voltagegate | August 7, 2007
I found the following article on the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) this morning on ScienceDaily, and due to the conservation problems we're having with the endangered fish, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss eutrophication and hypoxia, two huge issues in marine and aquatic sciences.
Dwindling numbers of shortnose sturgeon in Georgia's blackwater Ogeechee River system have prompted an effort to quantify the causes and prioritize recovery efforts.
Yetta Jager and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are conducting a population viability analysis, which…
voltagegate | August 3, 2007Fairy rings are regarded in legends across Europe and North America. In Wales and much of Britain, people thought the rings were leftover from the merriment of fairies. In Ireland they are associated with leprechauns. In Germany, witches gathered around the rings at night. In Scandinavian tales (from which, by the way, Tolkien borrowed heavily), elves danced among the mushrooms in meetings called älvdanser.
In reality, fairy rings are the result of the natural tendency of mycelium (the underground "spreading" portion of the organism) to spread out in a ring shape.
Think of the mycelium like…
voltagegate | August 1, 2007PLoS One has an overload of ecology centered articles I want to read and review from the past few weeks. I'm hoping I get to some of them in the next week:
Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene?
[Abstract] The southern African tick shell, Nassariuskraussianus (Dunker, 1846), has been identified as being the earliest known ornamental object used by human beings. Shell beads dated from ,75,000 years ago (Pleistocene era) were found in a cave located on South Africa's south coast. Beads made…
voltagegate | July 31, 2007
Millenia ago, Brian from Laelaps presented The Voltage Gate with the Thinking Blogger Award, and I have finally found some time to pass it on to blogs that make me think. It's difficult to siphon the 50 or so blogs I peruse and only choose five, but I'll do my best.
Jen, The Infinite Sphere: Jen's original blog, Studying Biology and Environmental Science (I think the URL has been swiped unfortunately), was one of the first science blogs I ever read. I was immediately drawn in because of our shared experience as nontrad biology students and her posts about her studies and hobbies (like…
voltagegate | July 31, 2007
Twelve years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a 70 year absence due to over hunting (and outright slaughter). Beyond the pure principle of reintroduction, an added bonus was cutting the elk population in the area, and subsequently reducing the pressure on riparian Aspen saplings. Researchers at Oregon State have been following this trend for a while now, and just published a paper on the revitalization of the Aspen population in Yellowstone:
The findings... show that a process called "the ecology of fear" is at work, a balance has been restored to an important…
voltagegate | July 30, 2007Paleoecologist Margaret Davis' work has become legend among ecologists. She analyzed layer upon layer of pollen buried in lake sediments in the Appalachian Mountains to determine the natural history of trees in the area.
She found an interesting pattern:
Spruce (Picea) pollen dominated the area 12,000 years ago. Beech (specifically Fagus grandifolia) pollen appears 8,000 years ago.
The American Chestnut pollen did not show up in the sediment record until 2,000 years ago; it quickly vanished around 1920.
Cryphonectria parasitica, a type of blight (type of fungus), was transported to North…
voltagegate | July 27, 2007I've been waiting for a decent Star Trek game for over a decade now, and so has AT; he's speculating about how good a Star Trek MMO could be. My question to the developers: Can you steal the Defiant and strafe Bajor? Please? The Bajorans are freakin' irritating.
voltagegate | July 27, 2007"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."
-Thomas Jefferson
voltagegate | July 27, 2007I finally got around to reading this study from PLoS One, another paper trying to address socioeconomic influences on ecology and biodiversity. The researchers explored a possible correlation between economic inequality - the distribution of wealth - and biodiversity in the US (state by state) and several other countries.
They used the Gini coefficient for measuring economic inequality. Gini coefficients are expressed in a scale from 0 to 1.0, with 0 being an area in which all families/households earn exactly the same income (perfect equality) and 1.0 being an area in which one family earns…
voltagegate | July 26, 2007Found this in my mailbox this morning, thought it would be nice to get it out there:
The BBC Natural History Unit is currently looking for stories for its sequel series to Planet Earth, Frozen Planet. In conjunction with a cutting edge website that will run for the 3 years of the production, Frozen Planet will be the ultimate and most comprehensive portrait of the polar regions to date. For the first time, a truly multi-media approach to broadcasting will give us near unlimited scope to tell all the stories and to properly explain the science that is key to these environments.
This is where…
voltagegate | July 25, 2007Critique of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows below the fold. Spoilers ahead.
I think it's important to get one thing straight right off the bat: I am a fan of the Harry Potter series. I think Rowling is a great storyteller, and I have enjoyed the series so far. I think she has seriously dropped the ball with her last book, and cheated her fans out of an equally engaging novel as well as a satisfying conclusion for the characters they have loved and followed for 10 years now.
Overall, I think Rowling is tired of writing about the gang. Her strengths - quaint descriptions and character…
voltagegate | July 25, 2007
After hosting TB last week, I had been planning a bit of a break to spend time with family and get lost in the mountains for a bit (while secretly waiting in line last Saturday at midnight for the new Harry Potter - review pending).
We had a chance to sift through some flea markets and I found a wonderful set of small, illustrated books on nature published by the National Audubon Society and a book on fossil collecting in PA, both put out back in the 1960's. I thought I would share some of the finer illustrations below the fold.
The fossil collecting book has some really great ones, like the…
voltagegate | July 19, 2007After a long hiatus (in blogging terms), Jen has restarted The Infinite Sphere (unfortunately someone swiped her original address), a blog about environmental science, conservation, limnology and ecology. She started blogging at is also the cofounder of Oekologie and a dear friend.
I love when she blogs about caves. Check out her first post on the subject, about the Tennessee Cave Salamander.
voltagegate | July 18, 2007Go say hi to the Angry Toxicologist, our new SciBling here at SB:
I am a Ph.D. scientist in the public health sector with a good amount of toxicology and regulatory knowledge. I'm not going to be dishing about projects I am privy to, but I am much freer to make my opinions known anonymously, than I could do in a completely public forum.
Although other topics will probably be brought up from time to time (friday is no day for science), this blog will be focused on public health and the science behind it and will be written for the non-scientist without dumbing anything down.
voltagegate | July 18, 2007Crap. I totally forgot about Martin's carnival idea. I had plans to visit a couple of places in my area that are being excavated, but never got around to it. Maybe next time (if there is one).
It's up right now, and looks like there's some great stuff.
voltagegate | July 18, 2007
Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us.
I want to begin this edition with an important announcement. Aetiology's Tara Smith has some news about the Clergy Letter Project (and Evolution Sunday). This founder, Mike Zimmerman, is trying to create a list of scientists who would be willing to answer the more technical questions posed about science and evolution by participating clergy. Tara has all the…
voltagegate | July 17, 2007Last time we delved into some of the smallest components of spiders and insects, exploring their differences based on deviations in their genetic code through molecular homology.
But there is one particular unifying element to these creatures and their overall make up. They share a series of genes - sequences of DNA that code for an organism's traits - that determine the exact body plan of an arthropod. These genes, called Hox genes,* have become helpful in describing just how evolution by natural selection constructs each different organism from detailed blueprints within our DNA.
More on…
voltagegate | July 17, 2007Found this in ScienceDaily this morning:
A team of John Innes centre scientists lead by Professor Nick Harberd have discovered how plants evolved the ability to adapt to changes in climate and environment. Plants adapt their growth, including key steps in their life cycle such as germination and flowering, to take advantage of environmental conditions. They can also repress growth when their environment is not favourable. This involves many complex signalling pathways which are integrated by the plant growth hormone gibberellin.
Publishing in the journal Current Biology, the researchers…
voltagegate | July 17, 2007Don posted the seventh edition of Oekologie yesterday morning (it's late, but he's on vacation; have fun, Don).
I'll have Tangled Bank #84 up tomorrow, so get your submissions in by this evening. I'm thinking that the theme will be ancient Greek/Roman science history. We'll see.
voltagegate | July 16, 2007In the last post of this series, we established that spiders descended from marine arthropods called the eurypterids, distinct and separate from insects, appearing in the fossil record in the late Silurian/early Devonian, about 425 million years ago.
The cladogram we used to analyze the spider's history was based on the organism's morphological characteristics, that is, visible structures like chelicerae and book lungs that can be tied to other organisms that possess the same structures. Limulus (the extant horseshoe crab) has both of these structures and predates the spiders, placing them…