Science
pharyngula | January 14, 2006
The next edition of the Tangled Bank will be held at Grey Thumb.blog on Wednesday, 18 Jan 2006. Send in those links to wonderful science writing to tangledbank@greythumb.org,
host@tangledbank, or
me by Tuesday evening.
pharyngula | January 14, 2006BioCurious has a nifty methods article on Labeling λ DNA—if you've ever wanted to know how to tag a strand of DNA with a bead so you can tow it around with your optical tweezers, here's the theory (and they've got optical tweezers? I am so jealous.)
pharyngula | January 13, 2006A reader sent in this little question:
Possible answers:
Well, what if McNuggets have souls, huh? What do you think of that, smart guy?
Neither have souls!
"Good" and "McNuggets" in the same sentence?
Let's have a taste test and find out.
pharyngula | January 13, 2006OK, that settles it. I'm in the wrong research field.
They found breasts moved in a 3D figure of eight and that uncontrolled movement strained fragile tissues and ligaments.
The study suggested as a woman runs a mile, her breasts bounced 135 meters.
The report found each breast moved independently of the body by an average of 9cm for every step taken on the treadmill.
With the average breast weighing between 200 and 300 grams, this movement puts great stress on the breast's fragile support structure—the outer skin and connective tissues known as Cooper's ligaments.
I suspect the analysis was…
ddobbs | January 12, 20063My piece in yesterday’s New York Times on errors in scientific journals lacked room to consider a key factor generating the sort of fraud that has haunted science lately: The way publishing concentrates and broadcasts not just the sort of error that John Ioannidis writes about, but power and money (its imprimatur), which can corrupt and lead to the sort of fraud Hwang indulged in.
While top researchers a couple generations ago lived modestly, today they command fat salaries and wield immense power. These perks provide extra motivation not just for cheating but for the overreaching — the…
pharyngula | January 12, 2006Every biology student gets introduced to the chordates with a list of their distinctive characteristics: they have a notochord, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, gill slits, and a post-anal tail. The embryonic stage in which we express all of these features is called the pharyngula stage—it's often also the only stage at which we have them. We terrestrial vertebrates seal off those pharyngeal openings as we develop, while sea squirts throw away their brains as an adult.
The chordate phylum has all four of those traits, but there is another extremely interesting phylum that has some of them, the…
pharyngula | January 12, 2006Whoa…now this is a phenomenal tool. iSpecies is a simple, minimalist page ala Google, with a single text entry box. Type in any taxon name, hit enter, and it comes back at you with genomics data, images, and documents on the organism(s). It's a species search engine!
(via Evolgen)
pharyngula | January 12, 2006This is a beautiful little animal with a brief and brilliant life.
Watasenia scintillans is a small (mantle length,~6 cm; wet weight,~9 g), luminescent deep-sea squid, indigenous to northern Japan. Females carrying fertilized eggs come inshore each spring by the hundreds of millions, even a billion, to lay eggs in Toyama Bay (max. depth, 1200 m) and die, thereupon completing a 1-year life cycle.
Watasenia possesses numerous (~800), minute dermal light organs (photophores) on its ventral side. Other organs are scattered over the head, funnel, mantle, and arms, but none is found on its dorsal…