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You can be a part of the next generation of AI!

To a biologist, there are only a few key elements that determine if something is alive: it must undergo homeostasis (stable internal state), metabolism (use energy to maintain organization and homeostasis), respond to its environment, adapt over time and reproduce. It sounds like a simple set of rules -- after all, a bacteria can do it. But we, as human beings, have never been able to capture such essence and truly bring machines to life. But such is the quest of many computer scientists that seek to create "artificial life," or AI. The goal is to design a digital genetic code that can…

How are we going to address this problem?

I've been on about the history of science quite a bit lately (see here, here, and here), and as I've aired my gripes one point in particular keeps coming up again and again. For various reasons the development of science (particularly those connected with evolution) in Victorian times has been extensively studied. There is still work to be done, but generally speaking there is an immense body of literature on science during the 19th century. This is particularly the case with geology & paleontology, associated sciences that came into their own during the 1800's and were important to the…

Lying about Rachel Carson

As part of its ongoing war on science, Quadrant Online as published a piece by J.F. Beck accusing Rachel Carson of constructing an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies. In his piece Beck is only able to come up with two alleged lies by Carson. First, Beck claims that Carson said that DDT was the product of World War II weapons research: Carson's suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874. But Beck is lying. Here is what Carson actually wrote about the development of DDT: DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-…

Rally to Restore... Something

I was there! Not that it was easy. We decided to park in VA (in the parking garage of the National Science foundation - totally by accident) and take the metro in, but evidently the entire world had the same idea; the metro was about a 2 hour wait, and the bus stop had like 3 buses worth of people, and only two buses scheduled in the next hour. So we decided to walk the 6 miles to the National Mall, with less than an hour before the thing started. I was at Obama's inauguration two years ago, and there were screens and speakers all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, but apparently Comedy Central…

Animal Rights Extremists Target UCLA Researcher

On Saturday, animal rights extremists torched the car of a scientist at UCLA--just one more incident in a long streak of violent threats and wanton destruction of property. LA Times columnist Tim Rutten gets it right when he states: No sensible person dismisses the humane treatment of animals as inconsequential, but what the fanatics propose is not an advance in social ethics. To the contrary, it is an irrational intrusion into civil society, a tantrum masquerading as a movement. It is a kind of ethical pornography in which assertion stands in for ideas, and willfulness for argument, all for…

What do you need to take your blog to the next level?

At ScienceOnline 2010, I'm going to be leading a workshop entitled Blogging 102. It's supposed to be a session to help established bloggers to improve their craft. The next question is, what do bloggers need most in order to become better bloggers? One possibility is "more technical skills." There is no doubt in my mind that if I had more skills, I'd be a better blogger. One area where I'm woefully inadequate is programming. My blog has a lot of interactive content -- movie demos, audio demos, surveys, and polls. But a lot of psychology requires interaction to work: we need to measure…

Today's Rant: Scientific Journals

OK now time for some real blogging (I.e. rant). Things I hate about journal publications. 1) Supplementary Data. You see a neat paper, you downloaded of the website and then as you go through the text you bump into "see supplementary data". Now I don't really mind this, however I hate that journals do not append the data to the end of the pdf file. Now I understand not everyone wants the hard copy of 2345 two hybrid reactions, but for most cases the 2 or 3 supplemental figures are crucial. It drives me mad. I get a paper emailed to me and half the data is missing! What is worse is if the…

Whale poo, and climate change, and microbes... oh my! (repost) [We Beasties]

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] A recent paper published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (I have no idea what the B means, but maybe one of you can clarify with a comment) draws an enticing connection between whale excrement and climate change.  Because this study involved whale poop, it even made the mainstream news.  The folks at MSN were even nice enough to provide an areal photo of what it looks like when a whale goes to the bathroom.  I have been lucky enough to experience this first hand on a whale watch when a whale shared the…

Raising the barriers: restricting access to scientific literature will hurt STEM education

This morning, I learned that congress wants to reverse the advances made by NIH and go back to restricting access to scientific publications. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (California) are co-sponsoring a bill to restore the limits on public access to NIH-funded research. I've written many times before (here, here, here, and here) about the challenges that community college faculty and students have in getting access to scientific papers. In an era where the economic benefits of educating students in science are well-known (1), the idea of crippling…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE - articles with embedded interactive 3D structures

There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. But first, you need to look at the new Collection of articles - Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the SGC - in which you can see the protein structures in 3D, turn them around, zoom in and out, and do other manipulations of the embedded object, right there inside the articles. Read more about it in: A New Method for Publishing Three-Dimensional Content: A new method for electronic publishing of articles with text linked to its interactive three dimensional content is described. The method is based on a single…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Fast food workers may have just received a huge boost, thanks to a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board. Steven Greenhouse reports in The New York Times that the board’s general counsel has ruled that McDonald’s is jointly responsible for labor violations at its franchises — “a decision that if upheld would disrupt longtime practices in the fast-food industry and ease the way for unionizing nationwide,” Greenhouse writes. The article reports that of the 181 unfair labor practice complaints filed against McDonald’s and its franchises in the last 20 months, the board’s counsel decided…

Knockin' boots and breakin' hips

A recent story detailing an outbreak of sexually-transmitted diseases has gotten a good deal of attention from news outlets and blogs. The reason it's newsworthy is because the individuals affected aren't teenagers or single twenty-somethings; they're senior citizens. So, let me point out the obvious: even "old people" have sex. This sometimes uncomfortable fact of life was driven home to me when I was just a teenager myself, when my grandma was discussing the difficulty she had showering (she'd just had surgery). Someone had asked whether grandpa was much help, and she mentioned that…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Pathogens this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number: Imagine a time when you and your complete scholarly output--papers, grant applications, blog posts, etc.--could be identified online and in perpetuity and returned in a variety of easy-to-digest ways. While ego comes into it as a driver to make this happen,…

Florida’s Stand Your Ground law led to sharp increase in homicides

In 2005, Florida legislators passed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” law, expanding legal immunity for residents to use lethal force when they believe they’re being threatened. A decade later, a new study finds that Florida has experienced a significant increase in homicides, while states without such laws have not. “From a public health perspective, we were shocked that in a given area, rates of people dying changed so abruptly and in such a sustained way,” study co-author Douglas Wiebe, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of…

Hulme

Somewhat against my will, I find myself obliged to post about Hulme, if only to stop people arguing on other talk pages. Come and argue here, folks :-(. Anyway, KK pointed me to two Hulme pieces, and I'll take those as my texts: * http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm * http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html My immeadiate reaction is that these are both about science-n-politics. Which immeadiately says the the hacking incident has told us nothing interesting or new about the actual science. Which in turn is one in the eye for the septics, who…

Why don't people pay attention to the future of their own world?

More politics, but since it is cunningly disguised as a reply to mt's Twitter rant, I think I may get away with it. You should go off and read mt's post, for context. But not for content; much as I like his take on the science I can never agree with his take on the politics. Here's a sample: One reason for the buckling of democracy is the stealing of people's time and emotional energy in high stakes marketplace hypercompetition. Democracy can be preserved or restored only if & when daily life is secure. A key reason to support Universal Basic Income1 or similar ideas. A calm and…

Christianity Today Botches Bloggingheads Brouhaha

You are probably familiar with the Bloggingheads website. The site, founded by Robert Wright, features conversations between various bloggers, journalists and scholars on whatever issues it amuses them to talk about. The site has long featured scientists among its participants. Two recent dialogues hurt that relationship. The first featured historian Ronald Numbers palling around with YEC Paul Nelson. Numbers seemed mostly uninclined to challenge Nelson on some of his more dubious pronouncements. Even more egregious was the dialogue between John McWhorter and Michael Behe, in which…

GlaxoSmithKline to buy Sirtris

Just a little blurb in my local paper this morning that is making a big splash in the stock market: international pharma giant GSK is purchasing Cambridge, MA-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc. for an estimated US$720 million. Glaxo plans to bolster its pipeline with Sirtris's experimental biotechnology treatments targeting aging-related diseases. In early trading, Sirtris shares gained 81.6 percent to $22.21 while Glaxo shares added 19 cents to $43.92. Apparently I should've gone immediately from my morning bathroom newspaper reading to my online stock purchase website. Instead, you get a…

"Stiff Nights" Falls on Hard Times

I should probably create a new blogpost category just for erectile dysfunction dietary supplements adulterated with authentic or synthetic analogs of prescription phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibitors (e.g., Viagra, Cialis). However, FDA has already created a page for this earlier this year after dozens of companies have been identified as putting real drugs into their erectile dysfunction products. Do the brains behind these companies not realize that FDA is now monitoring every erectile dysfunction supplement for all manner of PDE5 inhibitors? Apparently not: For Immediate Release: Nov. 5…

Perfection, Symmetry, and Chaos in Science and History

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion ...continuing from Sidebar 2a (you might read that first before continuing on below) All of the above (Sidebar 2a) interested me in its own right but truly startled me when set beside a simultaneous set of little essays on-line about Stalin and the bomb. Lawrence Weschler discusses a tale Solzhenitsyn told about applauding for Stalin. At a Communist Party meeting, Solzhenitsyn wrote--and here I abbreviate the longer telling of the story--that everyone stood…

The Unholy Wars and Flagrant Bigotry at the LA Times

Yesterday, the LA Times ran an opinion piece that is nothing short of appalling. The column in question was titled, "Atheists: No God, no reason, just whining". Sadly, that remarkable headline does appear to very accurately reflect the content of the column. The LA Times apparently decided, for reasons passing understanding, that it was a good idea to give Charlotte Allen the opportunity to present a ~1300-word long explanation of why she doesn't like "atheists." Just so we're clear, that's how she presented herself - not as someone who doesn't like some, many, or most atheists, or someone…

Math Confuses Princess: I Read It In Seed

One of the perks of being a Scienceblogger is getting a free subscription to Seed Magazine. Last week, issue 11 August 2007 arrived, and I happily began sampling its good stuff. There's a new feature this month called "Incubator" that tries to "capture the multifacted nature of science itself - from the minutia of the bench, to the personalities behind them, to the oversized ideas that propel us forward." One item included in the new feature is Workbench, a photo of a "scientist's natural hangout". The inaugural, and annotated, full-page photo is of the desk of 3rd-year grad student…

Could video games be the new humanitarian ambassadors?

One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…

Was Johnny Ball really victimized by environmentalists?

Remember how David Bellamy claimed that his TV career was ended (something that happened in 1994) because of an article he wrote in 2004? Now Johnny Ball is making similar dubious claims of persecution: But his bookings have dropped by 90 per cent over the past year and the 72-year-old has blamed this on harassment by extreme environmentalists who object to his dismissal of climate change as "alarmist nonsense". Mr Ball, father of TV and radio presenter Zoe, told The TES a website featuring pornographic images was posted online bearing his name, while another blogger stated he "should not be…

Whale poo, and climate change, and microbes... oh my! (repost)

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] A recent paper published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (I have no idea what the B means, but maybe one of you can clarify with a comment) draws an enticing connection between whale excrement and climate change.  Because this study involved whale poop, it even made the mainstream news.  The folks at MSN were even nice enough to provide an areal photo of what it looks like when a whale goes to the bathroom.  I have been lucky enough to experience this first hand on a whale watch when a whale shared the…

An Integrin Is Identified as a Co-Receptor for HIV

The New York Times reported yesterday that "scientists find new receptor for HIV," referring to a paper published online in Nature Immunology on Sunday by Arthos et al. This is basically correct, although it would be more accurate to call the new receptor a co-receptor, since the infection of a cell with HIV still depends on the primary receptor, CD4, in combination with either CCR5 or CXCR4. The newly-identified co-receptor, just like the other HIV receptors, is a protein located on the surface of white blood cells (T-cells, specifically). HIV, like any other virus, can only replicate…

Scrubbing the Kitchen Floor

Whenever I go back home to see my mom, I usually spend some time visiting with her cousin D., who lives in the house across the street from my mother's house. D. has spent a good many years taking care of his elderly mother, my great-aunt. I have known D. all my life. As a child growing up, he was one of my elders. As a young adult, coming back home now and then for visits, I often didn't know what to say to him when our paths would cross, thinking I didn't have much in common with him. Now we are both intimately involved with the care of our elderly mothers and this brings us a…

Qigong in science class?

A reader of this blog reports: My children went to a [public charter] school in which pseudoscience was taught to them. However, it was something more insidious than "intelligent design." It was Qigong taught as science. One of my daughter's classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was mainpulating body energy or "Chi." I assume that the girl was OK in the end ... but, this gives one pause. What…

What does it mean to be "anti-vaccine"?

"Anti-vaccine." I regularly throw that word around -- and, most of the time, with good reason. Many skeptics and defenders of SBM also throw that word around, again with good reason most of the time. There really is a shocking amount of anti-vaccine sentiment out there. But what does "anti-vaccine" really mean? What is "anti-vaccine"? Who is "anti-vaccine"? Why? What makes them "anti-vaccine"? Believe it or not, for all the vociferousness with which I routinely go after anti-vaccine loons, I'm actually a relative newcomer to the task of taking on the anti-vaccine movement. Ten years ago, I…

The Greed of The Humane Society of the United States

tags: humane society of the united states, HSUS, H$U$, news report, investigative journalism, animal rights, animal welfare, animal shelters, streaming video Where do all those millions of dollars of charitable donations to the Humane Society of the United States go? If you think H$U$ uses those monies to help improve the lives of animals, think again! Seven Things You Didn't Know About the Humane Society of the United States: The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a "humane society" in name only, since it doesn't operate a single pet shelter or pet adoption facility anywhere…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 14 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, Mendeley, 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: A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales: Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an…

StoryBlogging, AIDSblogging and more....

[Slightly edited post from May 04, 2006] Collecting stories has become a really exciting endeavor lately. While writing down people's stories has been done since time immemorial, on stone tablets, clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, the modern technology allows more people to record oral and written histories than ever before. Everyone can now write, make an audio or video recording, and publish their life stories. We can tap into the wisdom of the elders and preserve their memories for posterity. The history will not be written only by winners, and, gasp, by semi-automated textbook-writing…

Just a quick update on 'framing science'

Matt Nisbet analyses George Will and Chris Mooney responds to some more recent discussions. Matt talks about framing on NPR (listen here) and now they both have an article published in the Washington Post. Also, check out some older articles by Matt and Chris, including this one on CSI and this one in CJR. With this, I will stop adding new links to blogospheric discussion at the bottom of this post (my first - and uber-long one - on the topic) and will start with a clean slate. But you go and check them, as discussions in the comments are still going on at some of those linked blogs.…

Recommendations for OSHA's Gulf Online Sampling Data

It's been good to see OSHA adding more Gulf sampling data to its website, but the presentation of the information there isn't quite as detailed as we were expecting to see. We asked an industrial hygienist colleague for a reaction to the web pages, and got an in-depth response. Here are one industrial hygienist's recommendations for how OSHA can make its online sampling data more useful: After reviewing OSHA's "Keeping Workers Safe During Oil Spill Response and Cleanup Operations" series of websites, I recommend that OSHA improve the information technology capacity of the sites and add…

Senators propose changes to OSH Act

In the U.S. Senate last week, between the debate and the vote on judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced  S. 1580, on behalf of Senator Edward Kennedy, a bill to amend the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.  As far as I can tell, its text is nearly identical to H.R. 2067 , the bill introduced in April by Cong. Lynn Woolsey.  The bills' major provisions are: expanding OSHA coverage to the 8.5 million public sector workers (who are employed by state, county and local governments, and not covered by an OSHA…

Dawkins on Religion and Evolution

My longtime readers know that I have very mixed feelings about Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I certainly recognize that he is quite brilliant both as a scholar and as a writer. His extremely lucid prose has undoubtedly helped millions of laypeople better understand the theory of evolution and the many lines of evidence which support it. On the other hand, I think his outspoken, even militant atheism, too often offered almost as a package deal with evolution without any meaningful distinction made between the two, also drives millions of people away from even attempting such understanding…

Links for 2010-01-18

BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » It seemed like a good idea at the time: The Slushpile Smackdown "The traditional method of sifting slush is in-house - a job usually handed out to a junior because it's time consuming and occasionally injurious to mental well being. Why? Because anyone with a word processor can submit a novel and while many aspiring authors are professional, know how to follow guidelines and are eager to learn, many are just eager. And submit as soon as the last word hits the page, sometimes sooner. They're full of hope and convinced they've just penned the bestest of bestsellers. Cue…

It's official! I'm blogging again! ...

...but actually somewhere else... So what's going on? The short version is that this is a goodbye post. The long version goes a little like this: 1. For a while now, I've been using twitter, primarily as a place to highlight interesting things. It has more or less replaced my blogging output. These tweets are often science-y, visual in nature, and with (of course) the occasional dose of Chewbacca. However, it soon became obvious to me that I should start blogging again so that such things could be compiled: more so because I'm a big fan of using these odd snippets to segue into…

Dividing up the pie

Another thing I meant to call out in the context of the Jupiter-goes-boom event was the nod to data gathered by people who aren't connected to the formal research enterprise save tangentially. This event was first noted by someone not an astronomer by profession, and the article notes that this is hardly the first time astronomers have been scooped. My husband, who is an extremely amateur skygazer and likes to hang out on online astronomy bulletin boards, says that his impression is that astronomers mingle with enthusiasts fairly freely, all things considered, and both sides appear to benefit…

Why we should make a fuss over broken windows

In 1982, criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in The Atlantic Monthly called "Broken Windows." The theory they laid out became known as the Broken Windows Theory. It holds that people are more likely to commit crimes in areas that appear unwatched and uncared for - i.e., "if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken...[because] one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing," as put in the Atlantic article. In other words, perceptions alter…

A tale of two people in two cities, part II

We've met, we've gotten educated, we've gotten married, and almost all in two different cities. Now I've quit my job so I can finish my dissertation, and we live together, what a concept. Okay, year together, blah blah blah. Gardening, working, eating locally, helping each other, all good things. I'm not kidding when I say it was a relief that we still liked each other - I had heard all these horror stories (okay, maybe 2) of academics who lived apart for 25 years, retire and live together and then get divorced because they had never had to live together before. Anyway, there are no…

QIP Talks That Have arXiv Papers

QIP 2010 talks and associated papers if I could find them (amazing how almost all papers for this conference are available, for free, online at one location....also interesting how papers seem to cluster in the 10-12 months of the listings :) ) If anyone has corrections please leave a comment. Monday Daniel Gottesman and Sandy Irani The quantum and classical complexity of translationally invariant tiling and Hamiltonian problems arXiv:0905.2419 Rahul Jain, Iordanis Kerenidis, Greg Kuperberg, Miklos Santha, Or Sattath, and Shengyu Zhang On the power of a unique quantum witness arXiv:0906.…

Lott Lawsuit: around the blogs

Ted Frank has your must read blog post on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt. He has a copy of the complaint and an explanation from Lott: When a book sells well over a million copies this goes beyond a mere debate among academics. To say that other scholars have been unable to replicate one's work is the same thing as fraud. I and other academics have written Levitt asking him to fix his claim. He has been unwilling to do so. I have people approaching me frequently asking if it is true that other scholars can not even replicate my research. Apparently the numerous academic articles in places…

Does tenure cause academic inflexibility?

There's a question-and-answer in The Scientist online [free registration required] entitled "Is Tenure Worth Saving?" The interviewee, Dan Clawson (a tenured sociologist at the University of Massachusetts) goes through some of the history that's all-too-familiar to people who want jobs in academia: to cut money*, universities have been quietly shifting their work, more and more, to non-tenure-track positions. But what about reasons besides money? Does the institution of tenure lead to the accumulation of deadwood**? TS [The Scientist]: Other than the monetary benefits to the university, what…

Genetically profiling the brain: it all ends with dopamine

Earlier today I linked to a Jonah Leher post on food that hooks into the role that dopamine plays in our decision making. Dopamine looms in the neuroscience angle of Jonah's book How We Decide because the chemical's role in cognition is established. Dopamine related genes are often fingered in behavior genetic studies as the causal root of some observed psychological variation. So a new paper in Nature Neuroscience is in perfect position to stand astride the literal slush pile of this research, Prefrontal and striatal dopaminergic genes predict individual differences in exploration and…

And now we start with the tornadoes. Are you ready?

Huxley and I went to Target to look at weather radios and found out that they don't carry them. But the three Target employees that were gathered near the cameras and electronics with whom we inquired were interested to know why we were looking for one. "You're about the tenth person today who has asked about weather radios. What gives?" Apparently they missed Minnesota's National Tornado Appreciation Week, which was yesterday1. And, they had missed the news that we were expecting a bad year for tornadoes. Anyway, Target does not carry weather radios. I didn't really care, because I had…

The American Chemical Society: Paving paradise to put up a parking lot

Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations? There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope. I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…

Best Science Books 2011: The top books of the year!!!!!

Every year for the last several years I've collated and extracted the science books from all the various "best books of the year" lists in different media media outlets. I've done the same this year for books published in 2011! I can tell it's been popular among my readers from the hit stats I see for this blog and from the number of keyword searches on "best science books" or whatnot I see in my analytics program. Back in 2009, I started taking all the lists I could find and tallying up all the "votes" to see which books were mentioned the most times. An interesting exercise, to say the…

Silica exposures in fracking : Over 60 percent of workers may be excessively exposed

At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry,  stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis,  an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…

When manatees crossed the Atlantic

No time for anything new (working on a book chapter and putting the finishing touches to the Tet Zoo book), so here's this, from the archives. NOT properly updated, so please be aware that it's more than four years old... There are three extant manatee species*: Trichechus inunguis of the Amazon Basin, T. manatus of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and US Atlantic coast as far north as Virginia, and T. senegalensis of western Africa. So, how it is that they occur on opposite sides of the Atlantic? [West Indian manatee T. manatus shown here, from wikipedia. This one was photographed in Florida…