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gregladen | April 3, 2008"In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA."
-Gregory Bateson
esiegel | April 3, 2008Starts with a bang reader Dumb Ass Dave points us to this BBC article about the discovery of a planet that's only just forming around a new star. The planet is surely less than 100,000 years old, although the 1,600 year old figure quoted in the article is probably hogwash.
How do you find it? Take a look at this picture below, taken in radio waves:
That big blurry thing in the center? That's a newly forming star, with a proto-planetary disk around it. But see that little blob in the upper right? That's a planet forming up there! When they do their analysis and determine its mass, it turns…
cmcclain | April 3, 2008John Hocevar visited MBARI yesterday discussing Greenpeace's research on canyons in the Bering Sea. We've discussed this research before but a followup is worthy of another post. Greenpeace has been trying to convince the powers that be to protect deep-sea diversity from fisheries practices. Unsurprisingly, some people don't give a damn about the deep. It's all I get mine and make some Benjamins. Some of the focus has been on Zhemchug and Pribilof Canyons. Zhemchug is the largest canyon in the world by volume (19x Monterey Canyon where my current interests and research are focused) and…
kevin z | April 3, 2008Way back in the day with deep sea drilling they used to just let it all flow out if you know what I mean. Now in the PC world and all, we have to watch what we spill, give rattail's fin about other critters, yadda yadda yadda. The japanese, being the ever inventful gadgeteers they are, have outfitted their newest and top of the line drill ship CHIKYU (japanese for "earth") with a Blow-Out Preventer (BOP) for just those uncomfortable circumstances when the pressure is a little higher than you expected that day.
"Further Blow Out Preventer (BOP) makes safe drilling even where there is…
pharyngula | April 3, 2008All right, people, I give up. Everyone has been sending me links to this story about a recent publication — it made the CBC, ScienceDaily, CNN, the Telegraph, and who knows what else — but I haven't been able to get my hands on the original science article: Huffard CL, Caldwell RL, Boneka F (2008) Mating behavior of Abdopus aculeatus (d'Orbigny 1834) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) in the wild. It's published in Marine Biology, sensibly enough, but out here on the prairie we don't get much call for tales of kinky tentacle sex in the sea … or, perhaps, it's all sublimated or hidden away (one does…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2008tags: On Punctuation, Elizabeth Austen, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day, this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). Today's poem was suggested by a reader and bird pal, Diane, who wrote; "I like the flow -- the freedom -- the not-so-subtle irreverent urging to think outside the box -- the joyful, (very) suggestive sauciness..." . This poet, Elizabeth Austen, is based in my original home, Seattle, and this poem appears here with her kind permission (the author…
gregladen | April 2, 2008"All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. "
-Isaac Azimov
edyong | April 2, 2008It's carnival time! Here are four excellent round-ups of blog posts for your scientific delectation.
Tangled Bank #102 (everything!) at Further Thoughts
Carnival of the Green #121 (environmental issues) at Conserve Plastic Bags
Circus of the Spineless #31 (invertebrates) at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol
Encephalon (neuroscience) at Of Two Minds
kevin z | April 2, 2008So Kallen over at the Biojournalism blog goes on a diatribe about great Echinoderms are, blah blah blah regeneration blah blah blah pentaradial symmetry. She then asks of her readers:
Tell me how snails are really cool, please?
OK, I'll tell you! Craig has already mentioned the coolness of the radula, how some snails can parasitize echinoderms, the backing of the Google Fight, and there huge range of sizes. He must have thought that was enough, maybe Kallen wasn't paying attention.
Mollusks also can harbor endosymbiotic bacteria that permit them to live in environments like hydrothermal vents…
cortex | April 2, 2008I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity.
The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does not change throughout history. Subjectivity certainly does, since people change. But objectivity would seem to be ahistorical.
It is not.
In their 1992 article, by looking across scientific atlases and forms of visual representation across the nineteenth century and to the mid-twentieth, they…
cortex | April 2, 2008There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the tragic tales, as he's not a neurologist or a neuroscientist. Instead, he's a brain injury case manager based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so the stories are as much about the bureaucratic maze of insurance claims as they are about the hippocampus. The Times review criticizes Mason for "giving the neuroscience short shrift," but, for me, that was one of the strengths of the…
kevin z | April 2, 2008CNN.com reports:
"Those favoring the removal say the sea lions are damaging salmon runs listed under the Endangered Species Act and protected at great expense.
The states estimate the sea lions eat up to about 4 percent of the spring chinook run as it schools at the base of the Bonneville Dam to pass through fish ladders en route to upriver spawning grounds.
The Humane Society contends the animals are only a small, although visible, pressure on the health of the runs and that the required "significant negative impact" hasn't been established."
cmcclain | April 2, 2008If you can tolerate the obvious Echino-bias, personally it makes me want to puke, the latest Circus of the Spineless is up over at from Archaea to Zeaxanthol. Word on the street is that all Mollusk contributions were deleted.
In a very unsurprising post from I'm A Chordata, Urochordata!, there is another post voting for the chordates. Personally, I think the Google results are faked. Try running that search with mammals and birds removed. Please! Like anybody cares about tunicates.
jlynch | April 1, 2008A new journal, titled Evolutionary Applications, has just appeared and the 2008 contents will be available online for free.
Evolution now permeates essentially all aspects of biology, and evolutionary concepts and methods are being applied to problems of considerable practical importance. For example, concepts in evolutionary biology guide research to reduce drug resistance of pathogens and parasites, to discover ways of ensuring the long term genetic health of endangered species and some crop foods, to improve the understanding of the ultimate causes of medical diseases, and to predict the…
cmcclain | April 1, 2008Why Craig? Why Craig would you be posting about buses?
Monterey police are investigating to find out how an empty tourist bus managed to roll away from its parking spot Saturday afternoon and crash into the front wall of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.The 40-foot Coach USA bus rolled downhill on David Avenue, about a block and a half away from the aquarium. Along the way it knocked down several street signs and hit the front end of a car. The bus also sideswiped an office building before ramming into the aquarium. The crash caused major damage to the front of the bus and the corner of the aquarium…
gregladen | April 1, 2008"We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet."
-Margaret Mead
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mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2008One of the things I didn't get a chance to talk about at the Boston Skeptics meeting is how we use evolutionary biology to understand the human microbiome--those microorganisms that live on and in us.
Here's an example from a paper about Crohn's disease (italics mine):
It is hypothesized that IBD [inflammatory bowel disease] results from an aberrant immune response against intestinal bacteria that results in inflammatory damage to intestinal tissues. Many clinical and experimental observations strongly implicate intestinal bacteria in the pathogenesis of IBD. However... neither the…
cmcclain | March 31, 2008A species of holothurian, Pannychia, swarms a whale fecal mound in the abyssal Pacific.
When Miriam visited me last week at MBARI, we discussed over lunch my current "great" hypothesis. Every scientist has them...these are the hypotheses that are high on creativity but lack quantitative data to test them. Usually, the hypothesis is a "big idea", virtually untestable, and the only support is anecdotal. It's more of a thinking exercise rather than a formal hypothesis. Anyway my current "great" hypothesis is that food limitation in the deep sea drives adaptations that you would never see in…
jlynch | March 31, 2008The ICR’s Christine Dao has a review of Expelled online where she states:
According to From Darwin to Hitler author Richard Weikart, Hitler saw World War II as a Darwinian struggle for existence, and he justified the practice of eugenics by saying that mankind had "transgressed the law of natural selection" by allowing inferior beings to survive and propagate (Mein Kampf, 1925).
Here’s the problem. Dao makes it look like Hitler used the phrase "transgressed the law of natural selection" in Mein Kampf. Problem is, he didn’t. The only mention of "natural selection" in the work is:
By reason of…
cmcclain | March 31, 2008Well it was only a matter of time before Miriam added the tunicates. Let me say that it has become crystal clear to me today what is occurring. This whole battle pits the protostomes vs. deuterstomes. The protostomes must rise up and defeat the evil empire and unjustness that is deuterstomes.
To refresh your memory or bring you up to speed, the deuterstomes are basically a superphylum that encompasses the echinderms, urochordata, chordata, and hemichordata. What do these groups share in common? First, they are extremely uncool and to cheer for them makes you uncool. Second, during the…