migration

Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas: Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele, the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampled Native American and Western Beringian populations has been interpreted as evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarily from a single founding population. However, this inference assumed that all copies of the 9-repeat allele were identical by descent and that the geographic distribution of this allele had not been influenced by natural selection. To investigate whether these…
The dark side of Dubai: "The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship." The article isn't fair at all. It isn't meant to be. But it does give one a window into the peculiar paradoxes of Dubai, and in a hyper-charged manner the effect of naked capitalism upon human societies over the past 200 years.
In the summer of 2007, thirty-four travellers left home with backpacks in tow to see the world. But these weren't human students, out to get drunk and pretentious find themselves in foreign lands - they were small songbirds, migrating to tropical climates for the winter. Their backpacks were light-measuring devices called "geolocators", each about the size of a small coin. By measuring rising and falling light levels, these miniature contraptions revealed the timings of sunrise and sunset wherever the birds happened to be flying. Those, in turn, revealed where they were in the world, and…
tags: Golden Rays, cow nosed rays, Rhinoptera steindachneri, Sandra Critelli, image of the day Golden (cow nosed) Rays, Rhinoptera steindachneri, gathering off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, near the coast of Mexico. This spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters. Image: Sandra Critelli [larger view]. Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Ray s are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one…
tags: Golden Rays, cow nosed rays, Rhinoptera steindachneri, Sandra Critelli, image of the day Golden (cow nosed) Rays, Rhinoptera steindachneri, gathering off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, near the coast of Mexico. This spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters. Image: Sandra Critelli [larger view]. Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Ray s are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one…
The area collectively known as Austronesia covers half the globe. It stretches from South-East Asia and Taiwan, across New Guinea and New Zealand, to the hundreds of small islands dotted around the Pacific. Today, it is home to about 400 million people. They are the descendants of early humans who spread throughout the Pacific in prehistoric times. These forebears are long dead but they left several unexpectedly important legacies that are evident in their modern descendants. The languages they used evolved and splintered into over 1,200 tongues spoken by modern Austronesians. The bacteria…
tags: migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis, Platte River, birds, birding, bird watching Sign about the Platte River in Nebraska. Image: GrrlScientist, 2008. [wallpaper size]. This past weekend, Dave, Elizabeth and I drove from Manhattan, Kansas to the Platte River in next-door Nebraska to see the migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis. These flocks of migratory cranes are a mixture of greater and lesser sandhill cranes along with some hybrids between these two subspecies, often referred to as intermediate sandhill cranes. (There also are sedentary subspecies of sandhill cranes,…
tags: researchblogging.org, birds, migration, cryptochrome, blue light, garden warbler, Sylvia borin, magnetic compass, avian cryptochrome 1a, ornithology Garden Warbler, Sylvia borin (Boddaert, 1783) Blakeney Point, 16th September 2006. Image: Matthew Rodgers [larger image]. Every year, millions of birds migrate to their breeding grounds and then back to their wintering grounds again. These birds' journies cover anywhere between several hundred to many thousands of miles, even when the skies are cloudy or dark. How do birds unerringly find their way to their destinations? Thanks to recent…