Science
pharyngula | July 23, 2008Olivia Judson has a lovely article about ongoing examples of evolution.
Before the creationists start whining, I know — they're still birds and lizards and flies. Get over it. They've changed, as evolution predicts.
bioephemera | July 23, 2008Today FAS put up an online public archive of documents produced by the Office of Technology Assessment.
As you may know, the OTA was a legislative office authorized in 1972 to produce comprehensive nonpartisan reports for Congress on a variety of scientific topics. It was defunded and closed in 1995, and the bulky paper reports it produced have been rather hard to find. Although these reports no longer represent the state of the science, they are remarkable, often prescient time capsules - a fascinating look at how teams of experts tried to predict the trajectory of new technologies we now…
pharyngula | July 23, 2008
Life has two contradictory properties that any theory explaining its origin must encompass: similarities everywhere, and differences separating species. So far, the only theory that covers both beautifully and explains how one is the consequence of the other is evolution. Common descent unites all life on earth, while evolution itself is about constant change; similarities are rooted in our shared ancestry, while differences arise as lineages diverge.
Now here's a new example of both phenomena: the development of segmentation in snakes. We humans have 33 vertebrae, zebrafish have 30-33,…
drorzel | July 22, 2008I've been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I've been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It's also been a useful mental health break, though, as I'm a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago.
Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle, which is the new "framing" fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming…
evolgen | July 22, 2008
Randy Olson left a career as a marine biologist (Titleist!) to become a film maker. His first feature project was Flock of Dodos, a movie I enjoyed. His second film is Sizzle, a movie reviewed by lots of ScienceBloggers a couple weeks ago. The gist: a lot of ScienceBloggers didn't like sizzle. Neither did a reviewer for Nature (doi:10.1038/454279a).
I did not request a review copy of the movie because I don't like to diverge much from the main themes of evolgen: evolutionary genetics, manatees, and the douchebag who writes this blog. But some of the recent discussion surrounding Sizzle has…
pharyngula | July 22, 2008
Epigenetics is the study of heritable traits that are not dependent on the primary sequence of DNA. That's a short, simple definition, and it's also largely unsatisfactory. For one, the inclusion of the word "heritable" excludes some significant players — the differentiation of neurons requires major epigenetic shaping, but these cells have undergone a terminal division and will never divide again — but at the same time, the heritability of traits that aren't defined by the primary sequence is probably the first thing that comes to mind in any discussion of epigenetics. Another problem is…
awild | July 21, 2008Oecophylla weaver ants are exceptionally cooperative subjects for photography, allowing for plenty of experimentation with lighting while the ants preen and pose. While developing the photographs from South Africa I discovered that strong backlighting allows a crystal-clear view of the tracheal system:
Oecophylla longinoda, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa
The tracheae are visible as dark canals running through the body. These connect to the outside air in a series of circular spiracles and are essentially the lungs of the insect, channeling oxygen to the respiring cells and carrying away…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2008tags: conjoined twins, siamese twins, ornithology, birds, avian, barn swallows, Hirundo rustica
Conjoined twin Barn swallows, Hirundo rustica,
found July 17, 2008 in Searcy, Arkansas after they fell from their nest.
Image: Samuel Peebles (Daily Citizen, AP Photo).
Last week, a homeowner discovered a pair of young barn swallows that had fallen out of their nest after a sibling flew off to learn to forage from its parents. That's a common event, but this particular pair of young birds were remarkable: they were joined at the hip -- literally.
Conjoined twins -- sometimes known as "siamese…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. If you despair of ever having enough summer reading material, this issue is just for you because you will find that the total page count in these books is 4277 pages!
FEATURED TITLE:
Olsen, Penny. Glimpses of Paradise: The Quest…
awild | July 19, 2008I've had a week to digest the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meeting held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of diverse presentations happening in 15 parallel sessions cannot easily be summed up in a single blog post, so I'll stick to a few of my own impressions of the conference.
First, the bad. Durban was a terrible location.
Lovely beaches aside, the city was not safe. Several people were mugged outside their hotels, and there is nothing relaxing about having to watch your back when venturing off the conference grounds. The crime had a surpressive effect…
pharyngula | July 19, 2008Massimo Pigliucci has posted the notes, parts 1, 2, and 3, from the Altenberg meeting that was unfortunately over-hyped by the creationist crowd (no blame for that attaches to the organizers of this meeting). It sounds like it was a phenomenally interesting meeting that was full of interesting ideas, but from these notes, it was also clearly a rather speculative meeting — not one that was trying to consolidate a body of solid observations into a coherent explanation, but one that was instead trying to define promising directions for an expansion of evolutionary theory. That's also the message…
pharyngula | July 18, 2008Hooray, I have evidence that at least one person didn't fall asleep at my GECCO keynote: here's a summary. He even managed to pay attention right up to the dramatic conclusion, which I usually keep a secret, but now the beans have been spilled.
Wait…the biology-oriented keynote at last year's GECCO was a panel with Lewis Wolpert, Steve Jones, and Richard Dawkins? I would have been a lot more nervous if I'd known I was following up that act.
catdynamics | July 17, 200891st Skeptic's Circle is up at Sorting Out Science.
Heavy on Crackers and Sizzles.
pontiff | July 17, 2008Michael Nielsen has penned a very thoughtful essay on how the internet age will change how science is performed. Having sloppily dabbled in a website which allowed for rating of scientific papers, I think Michael's observations about why "review" sites for scientific papers are a tough sell (what reward do I get for commenting on a paper, exactly?) are spot on. I also liked his comparison of science review sites and reviews of Pokemon products:
The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark. To pick just one example, you'll find…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2008tags: explicit atheism, godlessness, religion, theism, rational living, freethinking, philosophy
Phylogeny of Christianity.
Image: FrostFireZoo.
All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.
~ Baron d'Holbach, 1772.
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) was recently added to the Atheist Blogroll. You can see the atheist doohickey on my left sidebar, which looks like this;
The Atheist Blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to atheist bloggers from around the world. As a new member, I was invited to write a little blurb (blurp?) about…
razib | July 16, 2008Please read: Follow up post.
Genetic Variation Increases HIV Risk In Africans:
A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, according to new research. Conversely, the same variation also appears to prolong survival of those infected with HIV by approximately two years.
...
HIV affects 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa today, an HIV burden greater than any other region of the world. Around 90 per cent of people in Africa carry the genetic variation, meaning…
pharyngula | July 16, 2008I'm on my way home, and am actually using a fast internet connection at the airport — I'd forgotten what it was like! I quickly uploaded a few essential files, and my mail software is downloading my email. Unfortunately, I'd need a really fast connection to handle all that — the number of messages pouring in might actually hit 5 digits. If you're hoping for a reply to anything, you might well be out of luck here.
Atlanta has been very pleasant, with friendly people and good company. I'll have to come back sometime. The meeting itself was challenging for a mere biologist, but I might have…
drorzel | July 15, 2008As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson's Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It's an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie.
Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test the old adage that "there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right." Most of the blog reviews collected at the ScienceBlogs page for the film were, um, less than glowing. My own kind of "Meh." review is one of the better ones on ScienceBlogs.
Having looked at a whole…
bioephemera | July 15, 2008
This morning, a plethora of Sizzle reviews will saturate Scienceblogs. I've no doubt that the film's science will be thoroughly dissected by more informed reviewers than I. So I'm going to steer clear of temperature trends and timetables, and instead consider how the film pitches its message.
Sizzle is billed as "a global warming comedy"; the official website claims "Sizzle is a novel blend of three genres - mockumentary, documentary, and reality." Personally, I think the film suffers from an identity crisis: it tries to fit all three genres at once, and it gets a little scrambled in the…
razib | July 14, 2008Well, I never thought I'd watch a film with the title, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The "star" of the Sizzle is Randy Oslon, a contributor to Shifting Baselines here at ScienceBlogsTM. In fact, Randy is a major contemporary interpreter of the term shifting baselines. I assume that most readers of ScienceBlogsTM are more familiar with Randy's oeuvre than I am, I haven't watched Flock of Dodos, and in general I tend to not be familiar with mass-market documentary films. I haven't watched either Al Gore or Michael Moore's documentaries, and Expelled was an experiment on my part in…