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Where are the women at? Again?

The Ms magazine blog has an awful little article on the New Atheists that completely misses the point. It's about the sexes and atheism, of course, but it has little to say except to whine that the New Atheism is just like the old religion, and gosh, look at all those Old White Guys in the fore. Yes, we know; the visible leadership of atheism right now is largely male, but it's not because they pushed aside the women. The New Atheism is really dominated right now by senior academic types, which means that we are the lucky survivors of the old all-pervasive sexism that we're seeing so well-…

Dworkin on American issues

The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin entitled "3 Questions for America". The three questions are: 1. Should alternatives to evolution be taught in schools? Dworkin says yes, but only if they are actually scientific. Alternatives derived from and dictated by religious beliefs don't count. He recommends that we (that is, the USAians, but it applies in broader international contexts) need a Contemporary Politics course that discusses how these sorts of issues arise and for what political purposes. 2. The Pledge of Allegiance. Though this is not cast as a…

Breathtaking editorial arrogance

A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe: Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice,…

Birds up

I can't believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he's just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young paleontologist, before I got to. So I will now, before he goes and does a better job. Chris and his advisor Michael Bennett have come up with a possible way to test the "trees down or ground up" controversy about the origins of flight. That is, they have some independent evidence that early birds were basically ground dwellers, but that there was, as there is now, a mix of lifestyles…

Mutant genres

This is a meme started by PZ Mackers. I will exact retribution upon him later. In the meantime, I have been tagged There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations: You can leave them exactly as is. You can delete any one question. You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best…

Revisiting Haneef

So, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has admitted that Haneef, the Indian muslim doctor who was deported for being of "bad character" because he was related to someone who had peripheral involvement in the London and Glasgow bombings, was wrongly charged on the basis of bad evidence. Quelle suprise! Earth Times reports that "Each day, throughout his 25-day incarceration, new leaks, fresh errors and denials had made the case slip into a shambles." The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Dr Haneef's lawyer, Peter Russo, welcomed this confirmation of defence claims from the…

SfN: Workshop on "Resources for Teaching Neuroscience"

I TA'd a bunch in college and I am currently the TA for the medical school Neurology course, so I am always looking for good ways to make teaching better. However, the moderator made a good point during the workshop that SfN -- in spite of the fact that majority of members do teach or are themselves students -- has always focused on research rather than teaching. This issue exceeds SfN; I would argue it applies to academia as a whole. It seems to me that teaching is viewed as something that you do because you have to and research is something that you do because you want to. Anyway, that…

SfN: Travel Log

I got here late night after a plane flight filled with people accidentally clubbing each other with long cyclinders filled with posters. The baggage checkers probably thought we were a horde of terrorists. "Sir, what is in that long skinny package?" she asks as her hand moves to the alarm. "Science, my dear. Science." There is simply no way to elegantly carry a poster case, particularly in coach. There are these pretzel vendors in the airport, and I got to thinking that under the new rules food related liquids probably have to be thoroughly inspected before entering the concourse. Are…

Brief Suspended Animation is Successful in Pigs

Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject: "Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her…

The theological mindset

Theologians can be monumentally stupid when they look at things through their doctrinal spectacles, especially when it comes to science. Since they think everything is theological, it must have a theological standing, either good or bad, and so they will undergo the most amazing gymnastics to achieve this outcome. Here's an example, by Anglican Bishop Tom Frame of the Charles Sturt University theological school: The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical…

Rudd does too little on climate change

I received this from GetUp today. I wonder if the politicians recognise that no amount of economic manoeuvring or political RealPolitik will avoid the laws of nature? If we do too little, then our children - not even our grandchildren but the very next generation - will suffer and badly. The ALP (sorry, the Clean Feed Censorship Party) is starting to look like More of the Very Same... again. I'm writing from Canberra with an urgent message. I've just finished reading an advance copy of the Government's White Paper on climate change. They aim to reduce carbon pollution by only 5% by 2020,…

The heat of religion

It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another explanation for religion, based on the correlation between tropics and diseases, and the variety of religions in the tropics. Their argument, it appears, is to note that controlling for other factors you get higher numbers of religions in more tropical regions. Promoting within-group solidarity therefore is a way to prevent the spread of diseases, to prevent contagion. As…

Men happier than women?

A New York Times article makes the claim that men are now happier than women: Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more. Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work -- and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don't enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes. John Grohol read the article and became…

A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research

Most CogDaily readers are familiar with the little icon we developed to indicate when we were reporting on peer reviewed research. We created it when we began to offer links to news and blog posts, as a way of distinguishing those less "serious" posts from when we were talking about peer-reviewed journal articles. But Sister Edith Bogue of Monastic Musings recently pointed out that other academic bloggers could also make use of the icon, to distinguish when they're blogging about news, family, books, etc., from serious scholarship. But our icon isn't ideal for this purpose since its design is…

Totally uncensored Casual Friday curse-word study results

Last week's Casual Fridays study was the most popular ever: Despite its grueling 58-question length, over 750 respondents completed the entire thing. We got so much data on foul language that I probably won't finish writing all of it up today. As you might suspect, in reporting these results it's really impossible to avoid using the offensive words themselves, so if you think you might be offended, I'd recommend not reading any further. One thing our results confirmed, however: if you're like most people who completed the survey, you don't find most of these words generally offensive, so read…

Ethicists steal more books

Eric Schwitzgebel has just completed an exhaustive study of the behavior of ethicists. He had noticed that a large number of ethics books seemed to be missing from research libraries across the nation. Rather than leave that observation in anecdotal form, he began a systematic analysis of the data. His initial analysis showed that 1.25 ethics books were missing for every 1 book in non-ethics fields of philosophy. But that still didn't satisfy him. Perhaps ethics books are simply more popular, or perhaps the sample is biased because of the relative age of the ethics versus non-ethics books. So…

The science of charity

If I get a phone call from a solicitor asking me to support my local fire department or the search for the cure for cancer, I refuse to give. If a live person shows up at my door asking me to donate to a worthy cause, I nearly always give something. Am I behaving irrationally? Surely seeking donations via the telephone is more efficient than traipsing door-to-door. Shouldn't I support the charities that are most efficient? Tim Harford of Slate argues that such behavior on my part demonstrates that my charitable giving isn't truly altruistic. Indeed, the most altruistic donor would realize…

Scalia Idiocy, Continued

This is just too much...so I'm taking time out from working on the book to bring you more. I've now seen the Supreme Court transcript and can provide actual passages of what Scalia said. It's even worse than the previous post made it seem. To wit: JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Milkey, I had -- my problem is precisely on the impermissible grounds. To be sure, carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and it can be an air pollutant. If we fill this room with carbon dioxide, it could be an air pollutant that endangers health. But I always thought an air pollutant was something different from a stratospheric…

The Wraps on London

Well I've just returned from the UK, and am currently writing from a coffee shop in Queens. I'll head back to D.C. this afternoon or tonight. The flight was easy, no hassle; the only disappointment was that although we flew very close to Greenland, if not over it, there were too many clouds for me to see any of the ice. Despite the fact that I managed to visit London right in the middle of a heat wave, I had a wonderful time. In particular, let me commend the stylish Hempel Hotel just north of Hyde Park and near Notting Hill. Every room is different. The hotel also has one of the only private…

The War on Science: A Question of Causation (Part I)

FDA whistleblower Susan Wood, with whom I've appeared publicly in the past, has a nice op-ed in the Post today about her former agency's continuing intransigence on the issue of Plan B contraception. I was a tad disappointed, though, by Wood's agnosticism about what's causing the continual delays in approving a safe, effective drug that would actually reduce the number of abortions if made widely available. Wood concludes her piece as follows: It's been nearly three years since the first application came in to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter, so that women,…

Powerline's War on Science

Yesterday Tim did a very nice blog post in which he took apart a Michael Fumento column attacking scientific journals. I contributed a smidgeon to the debunking in the comments section. I was very proud of myself. But little did I know (mainly because I didn't read to the end of Tim's post) that Fumento's rant had been picked up by the influential right wing bloggers at Powerline, who use it to declare that "in recent years, the politicization of science by the left has become a serious problem" (ha!). Powerline then goes on to show that, in fact, the right is the real problem with a sweeping…

A Pepsi-Induced Hiatus Exodus

Important Update: The time has come to close things up here. I will no longer be blogging for ScienceBlogs.com. I am not sure where Laelaps will end up - perhaps back on Wordpress, perhaps elsewhere - but you can be sure that I will keep on writing about saber-toothed cats, whales that walked, early humans, and other cool bits of paleontology. With any luck, I will be able to confirm my plans in a few days. Keep your eyes on my author website or follow me on Twitter to find out where I'll be headed next. This is not farewell - just a brief break in transmission. By now you have probably heard…

Casual Fridays: Confident friend or diffident foe?

This week's survey was inspired by our efforts to get our middle-school-aged kids to behave appropriately when greeting adults. Both Jim and Nora tend to mumble, look away, hunch over, and give other anti-social cues when, say, an adult compliments them after a school band concert or a play. When we tell them to stand up straight and speak clearly, they often give us a look that suggests we are not only clueless to the social norms of respectable society, but also just plain stupid. Now we have hard (though nonscientific) data to back up our claims: we asked Cognitive Daily readers what…

A graph by any other name?

You can get a lot of information from a simple bar graph, but to what extent does the arrangement of the bars matter? You can find great commentary about good design, but what about a nice clean experiment? Martin H. Fischer led a team that asked participants to indicate if a given relationship was true or false, based on a variety of different bar graphs. For example, is A > B in this graph? And what about this one? If you are like most people, it was easier to confirm that A was larger than B in the first graph -- where the bars were oriented vertically. In addition to…

Lonely people have less efficient sleep

To say college students* aren't well-known for their efficient sleep habits might be the most dramatic understatement since Washington observed that Valley Forge winters are "a bit nippy." I can remember dozing off with my head in a pile of books at the library when I was in college, then waking with "The Riverside Chaucer" imprinted on my face in mirror-image. Undaunted by college students' reputation for irregular sleep, a group of researchers conducted a large study of Ohio State University students' sleeping habits. Among the many questions they attempted to answer was a simple one: how…

Looking back on 2008

Two thousand and eight has, to say the least, been a bizarre year for me. As I sit here watching the snow fall on a farm* nestled just outside the sprawl of Target stores and mini-malls in suburban New Jersey, I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. *[My wife and I are pet-sitting for a friend, a welcome respite from life in our tiny apartment.] Academically, 2008 has presented many trials. The mathematics courses I took, in particular, crushed my soul and made me miserable. Even the classes I did enjoy did little to mitigate the stress and frustration caused by the rest of my coursework…

Sex In The Blogosphere

I tried to keep mum. I really did. Honest! But sometimes I just can't help myself. I have a question for readers... What's up with this blogosphere being so gosh darn male dominated? I mean, sure we've got some incredibly talented boys here at Science Blogs. Razib's insightful, Bora's fun, PZ's amazing at stirring things up, Carl's got incredible style, and don't even get me started on my very favorite scibling (and co-blogger)... still it was recently brought to my attention that we ladies sure don't represent in the science blogging world. And I just can't help but postulate why that…

EXTINCTION: When Did Ours Become The Red Planet?

In the grand epic that is life on planet Earth, what is it about labeling everything by color to emphasize significance? The US map is generally red and blue while our nation's threat level seems to be stuck at yellow and orange. On the latter, I still don't quite understand Homeland Security's scheme, and frankly I'm not positive they do either. Today's colorful hot topic is one that really matters in the big picture: Red species. With yesterday's release of the '07 data from IUCN, conservation scientists all about the globe are scrambling to find out who's made the A-List... Er, I mean…

My Talk at NCAR--Book "Characters" in the Audience (!)

I just got done with a great event at the National Center for Atmospheric Research here in Boulder, CO. I would estimate that 140 people attended, and I gave a talk that combined elements of my bookstore presentation on Storm World with a PowerPoint show and a number of Nisbet-Mooney slides and analyses. I spoke for about 45 minutes, after which many scientists asked questions. Among those scientists was William Gray, famed hurricane specialist from Colorado State University, who came down from Fort Collins for the talk. Gray is heavily featured in the book, and his name pops up in pretty…

A fifteen-minute exercise may help overcome a lifetime of racial stereotyping

[This article was originally posted in February, 2007] The setting was an integrated suburban middle school: nearly evenly divided between black and white students. As is the case in many schools, white students outperformed black students both in grades and test scores. But how much of this difference is attributable to real differences in ability? After all, black kids grow up "knowing" that white kids do better in school. Perhaps this was just an example of kids living down to expectations. At every performance level, this chart (adjusted for covariates) shows that black students who…

Help celebrate PLoS ONEâs second birthday on ResearchBlogging.org

PLoS ONE turns two this month, and to celebrate, they're partnering with ResearchBlogging.org to make history on December 18. On that day, we're asking bloggers to write about one of the thousands of articles that have appeared on PLoS ONE in the past two years, in a synchroblogging event of epic proportions. It might just be the biggest day ever for blogging about peer-reviewed research. Want to participate? Visit the PloS ONE blog for more info. I've also reposted their instructions below. PLoS ONE turns two this December. For our community celebration we're going to run our second…

A temporary title

The lack of a proper title for my book (latest update here) has continued to vex me, even as I have made quite a bit of progress in fleshing out the chapters. A title is not necessary to my work at this stage, of course, but I feel that having a title helps keeps the voice of the book coherent. I also know that when everything is finished the title is going to be important in generating interest in what I have written (for, contrary to the old admonition, people do judge books by their covers), and I did not want to pick something boring (i.e. Evolution) or especially cliched (i.e. anything…

What the hell...

This past spring the science blogosphere was all a-twitter over the release of the creationist propaganda film Expelled. Was it a success? A flop? A big budget fluff piece that only attracted those already inclined to agree? Such debates aside, the release of Expelled and the opening of Ken Ham's Fun House (aka The Creation Museum) signals the fact that anti-evolutionists are willing to dump millions of dollars in attempts to "reclaim America for Christ." While the museum in Kentucky* and Expelled have received plenty of press, modern day anti-evolutionists are trying to extend their…

I'm done, almost!

Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in…

Best. Movie. EVAR.

The plot careered around like a drunken sailor, and made very little sense. The macguffin was ridiculous. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were bland mannequins who didn't do much. Many of the situations were absurd—the sword fight on the water wheel, the cannibals and the pirates dashing back and forth around the island, heck, just about every time someone pulled a sword, it was for a silly reason. The primary villain, Lord Cutler Beckett, was a conniving bureaucrat who didn't leave his office, and who was working to get a monopoly for the East India Company—did they get their plot driver…

Things That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS, Part 3

The first two posts in this series are href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">here and href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a_1.php">here.   The final editorial in the NEJM's three-part series on FDA reform takes it's title from a line in the Institute of Medicine report: href="http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/26341.aspx">The Future of Drug Safety: "This [is] a golden moment of opportunity to improve fundamentally the way FDA regulation considers and responds to the evolving understanding…

Anni is getting a new liver...

Remember my friend Moreena, and her kids Anni and Frankie? It's Moreena's birthday. And Anni is getting a new liver today. As she put it, Please please please keep her safe. Please please please send peace to this donor family. Please please do. I'm not a prayer, but I'm praying. We're waiting to hear. Update at 8:34 am 10/9/08: Anni is doing okay. Update from Moreena below the fold. And it's Frankie's birthday today. Moreena writes: Dr. Superina just came to talk to us. The new liver is all hooked up, and is making bile already. Surprisingly, they ended up using the entire liver. Her…

Sciencewomen Reader Challenge 2008 begins! Fund proposals for DonorsChoose, help kids.

For the last two Octobers, Janet of Scienceblogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science has organized Sciencebloggers into participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. We're doing it again this October, yay! DonorsChoose collects requests for materials, supplies, equipment, money for field trips and so on from public school teachers who are trying to do great things for their students, and then faciliates matching them to people who want to help. ScienceWoman and I have chosen some projects we think would be great to fund, for kids who really need it. And while we realize that the…

10 reasons why Wednesday is not a good day for field work

Earlier this week, I thought that it would be a great idea to nip over to a local field site and get some work done. Wednesday seemed like the perfect day. The mere fact that I am only now getting a chance to write this should indicate that ideas and reality don't always mesh. 10. Your laptop will get infected by a virus (called XP 2008 Antivirus) on Tuesday afternoon, leaving you sans computer for two days. (You'll also have to reinstall all your programs and files once you get it back.) 9. Your dean will insist on scheduling a mid-morning meeting on Wednesday - and then fail to show up.…

Confusing and misleading statistics in the news

I am an inveterate and unapologetic listener of NPR. I love to feel like I am getting something useful out of being stuck in traffic and I find their reporting to generally be much better and more in-depth than that of the print media. However, this week, All Things Considered's reporting has really irritated me. Not just because they almost exclusively focus on the horse-race aspects of the presidential race, but because they've been doing a pretty poor job of reporting their statistics in a correct and understandable way. First the confusing example, from yesterday's story about McCain and…

Looking forward to year two

As Alice has reminded us, the theme for this month's Scientiae is "transitions." Seems like a totally appropriate thing to be contemplating as I gear up for the next academic year. A few months ago, I reflected on my lessons learned as a first year faculty member. I felt like I'd learned a lot but still had a ways to go before I really felt up to speed. Maybe it's optimism generated by a few months away from the classroom, but now I'm feeling much more comfortable in my role as a not-quite-so-new member of the department. For one thing, classes start in about a month, and I actually know…

Changing the conversation

We've been having a couple of interesting conversations on this blog about what makes an engineer, or who becomes an engineer. The National Academy of Engineering has been facilitating a conversation about this too, and have just published a report about it. I have just ordered my copy, so I haven't read the report yet. But I have heard a couple of presentations on it, and the rough summary is that engineering needs an image change. We need ideas other than the stories of "engineering is problem solving" or "engineering is making things" to attract those who have the talent engineering…

De Took Er DataBs Jrbs!

Over at Daily Speculations, Alan Corwin writes about database programming jobs that will never return. The gist of Alan's piece is that the tools for databases are basically so turn-key and so easy that those who were trained to build their own database code by hand will be unlikely to see those job returns. He ends his article by noting: "For my friends in the programming community, it means that there are hard times ahead." Turn the page. Here is a report from UCSD on "Hot Degrees for College Graduates 2010." 3 of the top 5 are computer science related, and number 3 is "Data Mining…

Florida Makes Shelley Sad

I have a love-hate relationship with Florida. The "hate" part of the equation comes from their shameful treatment of the manatee issue, their conservative Republican politics, their wanton destruction of the Everglades, and now, giving consideration to putting intelligent design in schools. As a product of the Florida public school system, I'm intensely grateful to the excellent teachers I had who instilled in me wonder for the natural world. Polk County is close to where my entire family lives (Highland County) and close to where I went to undergrad (New College in Sarasota). A majority of…

Back in the USA With Gossip From Paris

I got back into Detroit last night after a long flight from Charles de Gaulle, after spending a week and a half traveling from Amsterdam to Antwerp to Paris. Hopefully you all enjoyed the chemistry-related blogging of Wired blogger Aaron Rowe in my absence, looks like he's kept things busy here (thanks Aaron!). There were a few things going on in Paris while I was there: one-- the French President, Nicholas Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia have just divorced. In fact, his wife was on the cover of Elle magazine this month with the headline "Divorcee!" across it. An interesting fact that in…

Friday Grey Matters: Rare (and Murderous) Owls

I'm going to take a bit of a departure for parrot-related news this week to focus on owls, which are solitary, nocturnal birds of prey. Recently a very rare species of owl, the long-whiskered owlet, was observed in the wild in Peru by an American ornithological team. The owlet, first discovered in 1976, is tiny, no bigger than a fist. The amber-eyed owl's facial feathers extend out past its head, making it appear to have wispy whiskers. It is also conjectured that the owl is nearly flightless The American Bird Conservancy said the sighting "is considered a holy grail of South American…

What is Happiness and Can We Ever Achieve It?

Would you rather have a completely happy life, or a meaningful life? And are the two mutually exclusive? The topics, as well as recent neuroscience research, is addressed in a fascinating podcast over at Governomics. The podcast is here, with the transcript here. As mentioned in the podcast, Aristotle had certain ideas of what ideal happiness was: [He]...thought that eudaimonia was the ultimate goal of all purposeful striving. Greek for "happiness," the word eudaimonia comes from"eu" (meaning "good" or "well being") and "daimon" (meaning "spirit"). For Aristotle, "well being," or "happiness…

Does "yes" mean "yes" - for a robot?

At io9, Annalee Newitz asks, "can robots consent to have sex with humans?" Do you think the blondie bot in Cherry 2000 was really capable of giving consent to have sex with her human boyfriend? Or did her programming simply force her to always have sex, whether she wanted to or not? And what about the Romeo Droid in Circuitry Man, or the Sex Mecha in AI, who live entirely to sexually please women, even when those women are abusing them or putting them in danger? Obviously this isn't a urgent social issue. An insentient robot is just an appliance, not a person, and a truly sentient AI doesn't…

Mid-week links: the self as data; E.coli vs. Linux; Graffiti snail

So much to read this week! Here are a couple of quick links of interest: Carl Zimmer on comparing the E. coli genome to Linux code: A number of scientists have begun to compare natural and manmade networks. A lot of the same rules appear to be at work in the growth of the Internet, airport connections, brain wiring, ecosystem food webs, and gene networks. But very often, scientists are finding, it's the differences between natural and manmade networks that are most revealing, offering clues to the different ways in which people and evolution build complex things. And the NYT Magazine has an…

Swim Sperm, Swim Together, Swim Like the Wind!

It would appear that today will be Sex Day at Pure Pedantry. So be it. I didn't know this but mouse and rat sperm have funny shaped hooks at their tips. To the right is a picture of sperm from a variety of mouse and rat species (click to enlarge). A) Variation in hook design across nine murine rodent species: (1) Bunomys fratrorum, (2) Mus musculus, (3) Rattus norvegicus, (4) Dasymys incomtus, (5) Pseudomys oralis (6) Maxomys surifer, (7) Melomys burtoni, (8) Apodemus sylvaticus, (9) Apodemus speciosus. Interesting, but scientists didn't know what this significance of the hooks were.…