull week, and here we look at one of my favourites: Platanista, the Asian river dolphins or susus. Susu is a Hindi onomatopoetic name based on the exhalation noise these dolphins make, and other local names include susuk, sishuk, shushuk and sishumarch. There are two species: the Indus river dolphin P. minor Owen, 1853 of the Indus and Chenab in Pakistan, and the Ganges river dolphin P. gangetica Roxburgh, 1801 of the Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the Karnaphuli in Bangladesh, and (possibly) the…

The many faces of "evolution"

A recent report noted that studies that rely on evolutionary processesto explain, say, antibiotic resistance among pathogens, tend not to use the "E-word" in medical journals, instead using terms like "emerging", "spreading" and "increasing". The reason appears to be the bad connotations "evolution" has in American contexts. There is much misunderstanding of this term, and people often pack a lot of differing concepts under it. Consider this rant by a creationist in The American Spectator: there are "six types of evolution" according to him. They are cosmic evolution, chemical evolution,…