Science
pharyngula | December 21, 2007
A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn't matter whether we're looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we've mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.
Now there's a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution…
awild | December 21, 2007...reviewed by Phil Ward here:
Ward, P.S. 2007. Phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1668: 549-563.
Abstract: The current state of ant systematics is reviewed. In recent years substantial progress has been made in identifying the major clades of ants and the relationships among them. Earlier inferences about ant phylogeny based on morphology have been refined and modified as a result of a recent influx of molecular (DNA sequence) data and new fossil discoveries. It is now apparent that much of the biological and taxonomic diversity…
denialism | December 21, 2007Orac alerted me, based on my recent obesity writings, of a new crank obesity attack on science.
This latest is in the form of a rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock's excellent film Supersize me. Comedian Tom Naughton, who has all the charisma of a wet sponge, is making his own documentary Fathead: You've been fed a load of bologna. Here's the trailer:
Aside from the shoddy production, noncharismatic host, and general crankery, I guess it's not so bad. But I am growing concerned about the continual assault on what little good nutritional data is out there, and the misleading tactics of those…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2007tags: The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich, book review, birds, ornithology, biography, science
I remember that I felt very cold when I read Bernd Heinrich's book, Ravens in Winter, even though it was a hot summer day. That was the first of Heinrich's books that I read, but it definitely wasn't the last. I just finished reading his most recent book, The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (NYC: HarperCollins; 2007) and just as I wore a sweater while I finished his Ravens in Winter, I found that my normally routine daily subway rides to and from the library were…
awild | December 20, 2007
Trachymyrmex pomonae Rabeling & Cover 2007
Arizona
Nothing warms the heart more than a new ant species close to home! An all-star team of ant specialists, headed by Christian Rabeling at the University of Texas, describe the Arizonan species Trachymyrmex pomonae in Zootaxa this week. This spiny little red insect is part of a New World evolutionary radiation of agricultural ants, the attines, that cultivate a fungus in underground chambers. Trachymyrmex pomonae is one of several Trachymyrmex species in the United States, with dozens more occurring in Central and South America.
New…
catdynamics | December 20, 2007in theory there is no difference between theory and practice
a theorist can derive the Lie algebra for the non-commuting differential operators that describe the two axle parallel parking problem, and derive the constraint equations that determine the smallest space that can be parallel parked in
an experimentalist can parallel park
in practice there is a difference between theory and practice
catdynamics | December 19, 2007Stanford claims Lithium battery breakthrough
Li-ion battery using Si nanowires with order of magnitude improvement in capacity
If practical to fabricate, this would do wonders for laptops and cellphones.
If mass producable, it could be interesting for rechargable mass energy storage and for high power applications, like transport.
The papers claims they reached theoretical capacity of 4.2 Ah/g, which is quite impressive. They'd require ~ 1000 cells in series to get a voltage interesting for high power application, which would still give you an Ah/kg or more, with packaging etc.
That is an…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007We've got a splendid new analysis of a southeast Asian artiodactyl from the Thewissen lab that reveals that these little deer-like animals are a sister taxon to whales — so this pushes our understanding of the ancestry of whales yet further back. Carl Zimmer has already described the essentials — I'll just show a few pictures of the fossils.
If you're read Zimmer's At the Water's Edge, you already know that one of the key diagnostic features of cetaceans is the large auditory bulla at the bottom of the skull. It's a distinctive bony capsule that contains the ear structures, and which also has…
pontiff | December 19, 2007Here's a list of people who voted for the spending omnibus which totally shafted science and who also voted for the America COMPETEs act. Is your representative on there? Send a letter?
Update: Science article on the budget and science.
razib | December 19, 2007EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATIONS: THE IMPACT OF LIGHTER SKIN:
It would take someone with dark skin of African or South Asian ancestry about 60 minutes at the same time of day to make the amount of vitamin D that a person of European ancestry would make in about 10 minutes, estimates Reinhold Vieth, one of Canada's top vitamin D experts and a professor in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto.
You probably know of Vitamin D deficiency for rickets, but I think more common ailments might have a major fitness impact:
VDR ligands have also been shown to increase the activity…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007Here's an interesting question: "if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you?"
Shelley says yes. Janet says no. I say it depends on that qualifier, "few or no side effects" — if that were true, I'd say "Yes! Gimme more!" This is no dilemma at all.
Of course, that's cheating. There's no such thing as a drug that has no side effects. The real dilemma would crop up if a cognitive enhancer were available that did have problematic side effects — then my worry would be that pressure to succeed in my classes would be driving students to…
oracknows | December 18, 2007If you listen to what advocates of homeopathy, acupuncture, or whatever form of so-called "alternative" medicine you can think of (in reality, non-evidence-based medicine for the most part), you'd think that physicians are in the pockets of Big Pharma, hopeless slaves to its propaganda, addicted to its tchotchkes and swag. Sadly for Big Pharma, they may not be having quite the effect it had hoped, if this roundtable discussion of primary care doctors about a study on NSAIDS and pain is any indication:
Should we believe this study?
Bob: When I decide to read an article, I first look at the…
drorzel | December 18, 2007Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! is in honor of the cold water dripping into our kitchen cabinet yesterday:
That's a glass icicle, with bonus dramatic shadows. If you're a homeowner, you might think that this stands for ice damming, but this is about SCIENCE!!! not property mishaps. This ornament stands for phase transitions.
Phase transitions are a big part of physics and chemistry. Exactly what constitutes a "phase of matter" is a little murky, and seems to proceed on a sort of Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart rule, but transitions between phases are a rich area of study. Solid to…
pontiff | December 17, 2007News from Computing Research Policy Blog that the new omnibus appropriations bill will totally hammer the NSF and NIST. Effectively, factoring in some accounting and inflation, both budgets will be shrunk. So much for the America Competes Initiative. I've appropriately updated the probability that I will be employed in the next few years.
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: science, public policy, politics, federal funding, research, reality-based government, 2008 American presidential elections, ScienceDebate2008
I was disappointed, but not really surprised, when three Republican presidential candidates -- Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback (who has since dropped out) -- declared that they do not "believe in" the theory of evolution (in my opinion, the correct phrasing should have been "do you accept the theory of evolution?" rather than using the misleading and incorrect phrase believe in, which implies blind faith rather than scientifically…
drorzel | December 17, 2007Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week-- one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post-- talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the "pipeline." Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there's really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren't going to be working in purely scientific positions.…
oracknows | December 16, 2007...well, not really:
OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure, there were a few scientists, like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who wrote engagingly about the mysteries of the natural world, but they were relatively few.
Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect…
pharyngula | December 15, 2007
Those of you who have been pregnant, or have been a partner to someone who has been pregnant, are familiar with one among many common consequences: lower back pain. It's not surprising—pregnant women are carrying this low-slung 7kg (15lb) weight, and the closest we males can come to the experience would be pressing a bowling ball to our bellybutton and hauling it around with us everywhere we go. This is the kind of load that can put someone seriously out of balance, and one way we compensate for a forward-projecting load is to increase the curvature of our spines (especially the lumbar…
pontiff | December 14, 2007Murray Gell-Mann always makes me laugh. Via Asymptotia here is what Murray said while giving a Ted talk:
I won't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it's like and so on...you've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway!
Which got me wondering: is more said which is wrong about quantum theory than any other theory in physics? Now certainly there are those who will interpret Einstein's relativity (which one they probably won't tell you) as some postmodern "everything is relative" mantra. But (and maybe because I'm locked in a quantum closet all day) it seems to me that…