ecology
clock | June 19, 2006Want this badge?
The 32nd edition of the Carnival of the Green is now up on Savvy Vegetarian.
tsmith | June 19, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 28, 2005]
Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it's something that's kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.
Many of you have probably heard of the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks," by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his "lost…
tsmith | June 16, 2006Welcome to the June edition of Animalcules! Apologies for the lateness; I only had a few minutes to get online yesterday, and that was mainly devoted to checking email and making sure there were no crises that needed my attention. So, without further ado...
From the Scientific Creative Quarterly comes a humorous entry: Prokaryotes of America Unite. Almost makes me feel bad. (You also may want to check out Scientific Creative Quarterly editor David Ng's new blog here at Scienceblogs: The World's Fair.
Jennifer over at Science Matters has a nice post discussing background information on…
chaoticutopia | June 13, 2006In the Fishlake Mountains of Utah, several fires are steadily burning. As the American West enters yet another dry season, there will almost certainly be more. Folks around these parts have been whispering about the increasing fire danger, dreading another year like 2002. We reffered to that period of time as "the summer of fire", when the Hayman fire, started by a disgruntled forest service worker, burned over 7 million acres of land and destroyed over 100 homes. This year is shaping up to be disturbingly worse. Why? The Bush administration thinks that the bulk of our firefighting helicopter…
tsmith | June 13, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger question is:
"Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?"
Musings below the fold...
First, I'll note that this question was actually somewhat difficult for me. I really, really like my job. It's a combination of all the things I "wanted to be when I grew up." Part medicine, part author, part teacher, part disease researcher (OK, so it's not investigating Ebola in the DRC, but it's still interesting). But, if I had unlimited time and money and had to…
clock | June 11, 2006
Welcome to the thirty-first edition of the Carnival of the Green. I am still trying to figure out the details of Movable Type after my move here last Friday (and please look around - there are 45 fantastic science bloggers here at SEED's ScienceBlogs), so fancy graphics and creative hosting will have to wait for some other time. Let's just take a straightforward look at this week's entries.
Is it sexual repression that's behind the religious right's obsession with gay marriage? Or are they just plain evil? Either way, they are using it to distract us from the far more serious issue of…
chaoticutopia | June 9, 2006When I first decided to go to Las Vegas for YearlyKos, I thought I would just tag along with my husband, who was representing Progress Now. I figured I'd do some shopping, maybe some sightseeing, and definitely some rockhounding along the drive there and back. When I saw a number of science related discussions popping up on the YearlyKos schedule, I changed my mind, and registered. (Ok, so, I still plan to do a bit of the tourist bit, too.) Now, I'm so glad that I did.
So far, this has been an incredible experience. Most of the people I've talked to have been bright and enthusiastic, thinking…
clock | June 9, 2006Want this badge?
Carnival of the Green has nothing really to do with the Green Party, but is a blog carnival that focuses on sustainability, ecology and conservation.
Next week, June 12th, the carnival will be hosted by me, right here on my new digs! I hope that means more exposure for all the entrants.
Check out the archives of previous editions of Carnival of the Green and see if you have written (or can write) something that fits with the theme.
You can send your entries to: carnivalofgreen AT gmail DOT com, or directly to me at: Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com. I'd like to have all the entries…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2006The Journal of Applied Ecology has just published a list of the Top 100 unanswered questions in the field. It was assembled for the benefit of UK ecologists, but most of the items deal with issues of global interest. If nothing else, it's a timely and humbling reminder of how little we know about the world that sustains us.
The list is divided up into topics like climate change, farming and forestry. No. 1, under "ecosystem services" is:
What are the benefits of protected habitats in terms of water resources, carbon sequestration and other goods and services, relative to non-protected land?…
tsmith | June 9, 2006Over at Doc Around the Clock, Dr. IBear has a nice post on Lyme disease: what it is, what it's not, and how to deal with ticks (appropriately, not as his mom removed them). He mentions this:
Most of the time people who get Lyme disease don't even know or remember being bitten by a tick. Thus, it stands to reason that if you do remember being bitten by a tick you probably don't have Lyme disease.
I want to elaborate on this just a bit, below.
A reason many people don't realize they've been bitten is because when the tick bites the human to transmit the Borrelia spirochete, it's not always a…
sb admin | June 9, 2006With a click of your mouse, you find yourself in a chaotic utopia.
That click sent an electrical signal inside your computer,
passing through circuits, joined by a contact made of gold.
The gold, you may find, was mined from a mafic vein,
deep within the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by Precambrian gneiss.
The gneiss, disguised by the mountains for billions of years,
lays exposed to the north in a shaded canyon.
The canyon, still being carved by the creek below,
crumbles with age, loosening a piece of milky quartz.
The quartz, lured by gravity, tumbles from the canyon wall,
and lands with a…
chaoticutopia | June 9, 2006Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to adapt. I made this "adapt fish", which you can see sitting beneath my blogroll. However, aside from the obvious-finding a way to live that isn't so dependant on fossil fuels-I'm not exactly sure what it means. This has dragged out a whole hoard of philosophical questions hidden within the big one: Do we know when we are adapting? Why do we react so badly to change, if change can bring improvement? It seems clear that it isn't a black and white issue... there's a swath of grayness, where our dependence on technology clashes with our…
tsmith | June 2, 2006John Hawks highlights a new article in today's Science, Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome. This goes nicely with the posts here recently on the topic of how our microbes affect our health and weight (part I; part II). A bit of discussion of the new article below...
First, I want to briefly mention what "metagenomics" means. There's a nice overview of it here on wikipedia. Basically, instead of sequencing and assembling a genome one at a time, you take a raw sample (such as dental plaque, sea water, soil, or fecal material, in this case), isolate the DNA, sequence it…
tsmith | May 31, 2006 It can't be said often enough that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Moving from physical characteristics--color, bone shape, the form of bacterial cells--to genetic characteristics in order to classify organisms--and infer phylogenies--was a giant advance. That the molecular characteristics confirmed what was known using physical characteristics was a breakthrough, and allowed for more sophisticated analyses of organisms that don't have bones or other easily-observable physical features that allow for simple classification into groups: microbes. I've…
tsmith | May 22, 2006 Razib mentioned here an article in the Boston Globe "which profiles researchers who suggest that variation in gut flora (the mix of bacteria) might be the cause of differences in body weight." The comments are somewhat skeptical, and I started to write a comment on the topic but it became a bit unweildly--so I've added it below instead.
As I've discussed previously, figuring out the relative contributions of environment versus genetics in obesity isn't an easy feat. As with so many human diseases/conditions, the "cause" is certainly multi-factorial. It's pretty clear that the genetics…
razib | May 21, 2006Interesting article in The Boston Globe which profiles researchers who suggest that variation in gut flora (the mix of bacteria) might be the cause of differences in body weight. Interesting fact: there are an order of magnitude more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body. Also, to my knowledge (hearing this from a microbiologist last year) this gut ecosystem hasn't really been replicated in the lab, so that kind sucks for a scientific understanding beyond description.
Update: An expert comments.
tsmith | May 12, 2006A polar bear-grizzly hybrid was found in Canada. My first thought was, "cool!" Then I clicked on the story, and now I'm ticked off, because 1) the bear's dead (why didn't they say it had been shot in the headline? Jerks); 2) the guy paid $45K US for a license to hunt polar bears (and is currently in Yellowstoneknife hunting grizzlies); and 3) all the references to it as a trophy. I'm not against hunting in principle or anything, but the whole "wow it's so great how this guy shot a rarity in the wild--and phew! good thing it was a hybrid or he'd have been in trouble for shooting a grizzly…
tsmith | May 6, 2006Just a few things that have either been sitting in my drafts box and I know I won't have a chance to get to, or stuff I saw elsewhere that deserves a mention.
Check out this excellent (and hilarious) post by Skip Evans on creationists and boobies.
I've posted previously here about our eagles here in Iowa. Phil at the Bad Astronomy Blog gives links to 2 webcams, where you can watch the nests of eagles or peregrine falcons (another favorite bird of mine). They've shut down the eagle one because the eggs didn't hatch and the parents left the nest, but there's a fluffy white falcon chick (…
tsmith | May 3, 2006It's been awhile since I've discussed prions on here. (Indeed, so long that the last time was on my old blog, but I imported a few of them that can be found here, here, and some background on prions here). Allow me to copy a bit of that to re-introduce the topic:
Prions are, of course, the transmissible agents that cause diseases such as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, and related disease such as "mad cow" disease, scrapie, and chronic wasting disease in animals. Though there was initially much controversy about these agents in the early years (most notably, because they did not…
tsmith | April 10, 2006I wrote previously about a recent study that found all sorts of bacterial diversity in a place once thought to be rather barren--the human stomach. One of the species they discovered appeared to be related to an extremophile--microbes that live in extreme environments (in this case, a relative of one that could withstand incredibly high doses of radiation). A new story from the BBC reports the discovery of another extremophile in a place one may not expect it (or at least, may not expect the one they found):
Researchers have found traces of a heat-loving bacterium that may live beneath a…