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Strange Fish Uses Chin Like a Metal Detector

Peter's elephantnose fish has long been a laughing stock of scientists. But now, due to a new study by researchers at the University of Bonn, Germany, the hilarious looking creature's reputation might improve due to an astonishing attribute. He's got the whole world....in his nose! According to the researchers' study, released in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Peters' elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii) use weak electrical fields emitted out of their chins to scan the floor of the water and do so with amazing accuracy. The study shows how in total darkness the fish can sense the…

American Muslims: Politically left but socially conservative

Pew has released a survey analysis comparing American Muslims to other American religious groups, comparing levels of religious intensity, political identification, and policy preferences. I summarize and quote from some of the key findings below. Muslims account for less than one percent of the country's population, whereas eight-in-10 Americans are Christian. Recent public opinion surveys by the Pew Research Center find that, with respect to the intensity of their religious beliefs, Muslim Americans most closely resemble white evangelicals and black Protestants. Among the findings, as…

UWisc Launches Stem Cell Center w/ Lecture by Wilmut

UWisc-Madison is joining Harvard and Scotland's University of Edinburgh by investing in a new stem cell research facility that promote cross-disciplinary collaborations. Tonight, in conjunction with a speech by Edinburgh scientist Ian Wilmut, the university will announce the new virtual center with $750,000 in initial funding. Here's how the initiative was described in the Wisconsin State Journal: "Just about every university now has a stem-cell center," said Clive Svendsen, a co-director of the center. "This is a response to national competition in this area. We want to keep UW-Madison a…

Ten Years After Dolly, Neither Cloned Super Models Nor Miracle Medicines Have Emerged

Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly. While the U.S. press largely passed on the moment, the Canadian and British media paid much heavier attention. In an op-ed at Canada's Globe & Mail, my friend Tim Caulfied, a professor of law and research director at the University of Alberta's Health Law Institute, wondered whether all the knee-jerk policy activity sparked by the event was really worth the fuss. For example, the UN spent three years negotiating an international ban on human cloning, only to settle on an ambiguous non-binding…

"Open Mike" Day for Senate Dems on Global Warming

Tuesday was "open mike" day at Senator Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works committee, reports the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. Senate Dems including Barak Obama took stage to hammer home the overwhelming consensus that climate change is real, and that major policy action, notably emission caps, is needed. In her speech to open the session, Boxer compared the moment to the early 1970s, when a burning Cuyahoga River and the nation's smog filled cities galvanized Congress to take action on clean air and clean water. "It's once again our turn again to stand up and lead this…

IPCC Report Unlikely to Shift Media/Public Agenda

Scientists and environmental advocates will watch with excited anticipation on Friday as the policymakers' summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is released in Paris, France. The IPCC reports are designed to be the most important events in climate science and policy, gathering world experts to craft an authoritative summary of the state of human understanding. Yet here in the United States, if past trends are predictive, the IPCC report is unlikely to make a major dent in the news or public agenda, much less shift public opinion. As the Pew analysis (pictured above) of…

THE FUNCTIONAL VIEW OF THE MEDIA: NYTIMES Details Efforts of Local Owners to Buy Back Newspapers from Out-of-Town Ownership Groups; Newspapers Defined as Central to Community Integration; USC Annenberg Mentioned As Potential Buyer of LA TIMES

There are two dominant ways we view the role of the news media in the U.S., with both views reflected in the traditions of classical sociology. The first perspective emphasizes the "power and persuasion" nature of the news. When we think of the media as a campaign tool, as a vehicle for elites to mobilize public opinion, or as an arena where competing groups try to win adherents to their side, these interpretations fall within the the "power and persuasion" category. But an overlooked, and secondary way we view the news media has less to do with power and persuasion, and more to do with…

Your Thoughts On A Science-Media Sit-Down

In about a month I'm heading to Colorado for the "Science and Media Summit" at the Aspen Science Center. The name may conjure up an image in your mind of a long table with diplomats from Science on one side and Media on the other, tensely negotiationg an end to some sort of bloodshed. As I understand it, though, the meeting should be much more amicable and interesting. The subtitle for the meeting is "Getting It Right: Science and the Media in the Emerging Media Landscape." Our mission will be to come up with a blueprint for good reporting on science in the age of blogs, YouTube, and…

In Praise of Flukes

I have an article in tomorrow's New York Times on a provocative theory about our origins. Humans, other animals, plants, fungi, and protozoans are all eukaryotes. We all share a distinctive genome compared to other organisms (prokaryotes, which include bacteria and archaea). Our genes are more versatile: they can be switched on an off in more complex patterns than in prokaryotes, and one gene can make many different proteins, depending on which parts of the gene our cells look at. Some scientists would like to say that this distinctiveness must be the product of natural selection. But Michael…

Zap

I've got an article in tomorrow's New York Times about a startling new way to control the nervous system of animals. Scientists at Yale have genetically engineered flies with neurons that grow light-sensitive triggers. Shine a UV laser at the flies, and the neurons switch on. In one experiment, the scientists were able to make decapitated flies leap into the air by triggering escape-response neurons. In another, they put the trigger in dopamine-producing neurons, and the flash sent healthy flies walking madly around their dish. (You can read the paper for free at Cell's web site.) In working…

On existentialism

Last night I watched Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life (2001). Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed, especially when it featured a chemist (Eamonn F. Healy of St Edwards University) spouting on about evolution. This piece, by Robert Solomon (Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin), on the other hand, struck me as offering a good statement for the relevence of existentialism. The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the…

Sonic hedgehog and Whales

What does Sonic Hedgehog on the left have to do with whale evolution? Nothing. However a soon-to-be-published study will argue that the gene Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) played a part. The abstract reads: Among mammals, modern cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are unusual in the absence of hind limbs. However, cetacean embryos do initiate hind-limb bud development. In dolphins, the bud arrests and degenerates around the fifth gestational week. Initial limb outgrowth in amniotes is maintained by two signaling centers, the apical ectodermal ridge (AER) and the zone of polarizing activity (…

'I don't take a position on that'

There always has been tension between advocates of Young Earth Creationism (such as Ken Ham and Henry Morris) and the ID movement. While the former believe that ID supporters should actively support Biblical principles, the latter refuse to disassociate themselves from a young earth position as that would negate the "big tent" strategy perfected by Phil Johnson. Witness, for example, what Johnson says about YEC: My approach with the young-earthers is to say, 'I'm not asking you to give up your point of view.' In fact I'm not even saying what my opinion is with it. I don't take any position on…

First real week of teaching

Last week was the first real week of teaching in that it was the first week when we had content-driven classes. So Tuesday saw me walking into class for a three-hour seminar on Galileo (to be repeated again on Thursday). The reading was relatively easy - Drake's translations of Starry Messenger (1610), Letters on Sunspots (1613) and the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) - so I expected no major problems with that. One of the most difficult things, in my mind at least, is trying to convince students about how novel Galileo's finisings were. They know about the moons of Jupiter, they…

Nice Evolution Primer Site

If you're looking for a website that gives a nice intro to the nature of science and evolution, but doesn't use lots of jargon, you should check out This View of Life. From the About page: The aim of this project is to present the topic of evolution in a scientifically accurate manner that avoids technical language, but that also avoids potentially misleading colloquial language. It strives to be accessible to the non-scientist and so it represents a general outline, merely scratching the surface of the large body of research in the many facets of this topic. For more detailed information,…

1st Annual Darwin Day Essay Contest

Darwin Day is fast approaching! In honor of Charles Darwin's birthday and his intellectual achievements, the Alliance for Science is starting an annual Darwin Day essay contest geared at high school students. We will be accepting essays from the 50 states, submissions sent by email. There will be cash prizes for the top entries, magazine subscriptions, and numerous signed books on evolution, creationism, or other relevant topics in biology available as prizes. Teachers, if your student is the winner then we will also kick in some money for your science labs. Now here's the kicker: we don…

Getting a free Ph.D.?

I hate to do it but I gotta take serious issues with some of the things Shelley put forth in her post here. Unfortunately, NIH training grants (T32 type NRSA) are not an answer to most financial woes. My graduate program had one, and I was on it. At the time, any one student could be carried for two years (I think that was a peculiarity of how our program chose to use the money) and it only funded half of our students. Considering that my program was pretty small (we typically admitted 6 per year), I have doubts about the ability of a T32 grant to pick up most or all students in a larger…

Robots in the Classroom: Sejnowski on Machine Learning and Education

I've been busy writing up a new paper, and expect the reviews back on another soon, so ... sorry for the lack of posts. But this should be of interest: The Dana Foundation has just posted an interview with Terrence Sejnowki about his recent Science paper, "Foundations for a New Science of Learning" (with coauthors Meltzoff, Kuhl & Movellan). Sejnowski is a kind of legendary figure in computational neuroscience, having founded the journal Neural Computation, developed the primary algorithm in independent components analysis (infomax), contrastive hebbian learning, and played an early…

Imus---synonym for "stupid"

I've written a number of times how blindingly stupid and irresponsible Deirdre Imus has been. Now, Don Imus has revealed he has prostate cancer, and he is apparently surprised. According to ABC News, "he was surprised by the diagnosis because he had been following a healthy diet for the last decade." He also stated that, "... it was all the stress that caused this." I'm not nearly as surprised as Mr. Imus. Prostate cancer is the malignancy most closely correlated with age (and of course, gender) and estimates are that between 14-70 % of men his age may have prostate cancer (occult or…

The family that posts together

In response to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, "Maxim" posted on Usenet: The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very shortly after the law started doing anything, and the crime rates start rising consistently after that, with the biggest increase in 2002. It is falling before the law and for one year after and then rising consistently afterward. Hmm, it was posted under the name of Lott's son, but the writing…

Introducing---A new blog category

Most of my readers know that I'm a dad, but I don't write all that much about fatherhood. We have some great bloggers here who talk about being a mommy and the difficulties of being a mom and a scientist. I'd like to add a voice about fatherhood. Every couple and every individual approaches parenthood differently. My writings, needless to say, are my experiences. The way my wife and I have ended up doing things has a lot to do with our earning potential---mine as a physician is much higher than hers as a teacher, so she is the primary at-home parent. This isn't to say that my wife isn't…

Do quacks prey on vulnerable groups?

A while back I wrote about a naturopathic "physician" who was specifically preying on the Latino community. This is troubling for a number of reasons, some of which I mentioned. In my zeal to rant about the quackery, I may have not delved deeply enough into some of the other important issues. For example, Hispanics have rates of diabetes and stroke well above the white Anglo population. These are conditions for which we have very effective science-based treatment. Proper treatment of high blood pressure in diabetics reduces the rate of heart attack and stroke by 35-50%. Proper foot care,…

Morning Report #2

Morning report is a daily conference for medical residents. It is done differently at different institutions, but normally a case is presented, often by the post-call team, and discussed by the senior residents and an attending physician. Today's case will be the first in an occasional series. It is best read above the fold first, and then going below the fold after digesting the first part adequately. --PalMD A fifty year-old woman presented to her primary care physician with hemoptysis (bloody cough). She has a history of emphysema and tuberculosis, which was treated about 25 years ago.…

Send Your Face to Space

If it has always been your fantasy to send your physical likeness out into the cosmos, now is your time! To commemorate the final two Shuttle missions, NASA has created a bonkers "Face in Space" initiative, which allows you to upload a picture of yourself to send to the International Space Station. What this actually entails, I imagine, is a burned data DVD in an astronaut's backpack -- nominal space travel if I've ever heard of it. It's fun, and my face is already destined to launch on September 16th on STS-133; but, seriously, what is this about? Rousing public interest in the space…

People with diabetes have less sRAGE

  When blood sugar concentrations are elevated, humans run the risk of glucose binding to proteins in the blood and causing the irreversible formation of advanced glycation end products (AGE). Once formed, AGEs can bind to their receptor (RAGE) and stimulate inflammation and oxidative stress. This pathological signaling can be stopped by pieces of the RAGE protein that break off and form a soluble version called sRAGE. These soluble versions of RAGE are good because they can bind excess AGEs and prevent their effects. A new study published in the American Journal of Physiology -…

Sex differences in the evolution of live-bearing fish

Samples of fish species from the Poeciliidae family show the diversity in color, fin size and body shape. Kansas State University researchers studied 112 species of these live-bearing fishes and found that males and females evolve differently. Image courtesy of Kansas State University Dr. Michael Tobler and Dr. Zach Culumber at Kansas State University examined 112 species of live-bearing fish (Poeciliidae) and have made some interesting discoveries about their evolution. Their analyses included information on body shape, fin size, where the species are found and information on global…

Another clueless article on the meaningless BBC phone-in poll

Yet another columnist has demonstrated profound ignorance of opinion polling. Scott Norvell writes about the meaningless BBC phone-in poll (discussed earlier here and here): Britain's chattering classes sure can get their knickers in a knot with the will of the people offends their liberal sensibilities. A phone-in poll does not represent the will of the people in any way, shape or form. Norvell compounds his error by leaving out important details about the shooting by Martin, like the fact that the burglar was shot in the back while fleeing…

How comparative physiology may save us from mosquitoes

Image of mosquito from http://bloodinurineandpainofca.wordpress.com/ Until now I thought I had come up with enough reasons to dislike mosquitoes, those tiny little blood sucking vectors of disease. With reports of the debilitating mosquito-borne virus chikungunya in the Americas (Carribean), I was ecstatic hear that researchers are working hard to find ways to control mosquito populations. As mentioned in a previous blog, only the females bite to obtain nourishment for developing eggs. According to the study authors, the female mosquito can double her own body weight after just one meal,…

Getting ready for Experimental Biology 2012 and our new contest!

I am getting very excited about the upcoming Experimental Biology conference especially since this year marks the 125th anniversary of The American Physiological Society for which there are many planned celebrations. Not to mention, the programming for comparative physiology at this year's meeting is really exciting: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section Distinguished Lecture: Tuesday, April 24, 2012, 8:00-10:00 AM James Hicks August Krogh Distinguished Lectureship of the APS Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section Symposia: Monday, April 23, 2012, 3:30-5:30 PM Nina…

ETDs as the data-curation wedge?

Many doctoral institutions now accept and archive (or are planning to accept and archive) theses and dissertations electronically. Virginia Tech pioneered this quite some time ago, and it has caught on slowly but steadily for reasons of cost, convenience, access, and necessity. Necessity? Afraid so. Some theses and dissertations are honest digital artifacts, unable to be faithfully represented in ink on paper or in other analog fashion. Others might be flattened into analog, but that wouldn't be their (or their author's) preference. Still others contain digital artifacts of various sorts.…

Please don't do this! A word about keywords

I see a lot of metadata out there in the wild woolly world of repositories. Seriously, a lot. Thesis metadata, article metadata, learning-object metadata, image metadata, metadata about research data, lots of metadata. And a lot of it is horrible. I'm sorry, it just is—and amateur metadata is, on the whole, worse than most. I clean up the metadata I have cleaning rights to as best I am able, but I am one person and the metadata ocean is frighteningly huge even in my tiny corner of the metadata universe. So here's a bit of advice that would save me a lot of frustration and effort, and is…

Review: Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age

Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT Press, 2007. Worldcat page, Powell's page (no, I get no kickback). This calm, clear volume provides a thorough grounding in the practices of academic researchers around their publications and their data, and how the Internet is—and in many cases, isn't—changing those practices. Copiously researched, accurate, and logically presented, the book starts with a 30,000-foot overview of the current situation, then swoops through technology, law and policy, the existing scholarly-communication…

New kid on the block

Hello, ScienceBlogs readers! I am so thrilled to be joining this little corner of cyberspace. Allow me to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about why I'm here. I'm Jane. I'm a computer scientist, an assistant professor, and a new mom. Trying to juggle those three identities is, shall we say, challenging at times, but never dull. I started blogging in late December of 2004. (Geez, has it been that long?!) When I started my original blog (over at See Jane Compute), there weren't that many women science bloggers out there. So my blog started as a way to add a new voice to the…

Radical thought to help solve the metrics question about newspaper pieces

One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday. I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…

Texas Ordered to Destroy Blood Samples Taken From More Than 5.3 Million Children and Stored Without Consent

I've been meaning to post about this for several weeks, but as we all know, things have been a weee bit hectic. But now, finally:  News on the informed consent for using tissues in research front. Since the 1960s, US law has mandated that all newborns be screened for genetic diseases.  What most people don't know is that those samples are often stored and used in future research without the knowledge of the parents (or, obviously, the children).  I write about this in the afterward of my book, which is of course directly related to this issue. For decades ethicists, scientists, policy makers…

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

It's that time again: Today , September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Japanese Respect for the Aged day ... and my birthday. It also happens to be the day Giles Corey was "pressed" to death by villagers who stacked increasingly large rocks on him because he'd been declared a witch in the famous Salem Witch Trials (1692). It was the day women were finally allowed to vote (1893) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid committed their first robbery (1900). It's the anniversary of the first underground nuclear bomb test and the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field (1957), where they…

Entangled Reality

Read an interesting interview with Roger Penrose at Discover Magazine. Found this part fascinating: So Schrödinger himself never believed that the cat analogy reflected the nature of reality? Oh yes, I think he was pointing this out. I mean, look at three of the biggest figures in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac. They were all quantum skeptics in a sense. Dirac is the one whom people find most surprising, because he set up the whole foundation, the general framework of quantum mechanics. People think of him as this hard-liner, but he was very cautious in what he…

Don't twitter and more at 58th edition of Four Stone Hearth

The 58th edition of Four Stone Hearth, the anthro blog carnival is up. One linked post at Ethblography by Fran, an anthropologist, asserts that twittering means nothing: Like Wikipedia, then, it is for this reason that Twitter gets under my skin in a most uncomfortable way. It doesn't mean anything. It is genuinely uninformative, ego-centric and self-obsessed drivel. The audience is no one and everyone; the subject is nothing and everything. I don't need to know when someone brushes their teeth or takes out the trash or picks their nose. I really don't. Humanity is exceptionally ridiculous.…

Irreligious intolerance or Intellectual honesty?

Go read this at 3 Quarks Daily and come back because I have more. The hand wringing by religious apologists has gotten desperate in the past weeks. Militant atheism is the name given and it is frowned upon. The fundamental reason boils down to what Dawkins has repeatedly pointed out. Religion has a special place in the society. While we will question and rigorously debate an economic or a political point we will not do the same for religious theologies. That, dear reader, is intellectually dishonest, to put mildly. The real question you must ponder about if you are the intellectually honest…

Religion and Equality

Razib at Gene Expression talks about a recent episode where women were to be banned from praying in a Mecca Shrine. a conversation that my aunt once had with my uncle, she joked offhand asking why men should always pray before women. My uncle, a religious man, explained that if women prayed before men in the hall then when they bent over and prostrated themselves they would expose themselves to men. That would be improper. My aunt responded, "Ah, but it's fine if we see your backsides all the time?" My uncle was taken aback that he didn't respond. On another occassion my mother explained to…

Creating Art on Drugs

Artist Ricardo Cortes has a beautiful exhibition of his work in the current edition of Vanity Fair entitled Sketches of the Drug Czars. In his series he points out the steps that have led our country through the most expensive (and least effective) domestic policy in history. Starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, Cortes describes the first federal restrictions on "medicines-gone-wild" such as morphine and cocaine (sorry Coca Cola) followed by the criminalization of marijuana in 1937, coincidentally taking place just a few years after the prohibition of alcohol was being…

Best sit in a soft chair to read this

    Ed Yong offers a particularly nice write-up of some studies about how physical experience shapes emotion, opinion, thinking, and so on. TKTK: When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six psychological experiments, Joshua Ackerman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the properties that we feel through touch - texture, hardness, weight - can all influence the way we think. Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview…

Neuron Culture Top Five, April 2010

Newscom/Zuma, via TPM Brains, genes, and taxes won the month. How does Williams syndrome prevent racism? It's subtle Ed Yong, Mo Costandi, Scientific American, and others have covered nicely a new paper finding that people with WIlliams syndrome (a condition I've been interested in since writing a long feature about it for the Times Magazine a few years back) show little or no racial bias. But I wanted to add one thought about the finding. Most of the write-ups have emphasized, rightly, that people with Williams tend to show little or no social fear -- a lack that could explain a lack of…

Genes & temperament; future of twitter etc; & how to sell that book

A few calendar notes: I've got a three-day run starting next Sunday in which I'll be talking to authors and journalists about book proposals; NY science writers about the future of social media; and to genomic geeks about genes and temperament. If you've questions you'd like raised at any of these, please shoot me a note in the comments or privately at david.a.dobbs [at] gmail.com. This Sunday morning, April 25, I'll be on a panel at the American Society of Journalists and Authors annual conference in New York discussing, along with agents Michelle Brower and Chris Parris-Lamb and GP Putnam…

Accidental brain evolution suffers a reversal

Early homind skulls, from A Kansan's Guide to Science (seriously) A couple weeks ago, the Guardian ran an article in which Oxford neurobiologist Colin Blakemore described "how the human got bigger by accident and not through evolution." Though I didn't get to it at the time, I thought that an odd headline, since evolution actually occurs when genetic accidents -- those mutation things -- grant an advantage. Now John Hawks has written a post addressing what he says is a pretty big muckup by Blakemore: Thanks to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore…

Cool dips: long distance running; memory and plagiarism; scenery; and swine flu action

Both Mind Hacks and Jonah Lehrer took interesting note -- Jonah's the longer, and a pretty nice summary itself -- of the fascinating NY Times piece on ultramarathoner Diane Van Deren, who began running long distances after brain surgery removed much of her right temporal lobe. This gave her a great advantage: the lack of memory of the run behind her, and thus of any dread of the punishment still to come. Downside: significant memory problems, and she can't read a map. Speaking of memory ... Newsweek has a good piece on unconscious plagiarism -- that is, how genuine lapses in "source memory…

Who Me? Dept: Me & Eating Well v Gourmet & Saveur for James Beard Award

Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as the food's quality -- especially if the food is good. His food awards are greatly coveted among chefs, food writers, and others who care about food. So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at…

Nerd Gift Ideas Part 1: For Any Nerd

As the holidays draw ever nearer, I've been trying desperately to put together a Christmas list for my family and friends. After a lot of internet-searching and idea-hunting, I've stumbled upon some great nerdy gifts, and I figured I might as well share them with you all. After all, if you read this blog you're either a science-nerd or a nerd-lover, so these gift ideas just might come in handy. Here's part one of nerdy gift ideas for the holidays, with gifts for any nerd you love A simple gift for any science nerd is a piece of the lab they can use anywhere, like this classic Beaker Mug. It's…

How Bad Is Acidification Anyhow?

If you've been reading the news, people are reacting strongly to a new study which reported ocean acidification due to CO2 output is occurring at a faster rate than expected. But what is the deal with acidification, anyway? The worst part of a change in ocean pH is that it shifts the balance of carbonate ions. As the pH of the oceans drops, it is harder for animals to fix calcium carbonate. Therefore, with oceans acidifying at an alarming rate, the threat to calcified organisms is also rising faster than previously thought - and 2005 estimates were bad enough. Luckily, some calcifying…

Hey, nobody's perfect- not even Biologists.

Just because we're uber-smart doesn't mean we're foolproof. Sadly, even scientists make mistakes. The most recent case of unfortunate events comes to us from Mallorca, where the captive breeding of the Mallorcan Midwife Toad, on the verge of extinction, has infected them with a fungus that might wipe them out. According to the paper recently published in Current Biology, the Mallorcan Midwife Toad was on the brink of extinction until a captive breeding program sought to boost the amphibian's population. Then, just as the toad populations were growing, the captive-bred toads got infected with…