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cmcclain | December 31, 2007
2007...what to say? A year that saw a lot of changes. First DSN moved to the big time here at Sb. Our traffic and regular visitors increased. At the old DSN, we hit 100,000 hits in nearly two years of blogging. For 2007, we reached nearly 320,000 hits! Lots of great posts, new discoveries, novel research, and...well deep-sea news. In the next week or so I will post the Best of 2007 determined by a crack, i.e. a bunch of suckers we got for free, team of experts. What will happen next year. DSN is going to be bigger, better, and badder. Don't worry we will still be the #1 action site…
cortex | December 31, 2007One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely affects political discourse. On a hot summer day, just about every presidential stump speech - and I'm referring here to the speeches of Clinton, Obama, Edwards and McCain - referred at least once to the prospect of global warming. However, when the outside world is coated in a thick slick of ice, I've found that presidential candidates tend to steer away…
cortex | December 31, 2007Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This post was originally going to be about how I now understand why the Inuit language has split "snow" into so many different and specific nouns: there really are that many different types of snow. (Keep in mind that I'm a native Southern Californian, so I thought snow was something they manufactured on cold days for ski slopes.)
But then I discovered this…
laelaps | December 30, 2007
Revered and reviled, the wolf embodies the concept of the "noble savage," a sort of respectable wildness that is both admired and feared. Presently many populations of wolves in North America continue on at the indulgence of our own species, humans essentially exterminating as many wolves as they could in America, and the tenuous position of modern wolves in the United States relies on understanding and the death of the "Big Bad Wolf" mythos. Scott Ian Barry, a photographer and wolf enthusiast who is intimately familiar with the natural history of these animals, has released a new book to…
cmcclain | December 30, 2007
The Neptune Memorial Reef project is the largest man made reef ever conceived and provides an extraordinary living resting place for the departed, an environmental and ecological masterpiece, a superb laboratory for marine biologists, students, researchers and ecologists, and an aesthetically exquisite, world-class destination for visitors from all walks of life. The most innovative concept in artificial reef design is currently emerging in 50-feet of water, 3.25 miles east of Key Biscayne, Miami. Wrapped in the silence of the clear blue ocean a new reef is evolving. The Neptune Memorial…
grrlscientist | December 30, 2007tags: chinese new year, online quiz
I am a DOG? And I am most compatible with a tiger or horse?
You Should Have Been Born Under:
You are totally loyal, faithful, and honest.
However, you don't trust others to be as ethical as you are!
Straight forward and direct, you really aren't one for small talk.
You are a great listener - and an agreeable companion when you're in a good mood!
You are most compatible with a Tiger or Horse.
What Year Should You Have Been Born Under?
grrlscientist | December 29, 2007tags: online fortune generator, fortune cookie, online game
I found a fortune cookie fortune generator online for you all to play with. I got a weird fortune and I am curious as to what fortune you got.
Your Fortune Is
Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have!
The Wacky Fortune Cookie Generator
gregladen | December 28, 2007Beethoven Home court advantage matters when it comes to food and reproduction. So, where does a big male ape sit? Wherever he wants to....
... and if you are an adult male chimp, this means in the same part of the forest that you used to hang out with mom, when you were still more or less attached to her metaphorical apron strings.
The next issue of Current Biology will have a paper by Carson Murray, Ian Gilby, Sandeep Mane and Anne Pusey on adult male ranging patterns. The conclusion of the research is that adult males essentially inherit their mother's habits of space use.
The study is…
cortex | December 28, 2007I'm certainly no music critic, but since it's the season of top 10 lists, I thought I'd share my favorite songs of the year, even if my list is bound to typecast me as yet another overeducated twentysomething with a soft spot for indy music, American Apparel and thick-rimmed glasses. The list is in no particular order:
Okkervil River, "(Shannon Wilsey On The) Starry Stairs," The Stage Names
Feist, "I Feel It All," The Reminder
Bright Eyes, "If The Brakeman Turns My Way," Cassadaga
Bruce Springsteen, "Long Walk Home," Magic
Jeff Tweedy, "Simple Twist of Fate," I'm Not There
The National, "Fake…
petnoyer | December 28, 2007
One of my back up plans for early retirement is to start a consulting business for Hollywood special effects (SFX) studios. My crack team of marine invertebrate biologists and kinesiologists will advise big studios on new scary creatures for space-based and terrestrial monster movies.
The first one's free. The picture of the amphipod Phronima sp. above would be a good biomechanical model for an update of say, the Imperial AT-AT Walkers from "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". The picture comes from the Norway-based MAR-ECO project and the global Census of Marine Life program…
petnoyer | December 27, 2007A recent study linking deep-sea biodiversity to ecosystem processes recognized that 1) the deep-sea supports the largest biomass of living things on the planet and 2) the deep-sea represents the most important ecosystem for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. The chosen indicator species for the study was the nematode worm.
Nematodes apparently account for 90% of all life at the bottom of the sea. I am unsure whether this is given in terms of species richness or biomass, but either way, it's an image problem. Just kidding, of course. The new study is published in the January 8 issue of…
cortex | December 27, 2007So I'm browsing the juice section at my local supermarket, trying to figure out if I like pulpy bits in my orange juice, when I notice that Minute Maid has a new line of "enhanced juices". I couldn't help but laugh at the tag line for the Pomegranate Blueberry drink: "Help Nourish Your Brain!" The label explains:
Minute Maid Enhanced Pomegranate Blueberry is a great tasting flavored 100 percent juice blend with 50mg of Omega-3/DHA per 8 fl. oz. serving to help nourish your brain. DHA is a key building block in the brain.
I think it's now clear that the omega-3 hype has gotten out of control.…
cortex | December 27, 2007Terry McDermott, who penned that great series on neuroscientist Gary Lynch earlier this year, has written another illuminating article on Alzheimer's. The news is bleak: scientists have yet to understand the disease. In fact, we still don't even know what causes the cellular degeneration in the first place:
It's been 101 years since Alzheimer's disease was first theorized, and 30 years since the federal government began funding research on it, spending, to date, more than $8 billion. Private industry has spent billions more. What has been learned?
The answer is perplexing. There have been…
grrlscientist | December 26, 2007I am sorry that my writing has slowed, but I am sick right now with a nasty cough. I get this same cough every year at this time (is it bronchitis? or "walking" pneumonia? I have had pneumonia several times so far). This cough hangs on for many weeks, or even months, and makes me exhausted and utterly miserable.
Anyway, I've been in bed all day, except when I venture out to take care of my birds and to care for the animals I am petsitting over the holidays. The worst thing is that I am not so ill as to sleep all the time -- quite the opposite, because I cannot sleep at all, which makes me…
gregladen | December 26, 2007Linnaeus' Legacy is "a monthly blog carnival devoted to the study of life's diversity, and the science of describing and understanding this diversity." The home page for the carnival is here.
The current issue of Linnaeus' Legacy is at Laelaps.
The reason I'm telling you all this is to get you excited about the next edition of Linnaeus' Legacy, which will be hosted here, on this blog.
The plan is to get the carnival up and running on the Fifth of January. Please send me your posts!
I'd like to have the posts in hand on the 4th of January but if you wake up on the morning of January…
gregladen | December 26, 2007This is not new, but it is cool: The NORFANZ sea sampling project. What is a little new is that many of these species are claimed on some crazy web site to have washed ashore during the Christmas Tsunami three years ago. That is not true....
Jewel Squid (Histioteuthis sp.)
The jewel squids are one of the strangest occupants of open-ocean waters. Firstly they have wonky eyes, the left eye is always much larger than the right. In some species the left eye is telescopic while the smaller right eye is normal. These squids have a funny slant on life, literally. They hang at a 45° angle and…
cmcclain | December 26, 2007Apparently that slime trail left behind by snails and slugs is good for the skin.
The studies have verified that the dribble of snail allows to prevent and to eliminate wrinkles, to attenuate grooves, to eliminate scars caused for wounded and burns of first degree, to remove the acne, to clean spots produced by the sun. It has also demonstrated to be effective to eliminate warts of the skin.
But will my hair grown back on my bald head if I rub a snail on it. The real question is how to they harvest it.
Unbeknownst to me a Chilean company AGROINDUSTRIAL LA FLORESTA LTD is dedicated to…