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Ancient Tool Use Discovered in Chimpanzees

Stones excavated from a forest in the Ivory Coast. They are 4,300 years old and have use patterns consistent with what is seen in modern chimpanzee sites. People like to believe they are somehow more special than animals, that we are set apart from other animals in some mysterious way. For quite awhile, the differences between humans and other animals were listed as the use of a language and tool use, as well as culture. Well, it turns out that chimpanzees have been using tools for quite some time, according to a recently published paper. Archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone…

In which I am compared to Einstein

I think it was intended to be an unfavorable comparison, but the ambiguity of the phrasing does leave open the possibility that Ben Stein is accusing Einstein of having a closed mind. What we see below are two views of Intelligent Design's place in science. One quote is from a brilliant, open minded and humble man...the other from a man typical of those who believe that they know better, but who don't have much to offer, other than a closed-mind. "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive…

Friday Flotsam: Pacaya, Eyjafjallajökull and Katla mongering

This week has been destroyed by workshops and my last death throes with a paper I am submitting on my research in New Zealand. And to think, I thought it might settle down a little after the students left. To news! Ash fall on a taxi cab near Guatemala's Pacaya. Pacaya in Guatemala erupted yesterday causing evacuations of people near the volcano and the closure of Guatemala City's main airport. Pacaya is a mere ~25 km from the capitol of this Central American nation. Tragically, a news reporter from one of the capitol's TV stations died when they were struck by volcanic debris, again…

Move over Theropoda, Sebecosuchia rules

Most of us have grown up with the idea that the Mesozoic Era was, excepting the Early Triassic, a time when dinosaurs dominated life on land. Or, put another way, a time when dinosaurs were the most ecologically significant and most obvious of all land animals. The familiar generalization, recounted in every book on Mesozoic life, is that dinosaurs were the only diverse big-bodied land vertebrates during the Jurassic and Cretaceous and, for as long as this was the case, other tetrapod groups were unable to achieve big body size. But in the same way that the modern world isn't really '…

Debate about life from other planets

Scientists have thawed samples of bacteria that were frozen in ice for up to 8,000,000 years in order to figure out whether these bacteria would still be viable and whether their DNA is intact. It turns out they are viable, but the longer they were in ice the more their DNA was fragmented. This has implications as to whether life traveled to Earth from a comet or was evolved on site: However, while some bacteria taken from 100,000-year-old ice reproduced quite readily, cells from the oldest ice multiplied only very slowly and their DNA was badly damaged. Studies of isolated DNA from the…

Making sense of changing risk predictions from personal genomics

Mihaescu, R., van Hoek, M., Sijbrands, E., Uitterlinden, A., Witteman, J., Hofman, A., van Duijn, C., & Janssens, A. (2009). Evaluation of risk prediction updates from commercial genome-wide scans Genetics in Medicine, 11 (8), 588-594 DOI: 10.1097/GIM.0b013e3181b13a4f Caroline Wright from the Public Health Genomics Foundation has a concise post describing the results from a recent paper in Genetic Medicine. The paper evaluates the probability that personal genomics customers will find that their predicted risk of a common disease changes significantly over time as their genetic data…

Uncertainty and Video Analysis

This is for commenter JimP. How do you take into account uncertainty when using video analysis? A great question. The first thing to think about is where does the uncertainty come from? My first guess would that it would be from the user. Where does the user click? Is it right on the object in each frame? Is the scale set correctly? I guess there could be other sources of error - maybe there are repeating frames that are a result of encoding. Maybe there is interlaced video frames. Well, what to do? I will just look at one motion in particular and do the analysis several times. I…

Senate passes energy bill

The Senate sent an energy bill to the House which includes strong fuel economy standards but doesn't include provisions that would have promoted renewable fuel use. Detroit had hoped for weaker fuel economy standards, and environmental groups had hoped to see a requirement that electric utilities generate at least 15% of their power from renewable fuels. The groups also lost a battle to boost taxes on oil companies and use the proceeds to subsidize production of renewable power from wind, solar energy and biomass. Environmental groups scored a victory earlier in the debate when the Senate…

Invasive Species Weblog in Science

Another blog I read has been highlighted in Science Magazine's Netwatch: WEB LOG: Invasion Chronicles An outbreak of pine shoot beetles (Tomicus piniperda) has prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to restrict the export of bark chips and other forest products from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Meanwhile, farmers in southwestern Puerto Rico are angry because the government has failed to control hungry mobs of Asian and African monkeys, descendants of escapees from a medical lab, that are pillaging their fields. For more news about wayward organisms and efforts to control…

Snowglobes

My daughter collects snowglobes. Or, to be precise, we collect snowglobes for her when we travel. She has a few from New York City, one from San Francisco, one from Murtle Beach, one from Milwaukee. I badly messed up when I went to Boston last year and did not get one. Last year, the TSA made a rule that snowglobes cannot be in the carry-on luggage (and I prefer to travel light and not check in any bags), but the lax security at Milwaukee airport let me smuggle one in. Now, traveling around Europe provided me with the opportunity to greatly add to her collection: snowglobes from London,…

and it is goodbye from him...

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." [President Bush at the G8 summit] ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock. (archive image) Uncouth. Independent has more Josh at Thoughts from Kansas also on it PS: Interesting additional summit report from the IHT - "...For four exceedingly enlightening minutes, the world was treated to an unvarnished view of the American president as he expounded on everything…

Caught up on Catching up

So this will be the last of my catching up posts, hope it was not too tedious. This one will not be article by article, I must succumb to the reality that I won't read everything I want to. So I have missed out on alot of fellow Science Bloggers stuff, namely Chris and Sheril's last 40 posts, William's last 17, and Tim Lambert's last 23. (But don't miss this gem, the definitive response to the "judge finds nine errors in AIT" canard." Gone are 61 posts from DesmogBlog, 84 from the Gristmill, 105 from Climate Progress, 8 from Climate Feedback (Natures blog, which seems to be getting going a…

How High Can You Fly?

Here are a couple more vacation photos... Notice that the bottom photo may seem to have been taken from a greater altitude, although that is not the case.  The top one is not really a vacation photo; it's from the href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060724.html">Astronomy Picture of the Day site.  (Credit: href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts121/121_crew.html">STS-121 Crew, href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition13/index.html">Expedition 13 Crew, NASA) The top one was taken from a Space Shuttle; the…

I win, thanks to everyONE...

I win! Fame! Glory! People fanning me with palm-fronds! Muhahahaha! Kneel before Zod!... Ahem. Regains composure... Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock fame has graciously awarded the first Blog Post of the Month award from everyONE - the new blog from the open-access journal PLoS ONE - to the post I wrote about ballet dancers. Every month, Bora looks at blog posts that have reviewed PLoS ONE papers and picks one out for an accolade. I'm very pleased, especially since the other blog posts in the running included stuff from some of my favourite writers - Christie of Observations of a…

Off To See The...Blogger Wizards in North Carolina!

I'm off to BlogTogether, the North Carolina Science Bloggers Conference, this weekend. And in a perversely un-blogger like move, I am NOT taking my laptop with me so that I can blog minute-by-minute from the conference. I plan to be unplugged from my computer from, oh, approximately now until I return Sunday afternoon. Hell, I may not blog until Monday. Besides, Mr. Zuska wants the laptop to burn some cds from his old tape collection. I won't say from which famous jam band he has about a gazillion concert tapes he made himself and/or traded for. But if you know what a Betty Board is, I…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 4/29-5/5/2009

All the eruptions fit to print from the Smithsonsian/USGS GVP Weekly Report. A few highlights (not including Redoubt, Rinjani and Slamet): Multiple ash plumes from Galeras (Colombia), some producing noticeable ash fall up to 35 km from the vent. The Alert Level at Anak Krakatau, Indonesia was raised to 3 (out of 4) after a sharp increase in the number of explosions. The Alert Level at Cleveland in Alaska was lowered from Yellow to "Unassigned" (no Green for Cleveland as there is no real-time seismic network for the volcano, thus no "background levels" to compare.) Ebeko in Russia continues…

Another week of GW News, December 19, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Another week of Global Warming News Information Overload is Pattern RecognitionDecember 19, 2010 Chuckles, Solstice, COP16, COP17+, UN GCF, CableGate, AGU, Amstrup, Weather, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, Year End, CSRRT, Cook, Post CRU, Shrinkology Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, GCDT, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…

Another Week of GW News, November 4, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years November 4, 2012 Chuckles, CCAMLR, Maldives, Subsidies, Cook Sandy: General, Impacts, Caribbean, Nukes, Attribution, Politics, Recovery Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food Production…

Another Week of Climate Instability News, August 27, 2013

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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomAugust 25, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Overshoot, AR5, Potash Bottom Line, Thermodynamics, CookFukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Harp Seals, Methane, Geopolitics, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather…

Physical Science Channel Weekly Update, 11/18/08

Physical Science Physical Science channel photo. An image from the Hubble Space Telescope of Fomalhaut b, the first planet outside of the Sun's solar system viewed from Earth. From Flickr, by bobster1985 “Lack of peer review is a unifying feature of pseudosciences. In this regard creationism is indistinguishable from astrology , homeopathy, etc. Effective peer review would cause all these "fields" to quickly disappear.“ Phil on Entropy and evolution

Stem Cells and Plastic Surgery

From Alex Kuczynski's new book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery: The synthetic collagen called Cosmoplast is manufactured from fetal foreskin stem cells harvested from a single baby boy, who would now be a teenager. (It's probably a good thing that he doesn't know that cells from his penis are filling the lips of hundreds of thousands of men and women around the planet. He might need as many therapists.

Genetic Modification as Medicine

On ERV, Abbie Smith provides an update on a pioneering treatment for hemophilia that uses viruses to insert missing genes in a patient's DNA. Hemophilia results from from the mutation or deletion of a gene that makes a blood clotting agent called Factor IX; without it, hemophiliacs are at risk for uncontrolled bleeding. While Factor IX can be delivered pharmaceutically, utilizing viruses to modify patients' DNA yields long-term improvements in natural Factor IX production. Abbie writes, "the amount of therapeutic Factor IX these patients needed (on average) dropped from 2613 IU/kg to 206. The…

Google's cache is sooo useful

Some commentators have not been persuaded that the reviews by "A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA" were really by Lott. Fine. I rummaged around in Google's cache and found older versions of the reviews of the books by Kevin Hassett, Robert Ehrlich and Cook and Ludwig. In those versions the location of the reviewer is not Swarthmore (Lott's home), but Washington, DC (Lott's workplace). Why did it change? I experimented by reviewing the nearest book to my computer (Game Programming Gems 2) and changing my location from Maroubra to Sydney. Not only was my location given as…

Faith-Based Initiatives Gone Wild

face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Blackwater USA was co-founded by former Navy Seal Erik Prince, a "billionaire right-wing fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family." face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">By the end of 2004 Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, was bragging to the press of "staggering" 600 percent growth. "This is a billion-dollar industry," Jackson said in October 2004. "And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it." face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">According to Scahill, there are tens of thousands of private…

The Kensington Forgery

The infamous Kensington Runestone is kept in a museum just a few miles up the road from me. It's a carved rock that was dug up on a farm in the 19th century by a Swedish farmer, and purports to tell the tale in runes of a doomed Viking expedition that had come down from Hudson's Bay to meet a tragic end at the hands of the Minnesota natives. More likely, it's a cunning artifact produced by the farmer, Olof Öhman. It's an unlikely bit of pseudo-history, and I'd love to see an unassailable disproof of its source. Martin Rundkvist is reporting that Öhman's signature has been found on the stone.…

A diversity of science news items

China Spacewalk; India bird flu outbreak spreading; Pollution and diabetes linked?; Cryptosporidium; Controversial theory of Alzheimer's China may broadcast first spacewalk live from PhysOrg.com China may broadcast its first ever spacewalk live when it launches its third manned space mission later this year, state media reported Friday. [...] India worst bird flu outbreak spreads from PhysOrg.com India's worst outbreak of bird flu spread as health authorities battled on Friday to stop it reaching the densely populated city of Kolkata amid heavy rain that hampered culling efforts…

Physical Science Weekly Channel Highlights

Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual channels. We kicked it off this week with Life Science; now, please enjoy the photo, comment, and a few particularly outstanding posts from the Physical Science channel below: A naturally framed view of Arches National Park, Utah. From Flickr, by James Gordon Reader comment of the week: In Alien or puppet? You be the judge!, Orac of Respectful Insolence shares a photo…

Life Science Weekly Channel Highlights

Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual channels. To kick it off, please enjoy the photo, comment, and a few particularly outstanding posts below: Life Science. From Flickr, by angela7dreams Reader comment of the week: In Who needs sex? - Rotifers import genes from fungi, bacteria and plants, Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science reports a new finding that bdelloid rotifers, a peculiar freshwater animal…

Parrot Pharmacists

Researchers from the University of York and the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom observed greater vasa parrots (Coracopsis vasa) using pebbles and date pits to extract a fine calcium powder from seashells that they would then lick off the shell. Their observations were published in Biology Letters. The birds were in essence creating their own nutritional supplements from materials readily available in their cages. While parrots are known to use their beaks to extract calcium from shells, this study shows the first known example of them using tools to accomplish the task.…

The Poop Pill Cure for C. diff

Image of C. difficile from BBC News. You may recall a prior post about a dog that could smell when patients were infected with Clostridium difficile. C. difficile causes about 14,000 deaths per year in the United States. Recent breakthroughs in understanding gut microbes have led to the successful treatment of C. difficile  in patients. Fecal transplants, the transfer of feces from a healthy person, has been life-saving for some patients for whom medical treatments are not effective or for recurrent infections. Listen to Billie's story here. To date, feces have been transferred by enemas,…

Lateral transfer of genes across the evolutionary tree

In recent years it has becoming increasingly obvious that there is a considerable amount of lateral, or cross phylogenetic, transfer of genetic material. In bacteria, this happens by several mechanisms, such as uptake of gene fragments from cells that have disintegrated, or by mechanisms such as conjugation ("bacterial sex"). Sometimes genetic material has transferred this way from bacteria into mammal cells. How important this turns out to be for the novelty of evolutionary processes remains to be seen. But until recently there has been little evidence of lateral transfer (apart from sex…

Death is not an option: where to put the micro-manager from Hell.

I'm couching the question in terms of the academic milieu, but I suspect people in other types of organizations face a similar kind of choice. Behind door #1: The micro-manager from Hell is in a position such that you have to interact directly with him/her. Your good ideas, your empirical grip on what will work and what will not, your sensible estimate of the time and resources required to get it done, even your understanding of the goals to which your labors are supposed to be directed -- all get discounted (because they don't necessarily fit with the micro-manager from Hell's vision and/…

Nature News

Washed-up sea snake rescued in New Zealand from PhysOrg.com A highly venomous yellow-bellied sea snake that washed up on a New Zealand beach was recovering Thursday at an aquarium. [...] Researchers recommend ways to fight lake trout invasion in Glacier National Park from PhysOrg.com Natural barriers like waterfalls play an important role in preventing lake trout from spreading through Glacier National Park, so maintaining those barriers should be a priority, Montana State University researchers said after conducting a four-year study in the park. [...] Ozone hole recovery may reshape…

Eviiiilllll scientists look at promiscuous queen bees.

For some reason this research sounds like it was done by that short criminal guy from the Princess Bride (you know... the one who gets poisoned?) Check out this quote from one of the Authors: "This required a particularly nasty experiment, in which we inoculated colonies with the most virulent disease of honeybees that is known, the dreaded American foulbrood disease," said Seeley. See the reason for the experiment below the fold... The reason for the experiment is actually pretty funny in itself. It seems that queen bees can be quite promiscuous - they go out looking for sperm from many…

Fish Are Still Screwed

"Industrialized fishing is the driving force in the depletion of biodiversity in our oceans...Oceans have been exempt from rules that are so natural to us on land." Because of the relative invisibility of life below the surface, most people never get to see it first hand, such as managers "who sit behind desks in Ottawa." Powerful words from Boris Worm, from one of the co-authors of a controversial report that projected the collapse of all of the world's commercially fished stocks within 50 years. From November from the old DSN... In case you didn't know or needed more concrete evidence,…

Chris Mooney & Carl Zimmer on Unscientific America

Two emigrants from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer, are on Bloggingheads.tv. The focus is the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, coauthored by Chris & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A comment from below seems appropriate: I remember an interesting (if apocryphal statistic) about radiation levels in the UK - you could get a higher radiation dose from living in the relatively undeveloped and unspoilt Cornwall than from living next to Sellafield (the UK's nuclear processing plant, aka Windscale) simply because the granite rocks…

The many babirusa species (babirusas, part VI)

Welcome to yet another article in the (outstandingly successful, yet recycled from ver 1) series on babirusas. Observant readers will have noticed that, strangely, I've refrained thus far from using a scientific binomial for babirusas, plus I've consistently (I think) referred to them in the plural, and not as a single species. What gives? Well, the proverbial cat is already out of the bag, but the traditional taxonomy where all babirusas are referred to the single species Babyrousa babyrussa is now defunct and there are good reasons for recognising several species. Babirusa taxonomy was…

Stem Cells for Spinal Cord Injuries

The difficulty with treating spinal cord injuries arises from a number of factors. Firstly there is the primary damage to the axons of the spinal cord itself, resulting in mechanical damage that can inhibit neurotransmission and transport of cellular material to and from the distal cord. The damaged cord must also compensate for secondary damage such as the generation of free radicals, a lack of oxygen to the affected area (anoxia), glial scarring, and a host of other issues. Your typical spinal neuron looks like this. (Image snagged from http://www.steve.gb.com). The axon is a long…

Okmok Eruption 2008

I'm back from my conference and will hopefully be getting back to a regular schedule!  In the meantime, the biggest news is still the eruption of Okmok Caldera in Alaska. The latest news has the eruption still going strong and the USGS predicting it will continues for potentially weeks to months. The eruption is apparently from a new vent on the caldera floor as well. Looks like the current eruption might be a VEI 4 (or thereabouts) eruption based on what I've heard from USGS scientists.  The largest hazard posed by Okmok right now is to air travel, this during a time when the Alaska…

It's supposed to hurt to think about it!

"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved." -Wittgenstein One of the most fundamental questions about the Universe that anyone can ask is, "Why is there anything here at all?" Image credit: Patrick at vignetted.com. Out beyond Earth, of course,…

Goodbye, Galaxies!

"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Heinrich Lambert One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century was that many of the great, faint, extended nebulae in the night sky were not merely objects within our own galaxy, like the stars. Rather, these objects were many millions of light-years distant, and were entire galaxies unto themselves. Image credit: Boren-Simon 2.8-8 ED POWERNEWT Astrograph Image Gallery.…

Next Generation Sequencing adds thousands of new genes

I had the good fortune on Thursday to hear a fascinating talk on deep transcriptome analysis by Chris Mason, Assistant Professor, at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Cornell University.  Several intriguing observations were presented during the talk.  I'll present the key points first and then discuss the data. These data concern the human transcriptome, and at least some of the results are supported by  follow on studies with data from the pigmy tailed macaque. Some of the most interesting points from Mason's talk were: A large fraction of the existing genome annotation is…

Great Moments in Deep-Sea History: Jan. 23, 1960

1960: The diving submersible Trieste descends to the floor of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on earth. via Wired Some pictures from Kevin sent along awhile ago from a "old" submersible chapter from Hill's The Sea from 1963. The chapter itself is authored by Dietz and covers bathyscaphs and other deep submerisbles for oceanographic research. You can read and see more of the Trieste here. Also check out Sphere and Cheerios & Alvin

Editor's Selections: Theory of Mind, Gut Bacteria, Sexting, and Opposites Attracted

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: From Jon Brock at Cracking the Enigma: How do siblings influence theory of mind development in children with autism? Did your gut bacteria make you read this post? From Mo at Neurophilosophy: Gut bacteria may influence thoughts and behaviour. A short, but interesting, post from Dr. Shock: Is Sexting a Form of Attachment Anxiety? Finally, from the eHarmony Labs: My partner and I are opposites. Now what?

Hapalodectids, the once otter-like proto-whales (mesonychians part V)

We now move to another mesonychian group: Hapalodectidae. This is yet another of those obscure little groups that sounds really interesting, yet are never the subject of focus or discussion. Virtually all of the literature on them - and that's still only ten papers or so - mentions the idea that they might have been piscivorous, but I can't find any elaboration of this and would like to see some. Hapalodectidae was named by Szalay & Gould (1966) as a mesonychid 'subfamily' (following Ting & Li (1987) and others, I here refer to the group as Hapalodectidae instead of Hapalodectinae);…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 17 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Individual Recognition in Domestic Cattle (Bos taurus): Evidence from 2D-Images of Heads from Different Breeds: In order to maintain cohesion of groups, social animals need to process social information efficiently.…

Breaking the Chain of Early Whale Evolution

A comparison of the third molars from three species of Pakicetus as viewed from the back. (From Cooper et al., 2009) Crack open just about any recent popular overview of evolution (namely Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters) and somewhere inside you will find a string of skeletal whales. Starting with either Indohyus or Pakicetus, the illustration will feature a graded series of forms that connect modern whales with their terrestrial ancestors. A caveat may be included in the text to say that we cannot be absolutely…

A Different Kind of Whale

Three restorations (top, left side, and bottom) of the skull of Andrewsiphius. From the Journal of Paleontology paper. During the past 30 years the evolution of fully aquatic whales from terrestrial ancestors has gone from one of the most enigmatic evolutionary transitions to one of the best documented. Evidence from the fossil record, genetics, and embryology have been combined to document how early whales walked into the sea, but what often has gone unnoticed is the diversity of early whales. In a new paper published in the latest issue of The Journal of Paleontology, cetacean experts J…

Tangled Bank #84: Science in Ancient Greece

Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us. I want to begin this edition with an important announcement. Aetiology's Tara Smith has some news about the Clergy Letter Project (and Evolution Sunday). This founder, Mike Zimmerman, is trying to create a list of scientists who would be willing to answer the more technical questions posed about science and evolution by participating clergy. Tara has all the…

How long does a Solar Eclipse last?

"The moon shuts off the beams of the sun as it passes across it, and darkens so much of the earth as the breadth of the blue-eyed moon amounts to." -Empedocles, ~450 B.C. Less than two weeks ago, I saw my first annular eclipse, with some spectacular results at the moment of maximum eclipse. From my first eclipse expedition, to False Klamath Cove, on the coast in northern California. This happens, of course, because -- from our point of view -- the Moon appears to pass in front of the Sun, blocking a fraction of the light coming from it. Image credit: NASA / Solar Dynamics Observatory. And…