biology
evolgen | March 5, 2007A discussion of open access data using bird flu and other disease data as examples.
The recent scares over bird flu have led many researchers to investigate the epidemiology, genetics, and disease risks of the virus. The researchers are focused on both preventing the transmission of the virus into human populations and preparing for a potential pandemic. By analyzing DNA sequences from different viral strains, researchers can understand how the virus spreads within and between populations, how it changes over seasons, and what (if anything) we can do to predict its next evolutionary jump.…
tfk | March 1, 2007A lake in Winfield is the second in Kansas with zebra mussels. The zebra mussel was introduced into the Great Lakes by bilge water from a European vessel. Since then, they have spread on birds and boats from lake to lake.
Upon arrival, they spread and outcompete local mollusks, filtering out food for native fish as well.
That isn't the only threat to Kansas lakes. Most of them were created by the Army Corps of Engineers, and have begun shrinking due to sediment, coupled with dry weather. In the other lake, which was infested in 2003, "The lake's down 5 ½ feet, and you can see millions…
oracknows | March 1, 2007I apologize for submitting you to the previous three creationist videos. I realize that they were pretty mind-numbing, and then there was that cheesy Christian rock ballad.
So here's one antidote. (Warning: The video is nearly two hours long; even I haven't had time to watch the whole thing yet.) And it happened at one of my old alma maters, Case Western Reserve University.
it's good for what ails you. Watch it a little at a time if it's too long to watch all at once.
oracknows | March 1, 2007Here's the finale of my audience participation project for today. I've saved the "best" for last. This short video, called Science Refutes Its Own Laws?, is the target. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the questions contained therein and/or demonstrate why they represent typical creationist canards, and do it without reference to Talkorigins.org. It's pretty easy, but it's also depressing that this crap persists. Also, don't be too depressed. There's one more of these coming, but it's an antidote.
It's also amusing how confident the tone of the video is. Forgive me…
tfk | March 1, 2007Increased Demand for Ivory Threatens Elephant Survival - washingtonpost.com:
An international effort to halt the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks has all but collapsed in most of Africa, leaving officials and advocates alarmed about the survival of the species. A study released yesterday estimates that as many as 23,000 of the animals were slaughtered last year alone.
…
"Almost half of Africa's elephants had been slaughtered in the eight years before the ban, but now the situation is even more extreme because the number of animals is so much lower to begin with," [Sam Wasser…
revere | March 1, 2007In the 1918 pandemic deaths occurred either from the usual secondary bacterial infections or the rapidly advancing acute respiratory distress syndrome. The latter, at least, seems also characteristic of the current human cases of H5N1, and in both the 1918 virus and the contemporary H5N1 there is strong evidence that a dysregulated immune system resulting in a "cytokine storm" may be involved (see our brief description of cytokine storm at The Flu Wiki). But what are the details of a cytokine storm and how does the virus cause it? A new paper in the Journal of Virology on an entirely…
razib | February 28, 2007A story just came out today about drinking high fat vs. low fat milk, and the positive effect on fertility that the former can have. Remember the report that drinking milk increases twinning? Issues like this should be kept in mind when considering the spread of lactose tolerance, anything that increases fitness should spread. Why didn't it? Well, it seems likely that cattle can't be raised everywhere, so you have a situation where the selective benefit is geographically constrained. Also, modern lifestyles are characterized by no scarcity of calories so comparing this to pre-modern…
jlynch | February 27, 2007The New York Times is reporting that in 24 states beekeepers are noticing that
their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable. ...
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling…
tfk | February 27, 2007Imagine you were an editor, and two stories came across your desk. One shows that chimpanzees use spears, giving insight into the origins of weaponmaking and violence in human society.
The other article shows that spider monkeys hug to avoid fights:
Hugging diffuses the tension when two bands of monkeys meet, say the British researchers who made the discovery. Without these calming embraces, the situation can escalate into aggression and even physical attacks, they report.
The researchers studied wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), which live in the forests of Central and South America.…
omnibrain | February 27, 2007There are all sorts of remote control rodents and cockroaches out there now - but I guess they've stepped it up a notch and created a remote control flying rodent cockroach hybrid (also known as the common pigeon). Now, not only can they control in which direction the pigeon flies, they can also control when it releases its little whitish projectile. Researchers say they are working on a laser guided shit release system and hope to have it installed in the next version of the robotic mind controlled shitting pigeon machine.
Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling…
omnibrain | February 25, 2007I've pretty much ignored all the academic fraud cases lately since I don't know what good can come from getting upset/annoyed/whatever about asshole scientists who screw it up for the rest of us. But lately I haven't been able to ignore them anymore - they are really starting to affect both my day to day life as well as how I read actual science.
Day to Day:
At Illinois we had a married couple who while perhaps not committing academic fraud (although that has been questioned) were committing actual monetary fraud by essentially double charging their respective grants for things like travel…
omnibrain | February 25, 2007Ok just kidding but you should really read this funny post from the Language Log mocking a Washington Post article about spear use in chimps.
The Original:
Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.
The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of…
moleculeoftheday | February 22, 2007It's remarkable how different RNA and DNA are, considering they're just one atom different. RNA is much more prone to fall apart; you can put DNA in basic solution without any problem, but RNA will begin to hydrolyze. Life takes advantage of the ease with which RNA is degraded. It has a much more ephemeral role in the cell; your genome is encoded long-term via DNA, and RNA is typically generated only as needed en route to proteins.
Because of this, RNA is degraded quickly when it's not around for a good reason. This is accomplished by the ubiquitous, aptly named RNAses. They're all over your…
tfk | February 22, 2007One of the late Stephen Jay Gould's regular observations was that the evolution of life on Earth has been highly contingent. Minor, often random, events in life's history have reverberated throughout the eons. One of the many fatal flaws of the "specified complexity," Billy Dembski's idea for proving design, is that it circularly assumes that the way things are is exactly the way that a "designer" would want them to be. This idea ignores the oddly contingent course life has taken over the last 3.8 billion years.
Chemists have illuminated one such contingent path that life took:
Chemists at…
omnibrain | February 21, 2007An interesting youtube video from the Discovery Channel featuring the research of Chance Spalding. The video features a monkey who can control a robotic arm with the implanted electrodes in its brain.
via boingboing
jstemwedel | February 20, 2007Score another point for my mother.
My mother is a really good cook. She is also an unrepentant violator of recipes. My earliest cookbook related memory involves noticing that, while Mom had a recipe in front of her, she was flagrantly measuring different amounts of ingredients than those called for, and combining them in a way that clearly contravened the method described on the page.
It turns out that this manifestation of her issues with authority may also explain why she has such a good understanding of what she's doing in the kitchen.
At least, that's a conclusion I'm inclined to draw…
tfk | February 15, 2007Getting along together is tough. In ecology, the problem is often stated the way the great G. E. Hutchinson did in a famous paper "Why are there so many kinds of animals?" In principle, a given species at some location should be a little better at getting food than others, and it ought to outcompete any similar species, driving them to extinction. If that were true, we would expect there to be very few species anyplace. Instead, there are lots of species all over.
The explanation Hutchinson offered 50 years ago is the foundation of modern community ecology – each species is different…
tfk | February 14, 2007
The origin of the flowering plants is, as DarkSyde observes, critical to the world as we know it. Not just because chocolate is lovely, as are roses. But because honey tastes good, and the diversity of butterflies is a never-ending source of joy to us all. If not for flowering plants, the insects would be a drab bunch.
It's hardly surprising that insect diversity and plant diversity have followed one another closely through geological history. Like so many romances, the story of plants and insects is a love-hate relationship, with happiness built by finding a happy middle.
The bee in the…
omnibrain | February 13, 2007Here's one for Valentine's Day.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Beatles' George Harrison wondered in his famous love song about the "something" that "attracts me like no other lover." A University at Buffalo expert explains that that "something" is actually several physical elements that -- if they occur in a certain order, at the right time and in the right place -- can result in true love.
"There are several types of chemistry required in romantic relationships," according to Mark Kristal, professor of psychology at UB. "It seems like a variety of different neurochemical processes and external…
tfk | February 12, 2007198 years ago, Charles "Chuck D." Darwin was born to an English physician who had married into the family famous for Wedgwood china. Halfway around the world, in a log cabin on the frontier, young Abraham Lincoln was born. Those two births changed the world, bringing forth a set of ideas that changed how we all see the world.
Darwin's idea was simplicity itself, once he recognized it. Animals and plants all differ, and those differences are passed from generation to generation. Some of that variation improves an animal or plant's prospects in life, other variations limit the prospects of…