ecology
hrynyshyn | October 5, 2009
With all due respect to the recipients of this year's Nobel prizes -- telomeres are more than worthy of our attention -- it's time for an overhaul of the whole thing.
Complaints about the outdated categories that ignore an enormous range of scientific endeavors appear each year at this time, and it's unlikely that the latest barrage of criticism will result in any real change. Still, there are plenty of good argument in favor of reform. Here's one.
New Scientist asked a group of notable scientists and authors for their thoughts on the subject. They came up with a letter pointing out the…
grrlscientist | October 4, 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…
razib | September 29, 2009The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…
razib | September 27, 2009
Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to produce viable offspring (in fact, many ligers are fertile as well). Here's the explanation:
Imprinted genes are under greater selective pressure than normal genes. This is because only one copy is active at a time. Any variations in that copy will be expressed. There is no "back-up copy" to mask its…
grrlscientist | September 27, 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…
razib | September 25, 2009Eric Michael Johnson of Primate Diaries has a piece up for Seed, where he reviews Franz De Waal's newest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Also a post, Misunderstanding Dawkins: The Role of Metaphor in Science is worth a read. I'll respond to Michael at some point in the near future,
hrynyshyn | September 24, 2009The journal Nature has just published a massive feature series on, to use a well-worn phrase, "the limits to growth." The centerpiece is a graphic created by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and his colleagues as part of "a new approach to defining biophysical preconditions for human development. For the first time, we are trying to quantify the safe limits outside of which the Earth system cannot continue to function in a stable, Holocene-like state." Here's their wheel of misfortune:
The green is the safe limit, the red represents more or less where we are. For those…
grrlscientist | September 20, 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…
razib | September 19, 2009p-ter points out that selection of model organisms can shape the path of scientific research because of the very nature of model organisms. Normative considerations in science are pretty obvious when you look at the set of disciplines; there's a whole field of biological anthropology which studies one species. There is the rather well known case that doctoral research arcs are constrained to a relatively short period, which resulted in a focus short-lived organisms in zoological studies. Imagine trying to write up grant applications focusing on the life history of the tortoise.
razib | September 14, 2009Nearly 50 years ago W. D. Hamilton published two papers, The genetical evolution of social behaviour - I & The genetical evolution of social behaviour - II, which helped revolutionize our conception of how social and genetic process might work in concert. It opened up a field of research which was highlighted in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and helped make inclusive fitness a general idea which allows us to view specific phenomena through a powerful theoretical lens. Hamilton's original work was broad in its implications and abstract in method, but concretely utilized various…
clock | September 8, 2009I know everyone in the sci-blogosphere is swooning over Carl Sagan. But as a kid I never cared much about him - I usually fell asleep halfway through each episode of 'Cosmos'. But I would not miss for anything an episode of 'The Underwater Odyssey of Commander Cousteau' with Jacques-Yves Cousteau. That was breathtaking. And what he and the crew of Calypso did was truly ground-breaking, both in terms of scientific discoveries and in terms of under-water filming. And those discoveries and breakthroughs were shared with us, the audience, in an intimate and immediate manner.
That was a long time…
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…
laelaps | September 1, 2009A lone female elk in the morning fog near Grizzly Lookout. I had heard one of the Hayden Valley wolf packs in this area just a few minutes before taking this photo.While traveling through Yellowstone National Park I was struck by the way in which the park's wilderness is being reshaped and redefined every day. Yellowstone workers and administrators have engaged in a herculean effort to restore the wildness of the nation's first national park, from the celebrated reestablishment of the bison herds to the cessation of bear feeding at park garbage dumps, but there still are tensions between the…
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…
grrlscientist | August 30, 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…
ejohnson | August 27, 2009
For the first time in over a century, New York's Salmon River is home to its namesake species of fish. Young Atlantic salmon were abundant in the Salmon River and nearby Lake Ontario in the 19th century but were driven away by damming, pollution and overfishing—now, USGS scientists have reported that efforts to reestablish the salmon population are beginning to produce results. Atlantic salmon made a comeback this year in the Seine River as well after a similarly lengthy absence. But as Jennifer Jacquet warns on Guilty Planet, the prognosis for fish is still bad; the shrinking sizes of the…
edyong | August 25, 2009Since late 2006, honeybees in Europe and North America have been mysteriously disappearing. Once abuzz with activity, hives suddenly turned into honeycombed Marie Celestes. They still had plentiful supplies of honey, pollen and youngsters but the adult workers vanished with no traces of their bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD). In the first winter when it struck, US hive populations crashed by 23% and in the next winter, they fell again by a further 36%.
Eager to avert the economic catastrophe that a bee-less world, scientists have been trying to find the…
grrlscientist | August 23, 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…
grrlscientist | August 16, 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…
edyong | August 12, 2009
When the bacteria that cause anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) aren't ravaging livestock or being used in acts of bioterrorism, they spend their lives as dormant spores. In these inert but hardy forms, the bacteria can weather tough environmental conditions while lying in wait for their next host. This is the standard explanation for what B.anthracis does between infections, and it's too simple by far. It turns out that the bacterium has a far more interesting secret life involving two unusual partners - viruses and earthworms.
A dying animal can release up to a billion bacterial cells in every…