Science
pharyngula | October 20, 2008At first, I was a bit disappointed in this result, but then I realized it's actually rather interesting in a negative sense. Investigators tested the effects of squid ink on other squid; the entirely reasonable idea being that it could contain an alarm pheromone that would have the function of alerting neighboring squid in the school of trouble. It works — adding ink to a tank of Caribbean reef squid sends them scurrying away.
However, when they removed the pigments from the ink and added that, the squid couldn't care less. That says there is no chemical signal, only a visual signal.
That…
oracknows | October 19, 2008Note: The following is a collaborative post between James (a.k.a. Dad of Cameron of Autism Street) and Orac. Feel free to tell which parts were written by whom.:-)
Jenny McCarthy's latest book, Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds, contains a foreword penned by "pediatrician to the stars' children", Dr. Jay Gordon. Dr. Gordon (or, as he often refers to himself, Dr. Jay), is the pediatrician for Jenny McCarthy's son Evan, whose autism McCarthy blames on vaccines and whom she has also claimed to have "cured" of autism with so-called "biomedical interventions. Dr…
grrlscientist | October 19, 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
awild | October 19, 2008Count me among the skeptics who find that "DNA barcoding" is oversold for what it actually delivers. Nonetheless, here's a well-written piece about the approach in Wired.
oracknows | October 18, 2008Orac gets e-mail.
Most of it's just brief notes with a link that someone thinks I should check out (and possibly blog about). Even though I occasionally make sarcastic remarks about being deluged with one story or other from time to time, I actually do appreciate those. Many have been the times when I didn't really have anything that floated my boat enough to blog about that a juicy tidbit sent by a reader prevented the blog from going dark for a day. Whether that's always a good thing, I leave to the reader to judge.
Occasionally, I get mail profusely praising the blog. Affectation of an…
pontiff | October 17, 2008A very good essay Paul Krugman wrote on his method of doing research. Some good gems in there for researchers of all fields.
The injunction to dare to be silly is not a license to be undisciplined. In fact, doing really innovative theory requires much more intellectual discipline than working in a well-established literature. What is really hard is to stay on course: since the terrain is unfamilar, it is all too easy to find yourself going around in circles.
pharyngula | October 17, 2008
While Steve Jones might think human evolution has stopped, I have to say that that is impossible. If human technology removes a selective constraint, that doesn't stop evolution — it just opens up a new degree of freedom and allows change to carry us in a novel direction.
One interesting potential example is the availability of relatively safe Cesarean sections. Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution…
ddobbs | October 17, 2008In "The Gregarious Brain," my NY Times Magazine story last year about Williams syndrome -- in which a genetic accident causes an intriguing combination of cognitive deficits and hypersociability colored by a lack of social fear and (to some extent) savvy -- I devoted some space to the "social brain" theory," which holds that we humans developed our big brains -- and perhaps language itself -- primarily to manage the complex social dynamics that went with living in large groups. By this figuring, managing social relationships is the most demanding task we face -- and gossip is our primary…
bioephemera | October 17, 2008
"Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa."
Brian Stewart and Giulia Saltini-Semerari
Science
If you couldn't stop twitching your pipetman to the crazy Euro-molecule party a couple posts back, or that anthropomorphic Orangina ad, or the Eppendorf boy band, you may have what it takes to win AAAS' Science Dance Contest.
The 2008 contest was a small-scale affair in Vienna, a prelude to a performance by the scientist-DJs Molecular Code. You can watch winner Brian Stewart & the other…
pharyngula | October 16, 2008
We all know the story of the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, a young graduate student named Stanley Miller ran an off-the-wall experiment: he ran water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sealed flask with a pair of electrodes to produce a spark, and from those simple building blocks discovered that more complex compounds, such as amino acids, were spontaneously produced. Stanley Miller died in 2007, and in going through his effects, the original apparatus was discovered, and in addition, several small sealed vials containing the sludge produced in the original experiment were also found.…
awild | October 16, 2008
Pheidole rugithorax Eguchi 2008 - Vietnam
In today's Zootaxa, Katsuyuki Eguchi has a taxonomic revision of the northern Vietnamese Pheidole, recognizing six new ant species for a genus that is already the world's most diverse. The revision also contains several nomeclatural changes and a key to the thirty or so species occurring in the region.
As in most tropical taxonomy this research has a comedic/tragic effect of adding several more species, about which nothing is known, to a catalog already overflowing with equally mysterious species. We don't know what they eat, how long they live,…
drorzel | October 16, 2008One of the annoying things about trying to explain quantum mechanics to a general audience is that the weirdness of the theory forces you to use incredibly convoluted examples. Pop-science books about quantum physics are full of schemes that the producers of the Saw movies would reject as implausibly complicated.
I wish I was posting to say that I had found a way around this, but I haven't. So here's another entry in the thriller-movie school of quantum analogies.
Imagine that you and a friend are out hiking, and find yourselves kidnapped by a sinister conspiracy of some sort. You're taken to…
razib | October 15, 2008FuturePundit reports on research which suggests that smoking removes 10 years from your life expectancy. It's nice to see a number on this; it isn't like this is a counterintuitive finding. But this sort of quantification is important. I don't smoke, and I never have, but my experience in college was that people who smoked found it pleasurable and a social lubricant. There's some value in that. On the other hand, unlike alcohol consumption, smoking seems to have uniformly deleterious health effects, so the utilitarian calculus is more straightforward. Greasy food, alcohol, sweets,…
bioephemera | October 15, 2008In the interest of supplying an educational, scientific alternative to the third presidential debate, I give you this:
This video is the creation of those kooky Europeans at Marie Curie Actions, who also gave us this disturbingly throbbing website. It all has something to do with science education and careers, but I can't look away from the video long enough to tell exactly what.
If this is what an EU research career is like, I may have left science too early.
bioephemera | October 15, 2008
If you had to persuade a medieval peasant that the world was round, how would you do it? Why do you believe the world is round? And what does the American public in general think?
One of the hardest tasks I encountered as a professor was getting my students to recognize that all of their convictions - even assumptions as basic as "the world is round" or "the sun will come up tomorrow" - are built on a lifetime of accumulated experience. Sometimes the experience is direct: we've all seen the sun come up. But sometimes it's not. We often underestimate how little direct evidence we have for our…
pharyngula | October 14, 2008
How can I respond to a story about zebrafish, development, and new imaging and visualization techniques? Total incoherent nerdgasm is how.
Keller et al. are using a technique called digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy (DSLM) to do fast, high-resolution, 3-D scans through developing embryos over time; using a GFP-histone fusion protein marker, they localize the nucleus of every single cell in the embryo. Some of the geeky specs:
1500x1500 pixel 2-D resolution
12 bits per pixel dynamic range
Imaging speed of 10 million voxels per second
Complete scan of a 1 cubic…
awild | October 14, 2008
Iridomyrmex reburrus
Highlights from the recent technical literature:
Savanna ants more resistant to fire than forest ants. Parr & Andersen. 2008. Fire resilience of ant assemblages in long-unburnt savanna of northern Australia. Austral Ecology. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2008.01848
Abstract: Tropical savannas and rainforests contrast in their flammability and the fire resilience of their associated species. While savanna species generally exhibit high resilience to burning, there is much debate about the fire resilience of forest-associated species, and the persistence of forest patches…
drorzel | October 14, 2008Via Physics and Physicists, a breathtaking blog at the Washington Post proudly proclaiming the author's ignorance of algebra:
I am told that algebra is everywhere - it's in my iPod, beneath the spreadsheet that calculates my car payments, in every corner of my building. This idea freaks me out because I just can't see it. I sent out a query on my blog last week asking, Who among us in the real world uses algebra? Can you explain how it works?
This is exactly the sort of intellectual innumeracy I have ranted about countless times. The whole concept of the blog (subtitled "A year reliving high…
pharyngula | October 14, 2008The Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference is in trouble — government support has been flat, and corporate support has been declining. They are really in trouble: here's what I got from one of the people working on it:
The CUPC is the largest conference in North America organized entirely by undergraduate students. It brings together students from across Canada and the world studying a vast array of subject areas from mathematical and theoretical physics to medical biophysics to engineering and applied physics. This important event gives many students their first experience with…
pharyngula | October 13, 2008
Here's a very strange fossil from the Chengjiang Lagerstätte, an early Cambrian fossil bed from 525 million years ago. It's a collection of Waptia-like arthropods, nothing unusual there; these are ancient creatures that look rather like headless shrimp. What's weird about it is the way the individuals are locked together in a daisy chain, with the telson (tail piece) of each individual stuck into the carapace of the animal behind. It's not just a fluke, either — they have 22 fossil chains, and just one animal all by its lonesome.
(Click for larger image)Waptia-like arthropod, Lower Cambrian…