Science

I went home for lunch today. While waiting, I saw this lizard. We have many lizards in Louisiana, I like them, really I do. So, this is what I did: No lizards were harmed in the filming of this video. I was really surprised. I thought for sure that I had tried this before and nothing happened. Maybe it was because of the white surface the lizard was on. Maybe it was because it was an older and wiser lizard (it was larger than normal). Maybe this is already a well known fact about lizards and laser pointers. Needless to say, this was quite entertaining and completely justifies the…
tags: 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…
Here's a question for my myrmecologist readers.  Has anyone published observations of ritualized fighting among colonies of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants?  I know such behavior was famously studied by Bert Hoelldobler in Myrmecocystus, and that ritual combat has been noted in Camponotus and Iridomyrmex.  The reason I ask is that the pogos in my front yard back in Tucson would engage in what looks like the same sort of behavior.  Ants from opposing colonies stand up on little stilt-legs and push each other about without anyone getting hurt. I suspect these non-lethal ways of establishing…
Some time back, I saw Brother Guy Consolmagno talk at Boskone, and said "You know, I should invite him to campus." For those who don't recognize the name, he's an SF fan and an astronomer (well, planetary scientist) who also happens to be a Jesuit brother. He works at the Vatican Observatory, where he is the curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection. After we were on a panel together last year, I asked him if he'd be interested in giving us a colloquium talk sometime, and he said yes. We exchanged a few emails, and settled on October 9, namely, this past Thursday, when he was going to be…
This is too much verisimilitude. The movie below is of the mating behavior of the jellyfish Carybdea sivickisi, and the first thing you'll notice is that the scientists have set it to good old classic porn music. The second thing you'll notice, that I found annoying, is that they used too high a power objective to film it, so everything is jerking everywhere and none of the participants stay in the field of view for any length of time. Why is it that porn is afflicted with so many gynecological close-ups? Come on, set the mood, show us whole individuals instead of fragmented zooms of body…
This is shocking news, but not too surprising: I know a few of the people in this facility, and when I talked to them last they were deeply concerned about this possibility. The University of Hawaii is planning to shut down the Kewalo Marine Laboratory. They're doing it so they can funnel more money into the expansion of a cancer research center, which is certainly valuable, but not at the expense of closing half of their marine facilities. This is especially shocking because heck, when students here in the cold and land-locked midwest talk to me about going into marine biology, many of them…
The Nobel in Chemistry this year goes to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien for the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein, GFP. That's well deserved — GFP is a wonderful tool, a simple protein that fluoresces. There are lots of fluorescent compounds out there, and most of them require some kind of artificial injection or application to get them into cells — they basically allow you to determine that "a needle was stuck in here", and also to allow us to visualize the morphology of individual cells, which is all very useful, and there's quite an industry built around making new…
Cataulacus brevisetosus - armored arboreal ant (Africa) Cephalotes rohweri - armored arboreal ant (North America) Tetraponera natalensis - elongate twig ant (Africa) Pseudomyrmex pallidus - elongate twig ant (North America) Plectroctena mandibularis - giant hunting ant (Africa) Dinoponera australis - giant hunting ant (South America) Dorylus helvolus - subterranean ant predator (Africa) Neivamyrmex californicus - subterranean ant predator (North America)
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It's split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?). The citation just says "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP," which is bound to produce some snickering. Perhaps it was used in an earmark-funded study of bear DNA, or some such... My impression, though, based on several years worth of sitting through student talks about…
I got some interesting comments on last week's post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things): But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty, which occasionally disturbs me. There's the option to label posts, but who ever looks at this? I'd vastly prefer to be able if interesting topics stay on top, such that it would be easier to spin longer discussions around a specific topic. Not sure I'm making that very…
Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current operation of the arxiv. In both of these, he mentions that the arxiv grew out of a pre-existing preprint culture in high-energy theoretical physics. People in the field would make copies of their manuscripts in progress, and send them to other…
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." I'll be honest: this is far enough outside my area of physics, that I can't say anything sensible other than "It's a good day to be a Japanese particle theorist." I can't begin to explain what these guys did. The…
Question from class: *What do magnets interact with?* Basically, everyone said "metals". I am quite surprised. No one specifically indicated that magnets only interact with iron and steel (of the materials they would likely see). I understand that steel is a very common material they are likely to encounter, but what about aluminum? I think this points to the idea that very few of my students have actually played with magnets. This is a shame. Everyone loves magnets. So, I propose you go out and give someone you love some magnets today.
Today's NYT describes a new strategy for Down Syndrome screening. The new test, developed by a company called Sequenom, screens the mother's blood sample for fragments of RNA produced from fetal chromosomes. Dr. Lo looked for genes on Chromosome 21 that were active in the fetus but not in the mother. That means that any such RNA found in the mother's bloodstream comes from the fetus. The Sequenom test then looks at spots where the version of those genes inherited by the fetus from the father might differ from the version inherited from the mother. If the baby has the normal two copies of…
tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education Today's featured project is below the fold. This teacher's proposal has only 26 days left to be funded, but only $25 has been donated so far! Mrs. R, who is starting her second year as a teacher, needs another $513 to add a special science lesson to her curricula. I think that Mrs. R has shown a lot of initiative by completing summer workshops that prepare her to teach science in her classroom, and when you read her proposal, you will find that she is especially…
Phrynoponera transversa Bolton & Fisher 2008 Gabon Barry Bolton and Brian Fisher have revised the African ponerine genus Phrynoponera, in a monograph appearing today in Zootaxa.  Phrynoponera are stout, heavily-armored predatory ants comprising a handful of poorly known species. Bolton and Fisher describe two new species, P. pulchella and P. transversa, to bring the tally of known species to five. Source: Bolton, B. and B. F. Fisher. 2008. The Afrotropical ponerine ant genus Phrynoponera Wheeler (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1892: 35-52.
It looks like Alex's predictions for the Nobel Prise this year did not come to pass — although I was thinking McCulloch and Till were likely, so I was wrong, too. The Nobel for Physiology or Medicine has just been announced, and the winners are Harald zur Hausen, for discovering that HPV causes cervical cancer, and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of HIV. It's a viral year this time around.
Coccinella septempunctata This weekend's project: to shoot a beetle in flight.  I chose ladybirds not because they are pretty, but because they are the slowiest, clumsiest beetles I could find in any number.   An easy target. I had a cast of several beetles from two species, the seven-spotted ladybird Coccinella septempunctata and the multi-colored ladybird Harmonia axyridis.  I placed the beetles inside a whitebox with a backdrop of leaves, along with my Canon 550 speedlite flash, and tried to capture the beetles as they launched themselves into the air.  The timing was tricky, as it…
Before heading to the Apple Store SoHo for our blogging panel last Wednesday, I dropped by evolution ("science and art in SoHo"), a store recommended by Pam of Phantasmaphile. Evolution is clearly NYC's prime destination for the amateur natural historian, an east coast cousin of Berkeley's Bone Room. They offer skulls (real and replica), butterflies and beetles in cases, minerals, shells, memento mori carvings, skins, ammonites, coprolites, meteorites, tusks, teeth, arrowheads, and other things one never dreamed one needed. A sphere of elemental copper? Natural hematite magnets? A wallet…
The best way-- really, the only way-- to sum up David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the "If You're Interested" digressions from the main discussion: (IYI There was a similar problem involving Fourier Integrals about which all we have to know is that they're special kinds of 'closed-form' solutions to partial differential equations which, again, Fourier claims work for any arbitrary functions and which do indeed seem to-- work, that is-- being…