Science
bioephemera | November 13, 2008My friend Kiki created this awesome choreography to represent her PhD thesis on sea turtle conservation. Kiki explains,
The dance opens with aerial dancers. The suspended fluidity of their movements embodies swimming in the ocean. The swinging and dancing couples are sea turtles mating. In the wild sea turtles breed and nest in the same time and place that shrimpers fish and so the sea turtles can get caught in the nets and drown. This is depicted by the dancing trio as well as the aerial dancer. As the female sea turtle dancer leaves her mate to swim ashore and nest she is caught by the…
awild | November 13, 2008
Atta cephalotes carrying leaves, Ecuador
Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution this morning has the first detailed molecular phylogeny of the leafcutting ant genus Atta. MaurÃcio Bacci et al sequenced several mitochondrial genes and the nuclear gene EF-1a from 13 of the 15 described species-level taxa, using them to infer the evolutionary history of the genus.
This is an important paper.Â
Atta is the classic leafcutter ant of the new world tropics and a model system for co-evolution among the ants, the fungi they cultivate, and a suite of microbes that either parasitize or protect the…
drorzel | November 13, 2008Over at Dot Physics, Rhett has just completed a two-part post (Part I, Part II) on quantum physics arguing against the use of photons in teaching quantum physics. Part I gives a very nice introduction to quantum physics, which is why I linked it, but Part II goes a little off the rails. There's not as much physics content, and it ends with a list of phenomena that are able to be described by semi-classical models of light, leading up to a question:
So, if there are no photons, why are they in all the textbooks? That is a great question. I am glad I asked it. I really don't have a great answer…
oracknows | November 13, 2008
The things I do for my readers.
I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…
drorzel | November 13, 2008Bora's beating the drum for submissions to this year's science blogging anthology. He doesn't seem to be suffering from a lack of submissions, but if you've got something you would like to see re-printed in dead tree form, submit it before December 1. I'm not clear whether this will be going through Lulu again this year, or if they have a regular publisher interested.
It's earlier than I would normally do this sort of thing, but Bora's post got me wondering about what I consider my best posts of the year. This isn't by any means a comprehensive list, just what I came up with in a few minutes…
awild | November 12, 2008
Kaspari et al. discover that coastal ants avoid salt while inland ants can't get enough.
Kaspari, M., Yanoviak, S. P., and Dudley, R. 2008. On the biogeography of salt limitation: a study of ant communities. PNAS early edition, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0804528105.
Barry Bolton and Brian Fisher continue their taxonomic work on the African ponerines in a recent issue of Zootaxa. The paper establishes a new genus, Feroponera.
Bolton, B. & Fisher, B. L. 2008. Afrotropical ants of the ponerine genera Centromyrmex Mayr,…
jrosenhouse | November 11, 2008Discover Magazine has an interesting article up discussing a perennial favorite: the fine-tuning of the universe for life. I got a bit nervous when I saw the title:
Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory
That makes it sound like scientists devised the multiverse idea strictly as a desperation move to counter all that annoying God-talk. In reality physicists have been seriously discussing the idea of a multiverse for decades, and quite a lot of work in physics is pointing in that direction. The multiverse does seem to follow naturally both from recent work…
drorzel | November 11, 2008Sometime commenter "Dr. Pain" asked, on a mailing list, for book recommendations for his son, who "wants to read up about physics, especially weird modern physics." He adds some qualifications:
Kid's books on physics are way too elementary for him, but the typical "naive adult" book is over his head. Does anyone have any good recommendations for something that would be an interesting introduction to physics at a young teen level?
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't know anything to recommend for this. Partly because it's been so long since I was in middle school, and partly…
awild | November 10, 2008
Neivamyrmex army ants attacking a pavement ant, California
I see this morning that Daniel Kronauer has published a review of army ant biology in Myrmecological News. The paper, among other topics, attempts to straighten out some key terminology:
AenEcDo army ant: a connotation free abbreviation that is introduced here to avoid the term "true" army ant. It collectively refers to species in the three subfamilies Aenictinae, Ecitoninae, and Dorylinae and is strictly taxonomically defined.
Army ant: any ant species with the army ant adaptive syndrome.
Army ant adaptive syndrome: a life-…
pharyngula | November 10, 2008
One of the oldest canards in the creationists' book is the claim that evolution must be false because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, or the principle that, as they put it, everything must go from order to disorder. One of the more persistent perpetrators of this kind of sloppy thinking is Henry Morris, and few creationists today seem able to get beyond this error.
Remember this tendency from order to disorder applies to all real processes. Real processes include, of course, biological and geological processes, as well as chemical and physical processes. The interesting…
drorzel | November 10, 2008SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she's started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she's discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other:
She's started grabbing one hand with the other, and exploring them. I've also seen her start to use both hands in concert, holding a hanging toy steady with one hand, while manipulating bits of it with the other, like a good little scientist.
Hands are, of course, critical to science. You can't be a good scientist…
bioephemera | November 9, 2008
What is this?
A. The escape response of the smallest known cephalopod
B. A recently auctioned photo series by Man Ray
C. A fungus launching its high-speed spore
D. Latex squirting from an opium poppy pod
E. A medical nanodevice deploying into the bloodstream
Answer below the fold. . .
Well, this reminds me of the primitive, strangely organic black-and-white F/X from Georges Meliers' classic 1902 film La Voyage Dans La Lune, in which humanity's first spacecraft blasts off, only to smack the hapless Man in the Moon in the eye!
You don't agree? Well, it is a blastoff - in fact, it's the…
razib | November 9, 2008A new story about Vitamin D, Could Vitamin D Save Us From Radiation?. I don't even post most of the stuff on Vitamin D that shows up in my RSS. I have to wonder: is there some industry group pushing this? I know that there are often fads for "miracles cures" and biochemical silver bullets.
grrlscientist | November 9, 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. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists…
awild | November 9, 2008
Aenictus aratus - Queensland
In my utterly unbiased opinion, Australia hosts the most charismatic ant fauna of all the continents. Except for their army ants, that is. While South America is bursting at the seams with scores of Eciton, Labidus, and Neivamyrmex, and Africa has hoardes of Dorylus, Australia's army ants are limited to a few small species of Aenictus, a genus that is likely a recent arrival, in a geological sense, from Asia.
In any case, Steve Shattuck continues his taxonomic march through the Australian ants, reviewing the Australian Aenictus in a paper appearing Friday in…
pharyngula | November 7, 2008It's cute: this exercise in molecular visualization has been all dolled up with anthropomorphized atoms to sneak it into kids' attention spans.
I can't be entirely dismissive, though. There's some cool stuff lurking in the backgrounds of these scenes, it's just unfortunate that the goofy cartoon stuff is always being placed front and center.
I am kind of hoping that the creationists, with all their talk of cars and buses and traffic lights in the cell, steal this video. I can almost imagine Michael Behe exclaiming that the sophisticated facial expressions of atoms are evidence of intent and…
denialism | November 7, 2008I would beg everyone who reads the scienceblogs and cares about science to contact the transition team in the Obama administration as Orac has requested.
It should be clear by now to readers of this blog that pseudoscience is not a problem of just the right. The left wing areas of pseudoscience are just as cranky, just as wrong-headed about science, just as likely to use the tactics of denialism to advance a non-scientific agenda. We have been dealing with the denialism of the right more because they've been in control. Now is the time to nip the denialism of the left in the bud so it…
drorzel | November 7, 2008Looking over my scheduled posts for today, I see that there isn't anything stridently political. Not wanting to shock the systems of readers still coming down off the election, let me add my voice to the chorus of ScienceBloggers expressing concern over the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
This is not a knock on his qualifications, or him as a person. As I understand it, he has done great work, and he spoke here a few years ago, and was very generous with his time considering he had a cold that made him sound like a duck.
The problem is, his…
drorzel | November 6, 2008Getting back to science, at least for the moment, I was puzzled by a press release from RPI, with the eye-catching headline Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles. The article describes work published in Optics Letters (that I haven't been able to put my hands on yet), developing new anti-reflection coatings to enhance the absorption of light by silicon solar panels:
An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it -- meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an…
bioephemera | November 4, 2008Okay. . . my mom has been campaigning for Obama, and she sent me a great "Science for Obama" button. It morphs the features of Einstein with those of Obama.
Unfortunately, it was pointed out to me tonight that this unnatural union yields. . . Al Sharpton.
Agh!!!!!
(I took this photo myself just now - no Photoshop, I swear!)