Life Sciences
edyong | September 20, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Imagine that one day, you make a pact with your brother or sister, vowing to never have children of your own and instead spend your life raising theirs. You'll agree to do the grocery shopping, cook for them, clean their rooms and bathe them, until you die.
That seems like a crazy plan, but it's one that some of the most successful animals in the world - the social insects - have adopted. It's called '…
emjohnson | September 18, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As expected, the apologists for unreason who promote Intelligent Design have jumped on the recent article in The New Yorker about bonobos. This inspired me to write at more length about the article since this is a species I've studied closely for the last two years. Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent uses the article to proudly…
pharyngula | September 17, 2009I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there's a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (called cirri) and wave them about in the water to catch small particles of food. They're very pretty, but also very skittish: a shadow passing over, a splash, the klunk of a rock sending vibrations through the substrate, and they instantly withdraw their limbs and slam the plate-like doors to their…
edyong | September 16, 2009
For humans and most other mammals, sex is a question is chromosomes. Two X chromsomes makes us female while an X and a Y makes us male. Birds use a similar but reversed system, where males are ZZ and females are ZW. But for reptiles, including crocodiles, turtles and many lizards, sex is determined not by genes, but by temperature.
In crocodiles, males hatch from eggs incubated at cooler temperatures while warmer conditions produce females. In turtles, it's the other way around, and lizards use a variety of criteria including some very complicated combinations of genes, temperature and…
laelaps | September 16, 2009Considering the fossils of the Cambrian, the oldest fossil-bearing rocks known during his time, Charles Darwin wrote the following in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species;
... it cannot be doubted that all the Cambrian and Silurian trilobites are descended from some on crustacean, which must have lived long before the Cambrian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. ...
... if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the…
clock | September 14, 2009Monday, Monday - let's see what's new. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research:
It is a summer day in 2009 in Cambridge, England, and K. (39) looks out of his lab window, wondering why he chose the life of a scientist [1]. Yet…
emjohnson | September 14, 2009My previous post on a potential problem for the selfish gene theory in explaining cooperative behavior resulted in a fair amount of heated discussion. However, there are quite a few misconceptions regarding the controversy surrounding the selfish gene, group selection, multilevel selection, generalized reciprocity, etc. that need to be clarified. When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976 it was an instant classic and has been championed for the past three decades as the final answer on how natural selection operates. What has been tremendously useful about the theory, as in…
edyong | September 12, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
In Jurassic Park, the role of Velociraptor was played by computer-generated reptilian actors, that bore little resemblance to the real deal. The actual dinosaur was smaller, slower and used its infamous claw to stab (or possibly climb) rather than disembowel. And in 2007, scientists found good evidence that it was covered in feathers.
Since Jurassic Park aired, dinosaurs like Velociraptor have received something of a makeover. It began in the late 1990s when Chinese palaeontologists found a…
clock | September 10, 2009I have been remiss this week....so here's a sampling from all seven PLoS journals over the course of this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Classical Morphology of Plants as an Elementary Instance of Classical Invariant Theory:
It has long been known that structural chemistry…
edyong | September 10, 2009The drawers of the world's museums are full of pinned, preserved and catalogued insects. These collections are more than just graveyards - they are a record of evolutionary battles waged between animals and their parasites. Today, these long-dead specimens act as "silent witnesses of evolutionary change", willing to tell their story to any biologist who knows the right question to ask.
This time round, the biologist was Emily Hornett, currently at UCL, and her question was "How have the ratios of male butterflies to female ones changed over time?" You would think that the sex ratios of…
grrlscientist | September 10, 2009tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate variation, climate change, penguins, El Nino, marine zoning, P. Dee Boersma
Adélie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae, and chicks.
(a) Adélie penguin chicks may get covered in snow during storms, but beneath the snow their down is warm and dry. (b) When rain falls, downy Adélie chicks can get wet and, when soaked, can become hypothermic and die.
Images: P. Dee Boersma.
According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution…
edyong | September 9, 2009Prions are proteins that have become bent out of shape. Their chain of amino acids folds up in an abnormal ways, and they can transmit this rogue alignment to their normal counterparts. As their numbers increase, they gather in large clumps that can kill neurons and damage brains. They most famously cause BSE in cows, CJD in humans and scrapie in sheep. But other mammals suffer from prion diseases too - the deer equivalent is called chronic wasting disease or CWD and it is shedding light on how prions are transmitted in the wild.
Gultekin Tamguney from the University of California, San…
laelaps | September 8, 2009
The skull of a brown bear (Ursus arctos), photographed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
The next time someone watches my apartment I will have to post a warning about the skulls. A few are in plain sight, like a badger skull on the bookshelf and a comparative set of small animal crania on the desk, but there are a few more hidden away in drawers and closets. The present disorganization of my osteological collection was very unsettling to the young woman who was taking care of the place while my wife and I were out west. She opened a drawer looking for a pen or some…
emjohnson | September 7, 2009Unicolonial ants, such as these Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), are genetically unrelated but will cooperate to defeat a much larger adversary.
Source: Alex Wild / Live Science
It has been a mainstay of evolutionary theory since the 1970s. Natural selection acts purely on the level of the individual and any cooperation observed between organisms merely hides a selfish genetic motive. There have been two pioneering theories to explain cooperation in the natural world given this framework: the first was William Hamilton's (1964) theory of kin selection and the second was Robert Trivers…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
clock | September 3, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
A Blog Around The…
gregladen | September 2, 2009Today's falsehood is the idea that individual animals act for the benefit of their own species.
Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, I watched a nature show about cougars. The show 'documented' a single female cougar going about doing cougar-things and being generally cougar-like. At one point she had cute little baby cougar kittens.
Then a flood came. The stream near her chosen lair swelled its banks and threatened to drown the kittens. So, she carried one of the kittens up the hill to a new lair. She went back to get the second kitten, and the flood waters were even higher…
ejohnson | August 31, 2009
As the long days of late summer grow shorter and darker, many of us are trying to eke out as much time outdoors as possible before fall's sweaters and yellowing leaves arrive. ScienceBloggers are no exception this week as they took to the natural world, focusing the lens of science on wildlife. Greg Laden's Blog looks to the skies, reporting on BirdLife International's efforts to "confirm the continued existence of 47 species of bird that have not been seen for up to 184 years." Photo Synthesis takes a dive into the deep, showcasing a photo essay on the sea's most fascinating camouflaged…
clock | August 30, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 300 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
A Blog Around The…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009tags: US endangered species list, parrots, aviculture, captive breeding, position statement, Parrots International, politics
NOTE: This position statement just came to my attention. I wish I had learned about it on 10 August, since I would have shared it immediately on that day.
August 10, 2009
Public Comments Processing
Attn: FWS-R9-IA-2009-0016
Division of Policy and Directives Management
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Drive
Suite 222; Arlington, VA 22203
As president of Parrots International I am forwarding the official position statement of Parrots International in…