Science
pharyngula | January 3, 2009This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing. Here's a short summary of the 15 stories the editors picked out, but you should also read the freely available article, 15 Evolutionary Gems. Teachers, put this in your classroom!
The discovery of Indohyus, an ancestor to whales.
The discovery of Tiktaalik, an ancestor to tetrapods.
The origin of…
bioephemera | December 31, 2008My annual list of words I learned in 2008:
alexithymia
exabyte
heteroskedasticity
semordnilap
petrichor
tsuris
picayune
fissiparous
fescennine
ceteris paribus
mutatis mutandis
Mamihlapinatapai
awild | December 30, 2008There are days when I wish I hadn't read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Today is one of them.
oracknows | December 30, 2008Here's one for our favorite creationist neurosurgeon: A whole Grand Rounds all about the interface of and application to medicine of the theory of evolution.
razib | December 29, 2008I'm old enough to have very faint memories of the very first shuttle missions, though I do not recall the last moon landings. I recently heard a science fiction writer observe that when he was a child the idea of a moon landing was so futuristic. Then it happened...and we stopped going. It's been over 30 years since humans set foot on the moon.
Granted, there's been a lot that's happened since then. Your rescale your awe meter, so the plethora of Mars landings and detailed exploration of the outer planets via the Galileo and Cassini missions don't register in the same way. Various…
razib | December 29, 2008Patient's DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Drugs:
The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested to narrow use of the drugs, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 a month.
To some extent this sort of thing is a gimme; intelligent & proactive patients already "help" their medical professionals by channeling them appropriately in terms of decisions because with the veritable tsunami of data no human…
oracknows | December 29, 2008Last week, I gave everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, the gift everyone loves to read but not to receive: the gift of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Christmas or no Christmas, he did ask for it, and far be it from me, given my benevolent nature, not to respond to his plaintiff plea with a resounding "Affirmative!" Nor was I alone. Others joined in. But apparently not everyone thought Dr. Egnor deserving of such a group slapdown. Apparently there is at least one blogger out there who thought that Dr. Egnor needed a defender. Apparently there is at least one blogger…
awild | December 29, 2008
Another year passes. The economy is in the toilet. Violence spreads in the middle east. In these trying times, one question must weigh on the minds of concerned citizens: "What's happening in world of ant science?"
Of course. Here are the myrmecological highlights of 2008:
The Demise of the Standard Ant. That is the title of a review by Juergen Heinze, but the idea that our basic conception of how ant colonies work is overly simplistic receives plenty of additional support from the research community.  For instance, Smith et al document the complexity of caste determination in…
awild | December 28, 2008This morning I was picking through recent ant literature for a 2008 myrmecological retrospective post when I stumbled on this little gem.
Why do autumn leaves change to such striking colors? Kazuo Yamazaki thinks it's all about the ants:
Therefore, bright autumn leaves may have adaptive significance, attracting myrmecophilous specialist aphids and their attending ants and, thus, reducing herbivory and competition among aphids.
I hereby proclaim Kazuo Yamazaki the first recipient of an award in his own name, the Yamazaki "Going Way Out On A Limb" Award, for creative lateral thinking in…
oracknows | December 26, 2008...more not-so-Respectful Insolence, courtesy not of Orac this time but of other skeptical physician-bloggers!
Enjoy:
Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I'm talking to you) (by blog bud PalMD)
Defending science-based medicine (by skeptical neurologist Dr. Steve Novella, who's been known to spar a bit with Dr. Egnor himself over evolution and neuroscience)
Egnorance is Bliss (by Dr. Kimball Atwood IV)
oracknows | December 24, 2008It's Christmas Eve.
I know, I know, it's all supposed to be Peace On Earth, Good Will Towards Men (and Women), and all that jazz. Really, that's exactly what I had intended for today and tomorrow. Indeed, my plan was to do nothing more than a quickie post today and a maybe a couple of brief (and hopefully amusing) Christmas-related posts this afternoon and tomorrow. Really, I had.
Then it came, and it came from a direction that I least expected. Yes, yet another "old friend" of the blog had to go and and not just ask but beg for a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. My readers…
sb admin | December 23, 2008It's another cold, snowy day in Michigan, and while I was busy stamping out disease, PalMom was looking out her window at the snow. Perching on a branch was this beauty, which I believe to be a red-tailed hawk. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
This raptor is no dummy. There's a bird feeder a few yards away, which, in addition to attracting the LBJs, also brings the little mammals.
Apparently the LBJs aren't too stupid either. There were none at the feeder while brother hawk was there, but according to PalDad, the hawk is now gone, and the birds have returned to their feast.
pharyngula | December 23, 2008
Squid don't just make sperm: they package it up into fairly elaborate little torpedoes called spermatophores, which are either handed to the female with a specially modified arm called the hectocotyl arm, or squirted onto her with a penis. Once on the female (or a male, it really doesn't matter), the spermatophore everts, forming a structure called the spermatangia, in which all the packed sperm uncoil, ready to do their job, and the whole mass is anchored to the target with a cement body. These structures do show species-specific differences, but here is one example from Heteroteuthis…
bioephemera | December 22, 2008At 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…
bioephemera | December 22, 2008
I'm snowed in here with the staffer in Washington state, but our luggage made it and we have Wifi, so it's all good. For your pre-holiday enjoyment, here's a treasure from an old book - "Pepper and Salt" by Howard Pyle. Click the image for a larger, more readable version.
grrlscientist | December 21, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
awild | December 20, 2008
An unusually festive jumping ant from a laboratory colony at Arizona State University. Researchers mark ants with unique patterns of paint to keep track of individuals for studies of ant behavior.
rallain | December 19, 2008I have been searching for where I found this link, if it was your blog please forgive me for not linking. Here is a link to Common misconceptions in science from wikipedia. Looks fun. Really, I am just posting this so I won't forget to come back to it sometime.
razib | December 19, 2008This is really weird, New World Post-pandemic Reforestation Helped Start Little Ice Age, Say Scientists:
Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands--abandoned as the population collapsed--pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from…
drorzel | December 19, 2008When I saw ZapperZ's post about this paper (arxiv version, expensive journal version) from the group of Serge Haroche in Paris, I thought it might be something I would need to incorporate into Chapter 5 of the book-in-progress. Happily, it's much too technical to require extensive re-writing. Having taken the time to read it, though, I might as well make a ResearchBlogging post of it... (My comments will be based on the arxiv version, because it's freely downloadable.)
So, "Freezing Coherent Field Growth in a Cavity by the Quantum Zeno Effect." That's quite a mouthful. What does it really…