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Reflections

From The Olde Dayes: 2001, Lammas Land: And Daniel, also in Lammas Land: Not a reflection, but from the same times: And not from those times, but a reflection: From February 2002, one I like because its near home:

IFHS study on violent deaths in Iraq

A new study of violent deaths in Iraq has been published in the NEJM. You can read it here. Here's the abstract: Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq. Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We…

Did the California H1N1 swine flu come from Ohio?

This afternoon, I was working on educational activities and suddenly realized that the H1N1 strain that caused the California outbreak might be the same strain that caused an outbreak in 2007 at an Ohio country fair. UPDATE: I'm not so certain anymore that the strains are the same. I'm doing some work with nucleic acid sequences to look further at similarity. Here's the data. Once I realized that the genome sequences from the H1N1 swine flu were in the NCBI's virus genome resources database, I had to take a look. And, like eating potato chips, making phylogenetic trees is a little bit…

Polynesians Beat Spaniards to South America

tags: south Pacific Islands, Polynesians, South American indians When I was a kid, I was intrigued by Thor Heyerdahl's fascinating book, Kon-Tiki. This book details Heyerdahl's voyage from Peru across the Pacific Ocean to the Tuamoto Islands where his crude raft eventually beached. By carrying out this voyage, he was trying to show that his hypothesis was possible, that South American Indians could have rafted across the ocean, settling islands along the way. "Scientists have not been willing to fully accept the idea" of prehistoric contact between Polynesia and South America, said said…

USVI: All About the Beach

Here's the second in a series of vacation-picture posts, this one providing pretty much what you would expect of a vacation in the Caribbean: it's all about the beaches, baby: Well, actually, our trip to the Virgin Islands was really mostly about the snorkeling: but you don't get a lot of really good pictures from that (not without an underwater camera, which I don't have), and anyway, on St. John you mostly snorkel from the beach... The beach shown above is Honeymoon Beach, a ten-minute hike from Estate Lindholm, and it's pretty much everything you expect from a Caribbean beach: soft white…

Neandertals cranium phenotypically neutral?

Update II: John Hawks leaves a comment. Update: Kambiz has much more comment. Were neandertal and modern human cranial differences produced by natural selection or genetic drift?: ... Here we use a variety of statistical tests founded on explicit predictions from quantitative- and population-genetic theory to show that genetic drift can explain cranial differences between Neandertals and modern humans. These tests are based on thirty-seven standard cranial measurements from a sample of 2524 modern humans from 30 populations and 20 Neandertal fossils. As a further test, we compare our results…

The Bestest Science Article EVAH! (The Five Second Rule)

You can't go wrong with the title "Residence time and food contact time effects on transfer of Salmonella Typhimurium from tile, wood and carpet: testing the five-second rule." And it only gets better. Here's the abstract: Aims Three experiments were conducted to determine the survival and transfer of Salmonella Typhimurium from wood, tile or carpet to bologna (sausage) and bread. Methods and Results: Experiment 1. After 28 days, 1·5 to 2·5 log10 CFU cm-2 remained on tile from and the more concentrated media facilitated the survival of S. Typhimurium compared with the more dilute solutions…

Friday Find: A new Island in the Pacific

In August we heard reports of a new island emerging from the Pacific Ocean. A boat tried to investigate, but its engine got clogged by pumice floating away from the volcano. At long last, we have art to show what a baby island looks like. In the image reproduced here, you can see the top of the island emerging from the sea, with an infrared image in the corner, showing the head from the molten rock that formed the island. The greener areas in the ocean to the upper right of the island are areas where sediment is mixing with water, possibly from hydrothermal activity. According to the…

The trouble with phylogenetics

Here's an issue that's been on my mind as I'm shuffling trees around from several concurrent phylogenetic projects. The primary output from phylogenetics programs is tree diagrams depicting the relationships among organisms.  Very clean, very crisp, very precise diagrams.  Precision isn't in itself a problem, but for the human foible of mistaking precision for accuracy. I'm not interested in a precise estimate of evolutionary history so much as a correct one.  I'm reminded as much when I see my estimates change from one precise conclusion to another as I add more data from more species. …

Meet the Newborn Giant Panda Bear Cub!!

  Image of panda bear cub at its first exam from the National Zoo. Exciting news from the Smithsonian National Zoological Park! Mei, a giant panda bear at the zoo has given birth to a cub weighing in at 137 grams (~4.83 ounces)-too cute!! DNA tests will determine the sex as well as the paternity of the panda cub, which is either Tian Tian from the National Zoo or Gao Gao from the San Diego Zoo. You can follow the Twitter feed from the Smithsonian here: #cubwatch  in additon to checking out the live panda cam at the zoo.  

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 5/20-26/2009

Your weekly dose of volcanic activity from the USGS/SI. (a little late thanks to an exciting day of column chemistry). Some highlights include: A 3.7 km / 12,000 foot ash plume from Karangetang in Indonesia (great name, eh?) Lava flows, ash plumes and local ash falls from Slamet in Indonesia. White and grey ash plumes rises to ~4 km / 13,000 feet from Colima, Mexico. Blocks up to 2-m across were transported by lahars from Fuego in Guatemala. The volcano also produced ~4.6 km / 14,500 foot ash plumes. Small ash plume spotted at Barren Island in the Andaman Islands of India.

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 4/15-21/2009

Has a week gone by already? It is time for another USGS/Smithsonian GVP Weekly Volcano Activity Report. Highlights (beyond Fernandina, Pagan and Redoubt) include: A new underwater eruption at NW-Rota 1 in the Mariana Islands. Increasing seismicity and incandescence from the rhyolite domes forming at Chaiten, Chile. A spike in sulfur dioxide emissions from Kilauea, Hawai'i to 700 tonnes/day (up from a 2003-07 average of 150 tonnes/day). 4.5-7.5 km / 15-26,000 foot ash columns produced at Shiveluch in Kamchatka from new lava dome. Continued dome growth and ~6 km / 26,000 foot ash columns from…

The Friday Fermentable: South American Reds, by Erleichda

Another Wine Experience - South American Reds By Erleichda The wine dinner group known as Jim's Disciples met at another of the area's BYOB restaurants. The theme selected for the evening's repast was "South American Reds", which translated into red wines from Chile and Argentina. In selecting my own bottles to contribute to the mix, I sought to avoid malbecs, as I figured there'd be plenty of those in attendance, and wound up buying a syrah and a pinot noir, just so as to try something I hadn't had before from the region. The first wine tasted was from Lapostolle Vineyards in the Alexander…

If your toddler falls from your window, will it necessarily die?

No! A surprising number of toddlers who manage to get their way through a window opening to fall to the pavement below live. Something just over three thousand toddlers do this every year in the US. Kids fall all the time. About 2,300,000 US children (under 14 years old) are treated at a hospital for a fall annually. Of these, a mere eighty die of the fall, though a much larger number are permanently injured or left in persistent vegetative state. Most, more than half, of these child-falls are accounted for by toddlers (age 5 and under). Falling is patterned. Infants tend to fall from…

And the plant goes "moo" ? - a bioinformatics case study with insulin

Sometimes when you go digging through the databases, you find unexpected things. When I was researching the previous posts on insulin structure and insulin evolution, I found something curious indeed. Human insulin, colored by rainbow. Image from the Molecule World iPad app by Digital World Biology.                     I wanted to find out how many different organisms made insulin, so I used a database at the NCBI called Blink.  Blink is a database of protein blast search results. Using Blink can save you lots of time because it organizes blast results from all the organisms in the non-…

Antarctic Species Treasure Trove Discovered

tags: Antarctica, Weddell Sea, new species, ANDEEP, zoology The scientists said an "astonishingly diverse" collection of isopods had been discovered. This young male isopod represents one of 674 isopod species found. Image: W. Brokeland. [larger image] According to a paper that was recently published, scientists have found more than 700 new species of marine creatures in seas surrounding Antarctica -- seas once thought too hostile to sustain such rich biodiversity. Fabulous creatures, such as carnivorous sponges, free-swimming worms, crustaceans and molluscs, were collected. The…

DNA from the largest bird ever sequenced from fossil eggshells

Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced "first drafts" of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even recovered DNA from dinosaurs. Now, a variety of extinct birds join the ancient DNA club including the largest that ever lived - Aepyornis, the elephant bird.  In a first for palaeontology, Charlotte Oskam from Murdoch University, Perth, extracted DNA from 18 fossil eggshells, either directly…

The Future of Eukaryote Genome Sequencing

A couple of weeks ago I suggested that the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) would no longer be funding de novo genome sequencing projects via white papers. They appear to be shifting their focus to resequencing projects to study variation (ie, this) and take a closer look at well studied organisms (ie, ENCODE, which now has Drosophila and Caenorhabditis versions). But the distribution of genomic resources is extremely biased towards a few species. What should those researchers who work on organisms without genome sequences do if they can't solicit funds from the NHGRI? As…

Tiny Gecko Species Discovered in Vanuatu Rainforest

tags: Lepidodactylus buleli, new species discovered, Vanuatu gecko, reptiles, Ivan Ineich, Natural History Museum Paris France French scientist, Ivan Ineich, displays a never-before-seen species of gecko at France's Natural History Museum in Paris. This gecko, formally described with the Latin name, Lepidodactylus buleli, was born in Paris from an egg that was removed from the rainforest canopy on the west coast of Espiritu Santo, one of the larger islands of the Vanuatu Archipelago, east of Australia in the South Pacific Ocean. IMAGE: Francois Mori (AP Photo) [larger view]. According…

Always make sure your illegal monkey meat is cooked thoroughly...

A *very* common exchange I have with the general public regarding HIV-1: Person-- Where did HIV-1 come from? Me-- HIV-1 is related to a virus we can find in African primates, SIV. SIV crossed over from chimpanzees to the human population to make 'HIV' sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s. This event happened at least three times, giving us the three groups of HIV-1, Groups M, N, and O, however it most likely has occurred numerous times over the course of human evolution, it just never lead to a pandemic like what we have with HIV-1 today. You can go get blood samples from African…

Crapulous

A friend and fellow inmate here at the nuthouse learned that I am in search of special words, so she donated this special word for me from her readings. Even though she could not find the precise sentence it came from, the word was so spectacular that I have to share it with you despite the fact that it did not come from my own reading. Afteryou see this under-used but underused word, you will agree that it is a very very worthy word for the day, desite the fact that it is breaking my rules. This word came from Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume I by Marcel Proust (Moncrieff &…

Another Week of GW News, May 25, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) Top Stories:Nargis, Knutson, Permafrost, Melting Arctic, Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Halong, GHG Stats, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels, Satellites, DSCOVR Impacts, Acidification, Forests, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc. Science, Pielke, Broecker Kyoto-2, Carbon Trade, Carbon Tax…

Villestofte: Danish Bog Booty

Long-time Dear Readers may remember that I've written in the past about the wonderful Danish war booty sacrifices. Victorious defenders dunked the equipment of foreign armies they had beaten into sacred lakes, mainly during the Late Roman Iron Age c. AD 150-400. The lakes soon silted up into bogs, whose anaerobic conditions preserved the weaponry and other gear perfectly. Bee-youtiful stuff. (Also, it's a very good blogging topic if you want heavy traffic, because any mention of booty, particulary Danish bog booty, will attract porn surfers like you wouldn't believe. Server logs show that a…

More Linkage

My ScienceBlogging brothers and sisters have been checking out The Republican War on Science in paperback, and I appreciate recent reactions from the following (in no particular order): Uncertain Principles, Respectful Insolence, Thoughts from Kansas, Afarensis, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Mike the Mad Biologist, the Scientific Activist, Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge, and Thoughts from Kansas (again!). Thanks to you all. A few excerpted comments below (sorry I couldn't quote everybody!): Respectful Insolence: "...one of the things that…

Life Science and Physical Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week! Life Science. From Flickr, by eye of einstein Physical Science. From Flickr, by iboy_daniel Reader comments of the week: In Friday Sprog Blogging: extinction, Janet of Adventures in Ethics and Science relates a conversation between her elder and younger sprogs (ahem, children), in which it is decided that ants should be allowed to remain alive as a species only where anteaters are around to eat them—which does not include the Stemwedel house.…

Experimental Biology 2017 - Day 3

Highlights from today's sessions included: Norelia Ordonez-Castillo, undergraduate student from Fort Hays State University, presented her research on channel catfish. According to Norelia, these fish can become obese so her research was geared towards trying to find out how their receptor for LDL cholesterol differs from rodents and humans. But what I want to know is whether the obese catfish tastes better... Image of channel catfish by Ryan Somma via Wikimedia Commons Christine Schwartz, Investigator from University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, studied how the brain of hibernating animals is …

Rectangular Programming for Warped Minds

In light of the recent posts and discussions about multidimensional numbers,today's pathological language is Recurse, a two-dimensional language - like Befunge, sort of. But I find it more interesting in its own peculiar little way. It's actually a function-oriented two-dimensional language where every function is rectangular. Underneath the two-dimensional layout, Recurse is based on a pretty simple computational mechanism. There are two stacks of integers, a left stack and a right stack; and a single register containing an integer. The basic commands are: Push: push the value in the…

The USA is still yielding lots of new extant tetrapod species

The naming of new amphibian species is a fairly routine thing. This doesn't mean that - despite the global amphibian crisis - amphibians are actually ok and that we can stop worrying; it means that we haven't been paying enough attention, and indeed many of the species that are being named anew are endangered, or threatened, or with tiny ranges. The current edition of Journal of Zoology includes the description of a new plethodontid salamander (aka lungless salamander): the Patch-nosed salamander Urspelerpes brucei Camp et al., 2009. The big deal about this entirely new species is that it's…

Why You'll Never Escape From A Black Hole

"They say 'A flat ocean is an ocean of trouble. And an ocean of waves... can also be trouble.' So, it's like, that balance. You know, it's that great Oriental way of thinking, you know, they think they've tricked you, and then, they have." -Nigel Tufnel Black holes* are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation is so strong, that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Image credit: Artist's Impression from MIT. But there are a number of very counterintuitive things that happen as you get near a black hole's event horizon, and a…

highlights from Eyjafjallajökull

Pretty pictures galore this weekend facebook video from Norðurflug - helivideo upwind from the volcano NASA's Aqua MODIS Between Heaven and Hell - fb - extraordinary images from Náttúra Íslands Cool ITN footage from April 19th Don't forget to head for Eruptions for all things volcanic - good stuff in the comments

MRSA and bedbugs?

An ahead-of-print paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases is generating some buzz in the mainstream media. While the findings are interesting, I'm honestly not sure how they got published, being so preliminary. Like many areas, Vancouver, British Columbia has seen a jump in the prevalence of bedbugs. After finding impoverished patients infested with the bugs, researchers decided to collect some and test them for pathogens--specifically, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE). So, they tested 5 bugs from 3 patients. That's it--it doesn't…

Thursday Throwdown: Turrialba, Mayon and the latest USGS/GVP Weekly Report

The steam plume from Turrialba on December 26, 2009. Image by Eruptions reader Sahrye Cohen. Turrialba Costa Rican officials extended the evacuation zone around Turrialba from 3 to 6 km, raising the alert status at the volcano to Yellow. Vanessa Rosales of the National Emergency Commission described the seismicity as "intense but low," but says the country is prepared to deal with the emergency. As always, the news chooses oddly what is the "news" of an event, and many article on Turrialba focus on Costa Rica's coffee - yes, it is safe, so far. A news report from the Tico Times quotes Raul…

Q: How do you sex a Smilodon? (A: Very carefully)

A very lion-like Smilodon, from Ernest Ingersoll's The Life of Animals (1907). For decades after its discovery the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis was depicted as little more than a lion with a short tail and long fangs. Given its size and habits as a large carnivore the connection appeared to make sense, but recent studies have suggested that Smilodon was quite different from the "king of the beasts." Not only did Smilodon have a face that probably would have looked a bit saggy when compared to modern lions, but a new study published in the Journal of Zoology suggests that male and…

CMB Part 1: The “Smoking Gun” of the Big Bang (Synopsis)

When you think about it, it wasn't all that long ago -- just 50 years -- that we didn't know where our Universe came from. A hot, dense early state? A cyclical, swirling past? Or perhaps a time-independent one, where the Universe back then was not so different from our own today? All that changed in 1964, quite by accident. “Horn Antenna-in Holmdel, New Jersey” by NASA — Great Images in NASA Description. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. With the first detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and its identification as the leftover glow from the Big Bang, we entered a…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 5/27-6/2/2009

We've already talked about how many active volcanoes reside in Indonesia, but this week's USGS/SI update just drives that point home. Listed in the update are no less than 5 volcanoes were activity is being seen or is on the increase (Karangetang, Slamet, Dukono, Batu Tara and Makian). This doesn't mean mention the activity at Anak Krakatau, Rinjani or Semeru. Amazing. Anyway, highlights - not counting Indonesia or the South American trio - from this week's report (as usual aptly put together by Sally Kuhn Sennert) include: A ~8,000 foot / 2.4 km ash and steam plume from Bagana in Papua New…

Diagrams in Category Theory

One of the things that I find niftiest about category theory is category diagrams. A lot of things that normally turn into complex equations or long-winded logical statements can be expressed in diagrams by capturing the things that you're talking about in a category, and then using category diagrams to express the idea that you want to get accross. A category diagram is a directed graph, where the nodes are objects from a category, and the edges are morphisms. Category theorists say that a graph commutes if, for any two paths through arrows in the diagram from node A to node B, the…

The ADTI-Philip Morris file

This is a list of the documents that detail the astroturf campaign conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) on behalf of Philip Morris (PM) against the Clinton health plan in 1994. They were obtained by a search for "fname: anti-tax" in the Philip Morris documents archive. ADTI's summary of their activities is here. Doc id Date Description Extract 2073011705 Feb 4 Note from Derek Crawford to David Nicoli about meetings with anti-tax groups on Feb 7 Mac Carey -- Alexis de Tocqueville Foundation 11 a.m. (their place) 2073011706 Feb 9 Cover note…

Whales: From So Humble A Beginning...

When I first met Hans Thewissen, he spending an afternoon standing on a table, pointing a camera at a fossil between his feet. He asked me to hold a clip light to get rid of some shadows. I felt like I was at a paleontological fashion shoot. Thewissen was taking pictures of bones from a whale that walked. As I later wrote in my book At the Water's Edge, Thewissen has discovered some crucial clues to the transitions that the ancestors of whales made from land to sea. In Pakistan, he discovered a 47-million-year-old fossil called Ambulocetus natans, that had an otter-like body. It was the first…

Taz - in the mouse!

PLoS ONE just published a very exciting paper - a regulatory sequence from the genome of a preserved Tasmanian wolf was inserted into a mouse and shown to have the same function: Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome: There is a burgeoning repository of information available from ancient DNA that can be used to understand how genomes have evolved and to determine the genetic features that defined a particular species. To assess the functional consequences of changes to a genome, a variety of methods are needed to examine extinct DNA function. We isolated a…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Bees Seem To Benefit From Having Favorite Colors: A bee's favourite colour can help it to find more food from the flowers in their environment, according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Nigel Raine and Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences studied nine bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies from southern Germany, and found that the colonies which favoured purple blooms were more successful foragers. How Dads Influence Their Daughters' Interest In Math: It figures: Dads have a major impact on the degree of interest their…

Be thankful for the Universe that created you (Synopsis)

"If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get." -Frank A. Clark There’s a lot to be thankful for, and some of those things are truly universal. The world we share, the Sun we orbit, the galaxy we reside in and the Universe itself plus the laws that govern it are cosmic stories we all share. And if you think about it really hard, you’ll realize that there are a whole slew of cosmic steps that needed to happen that are worth giving thanks to. An infrared view from ESA’s Herschel observatory of a new star-forming region. Image credit:…

Abstinence Doesn't Age Well

I occasionally joke that some of the articles passing through my EurekAlert feed ought to be published in the Journal of "Well, Duh!", but I think this one takes the cake: Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age: The study, reported in the January 2008 issue of the "American Journal of Public Health," studied teens from the fall of their ninth-grade year through the spring of their tenth-grade year. Among teens who remained sexually inexperienced during the study, the percentage reporting only positive experiences from refraining from sex fell from 46 percent to 24 percent…

Thirsting for turtle tears

Amazonian butterflies drinking turtle tears.Image from: Jeff Cremer / Perunature.com The Amazon region is notoriously deficient in sodium because of its large distance from the ocean and because the Andes mountains block the delivery of windblown minerals from the West. Some minerals travel from the east, but much of the air is cleaned by rain before the minerals can make it to the western region of the Amazon Basin. So if you were a butterfly, where would you find a readily available source of salt in the Amazon? The answer is not very obvious, unless you look at the photo of a yellow-…

Mechanical Jewels, Clockwork Insects

I'm a huge fan of artistic expressions which gets inspiration from the natural world, which is why I was absolutely floored by these beautiful clockwork insects created at Insect Lab by Mike Libby. These clocks are made from actual dead bugs; tiny clockwork gears and spings are worked around the shiny carapaces of beetles, the furry exoskeletons of tarantulae, and the delicate wings of butterflies. The inspiration for creating these tiny frankenbugs came when Mike found a dead intact beetle one day. After locating an old wristwatch, and thinking about the simplistic, precise movements of…

Donald Roberts' false testimony to Congress

With Donald Roberts about to give testimony before Congress it is instructive to look at his Senate testimony on October 6, 2004. Just as the use of DDT in house spraying brought spectacular reductions in malaria, declining use of house spraying brought spectacular increases in malaria. ... Data from Asian countries show similar relationships. Figures 2-5 contrast malaria rates in recent years with the years when DDT was used. The data represent annual parasite indexes (a population-based index of malaria prevalence) during the period from 1995-99 compared with identical data from 1965-69.…

test

test this blog is broken i repeat: BROKEN! rise up from the dead, broken blog! i command you to rise up from your broken shards of electrons and WALK! EDIT: i baptize thee, oh blog, with extra chunky spaghetti sauce and declare you freed from evil, and sanctified in the name of the spaghetti monster, the tomato, and the garlic and declare you freed from your two demons and three bags of trash (one, organic trash, based on the smell emanating from the bag). you may now save this edit and publish for the world to see. for the world shall know you by your published essays, images and videos. go…

A Bird's Eye View: George Steinmetz's Aerial Landscapes

George Steinmetz began his aerial adventures on leave from Stanford in 1979. Thirty one years later he has accumulated thousands of photographs from his flying machine. He showed us a sample here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute. The Waw an Namu volcano in S. Libya, A 20K peak in the Himalayas, deserts encroaching on farms in China, immigrant tomato pickers in Saudia Arabia, sand basins in the Sahara- all photographed from a motorized paraglider. The flying man is determined and creative. He has dodged arrows, fled machine guns,…

Little monarchs, little monarchs, where are your trees?

Your canopy is disappearing, you're likely to freeze. NASA's Earth Observatory reports that over 1,110 acres of forest were illegally logged, during the past four years, in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico. Monarch butterflies travel here from all over the United States and Canada. Images from the Ikonos satellite tell us though, that future migrating butterflies are likely have problems in this reserve. The top image is from 2004, the bottom image shows what things are like now. NASA's Earth Observatory Without the trees to protect them, the butterflies could…

Timetree of Life

FUUUUUN! TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute summary statistics, and present the results. You can type in some species names (or common names) and get an approximation of when those two species initially diverged! For example: Humans split from dogs ~97 mya.…

What different parts of the world eats in one week.

Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel have a newish book out which is just wonderful from a food perspective. Essentially, they've traveled the world to meet "average" families and report on their dietary habits. Apart from being thematically intriguing from a journalistic point of view, it's also quite awesome from a visual perspective. Basically, Peter has taken photos of the families with their weekly food totals. This one is a representative from the US, and here are some others (below the fold). A whole ton of other pictures can be found here. United States of America China England…