Life Sciences
sporte | December 26, 2007Genetics textbooks abound with stories of European royalty and the hazards of having children after you've married one of your cousins. It struck me as an interesting parallel that the lion is such a popular symbol in so many royal coats of arms. Like the royal families of Europe, certain lion populations have also suffered from a few too many copies of certain recessive genes.
I first read about the Florida panthers a few years ago while researching material for a class that I teach on using bioinformatics. It wasn't my first encounter with big cats and their DNA. Years before, while…
clock | December 25, 2007The year in review meme is too random to really capture the highlights of a year on a blog. So, here is a collection of links that I think mark the most important moments of this blog in the last year:
January (297 posts) was dominated by the science blogging anthology and the science blogging conference, so it was filled mostly with re-posts of the old stuff, quick links and only a couple of science posts. This was also the time when my name first appeared in the media. This is also the time when I started writing more about Open Science. All of this combined resulted in a large and…
laelaps | December 24, 2007
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was likely behind the slaughter of three Amur Tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) , an adult female and two cubs, involving two separate incidents in Chongqing, China during the past week. Last Thursday an adult female tiger was found by park officials, the criminals tranquilizing the animal before butchering it; they decapitated it and took the skin and legs, as well. The cubs were found today in a freezer in the park ticketing office, which makes me suspicious whether park officials were involved in the killings, and I don't doubt that similar incidents will…
tetrapodzoology | December 23, 2007
One last thing before Tet Zoo closes down for Christmas but, don't worry, this isn't anything I've knocked up specially... due to an unfortunate series of misunderstandings it's something I produced 'by mistake' and have since decided to recycle. Hey, why not. Ironically, I post it just when I'm in the middle of two other pterosaury bits of work (more on those soon). So I never did get to finish the anuran series before Christmas, nor post about that big, personally-relevant publication which has just appeared, nor get through the titan-hawks, monster pigeons and whatnot. And what about all…
jjacquet | December 22, 2007The New York Times ran a great article today: As Cars Hit More Animals on Roads, Toll Rises.
Wildlife-related crashes are a growing problem on rural roads around the country. The accidents increased 50 percent from 1990 to 2004, based on the most recent federal data, according to the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University here.
The basic problem is that rural roads are being traveled by more and more people, many of them living in far-flung subdivisions. Each year, about 200 people are killed in as many as two million wildlife-related crashes at a cost of more than $8…
jstemwedel | December 21, 2007Have you ever tried to have a conversation about one thing and found that, almost immediately, the conversation veered someplace else entirely? This is one of those.
I had heard the horrifying news that there are high school teachers -- in our pretty good school district -- who actually tell their students that it's OK to cut and paste stuff from the internet into their papers without quotation marks or citation, and that Wikipedia is a great source of authoritative information (which, again, one need not cite, seeing as how the internet is like our shared brain).
My response was to launch a…
evolvingthoughts | December 20, 2007
Philosophy isn't one of those things that makes great breakthroughs that are recognised at the time. Generally something is thought of as a significant development much later, after it becomes obvious that people are engaging with it, like the Chinese Room of John Searle. So instead I will simply list my better posts of this year in a fit of self-aggrandisement.
January
Bioturbation and Darwin's worms
Another kind of agnosticism
The man who invented evolution
Species
February
Dads
Darwin on species: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Science and nonscience
Theory
The many faces of "evolution"…
tetrapodzoology | December 20, 2007
Some people who come to Tet Zoo seem to absolutely despise all those annoying teasers, preemptives and references to things that are yet to come. Others regard these as one of Tet Zoo's key points of awesomeness. Whatever, I am pleased to say that I congratulate you all on your patience and tolerance, for there are some subjects that I advertise and am then unable to publish for weeks, or months, or months and months and months. Yes, unable... I don't delay things on purpose. Obscure island-dwelling, recently extinct animals are a case in point: there's this map from October, and there are…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2007tags: The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich, book review, birds, ornithology, biography, science
I remember that I felt very cold when I read Bernd Heinrich's book, Ravens in Winter, even though it was a hot summer day. That was the first of Heinrich's books that I read, but it definitely wasn't the last. I just finished reading his most recent book, The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (NYC: HarperCollins; 2007) and just as I wore a sweater while I finished his Ravens in Winter, I found that my normally routine daily subway rides to and from the library were…
laelaps | December 20, 2007
Deer are not the sort of animal you would normally expect to have fangs, but some of them actually do. Well, the males do, anyway. The Common Muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak, pictured above) is one such minuscule cervid, although the genus Muntiacus contains about ten species and many subspecies within each of the ten. The Musk Deer (Moschus sp.) is larger and the males of that species have even larger canines, but they belong to their own family (the Moschidae) and are not "true" deer. Speaking of muntjacs, though, as Darren notes in a recent post the Chinese Muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi) was…
jjacquet | December 19, 2007The Best American Science Writing 2007, that is. Seriously, this book is good. First off, many of the articles center around medical conditions and who isn't interested if they or someone they love might one day face prosopagnosia (aka face blindness), depression, Alzheimer's, a Cesarean, or a dissecting aortic aneurysm? Stories like this explore the most fascinating interface: that between humans and life-altering afflictions. My friend who is a nurse borrowed the book and loved it, but it's not only about medicine.
This is the type of book perfect for someone like me who thinks: Golly…
clock | December 19, 2007Well, just too busy for something original, so it's time for a little linkfest of notable stuff I saw in the blogosphere over the past couple of days:
Carl, Brian, Anne-Marie and PZ report on the Indohyus, a close relative of the whales that lived 48 million years ago in Kashmir.
Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir wrote a provocative commentary about the mind-enhancing drugs - would you use them or not? A discussion is ongoing on Nature Network. Shelley, Janet, Anne-Marie, Vaughan and PZ offer some quite different answers. I think that these drugs, especially as they get perfected and…
voltagegate | December 19, 2007The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science recently published an article discussing some progress in blue crab research and conservation, and mentioned a related report:
The Chesapeake Bay blue crab population has stabilized, but at historically low levels according to a recent report by the Chesapeake Bay Commission's Bi-State Blue Crab Technical Advisory Committee.
Though the news isn't quite heartening, it's better than nothing.
Blue crab populations have been declining tremendously over the past few decades, not only threatening a population of the animals, but also…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
Awful Changes.
Man found only in a fossil state -- Reappearance of Ichthyosauri.
A Lecture. -- "You will at once perceive," continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, "that the skull before us belonged to some of the Lower order of animals the teeth are very insignificant the power of the jaw trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food."
[Cribbed from Neil.]
Every once in a while scientists get thrown a curve ball by the popular press, a kind of question that requires a short and carefully-devised answer as the query, in any other setting, what make the…
tetrapodzoology | December 18, 2007
Over the weekend Neil Phillips, Richard Hing, Jonathan McGowan and I went into the field, in quest of tetrapods (Jon and Neil are shown in the adjacent image, as are other mammals). And we saw a bunch. In an effort to produce a post that is essentially an excuse to showcase some of Neil's photos (for the whole set go here), it occurred to me that this is a good chance to throw out some random facts about Britain and some of its wildlife... well, more random facts than I've already thrown out, anyway. Contrary to the idea that Britain lacks anything interesting, I still think we have a really…
laelaps | December 18, 2007Preface
I originally wrote this post during the late summer of this year, a piece that was fraught with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and an overall cumbersome attribute that made me admire anyone who was able to get through the whole thing. I have revised and edited the text starting with the first word, adding in some new information along the way, and I hope you enjoy what I feel is a better and more cohesive review of how our own species has seen itself during from the early days of natural history to the present. Some of the major debates (i.e. the origins of bipedalism) are…
sporte | December 18, 2007How do you go about researching a genetic disease?
This multi-part series explores how digital resources can be used to learn about Huntingtin's disease. Reposted and updated from the original DigitalBio.
A bit of background
Alice's Restaurant is a movie with an unforgettable song that mostly revolves around Arlo Guthrie hanging out with his friends. Somewhere in the movie, the conversation turns to Woody, and someone asks the question that no one wants to touch. Does Arlo's girlfriend know about Huntington's? ...dead silence... Now, I did see the movie quite a few years ago, so my…
tsmith | December 17, 2007 In my field, many things that cause the average man-on-the-street to get a bit squeamish or squicked are rather commonplace. My own studies include two types of bacteria that are carried rectally in humans (and other animals), so I spend an absurd amount of time thinking about, well, shit, and the lifeforms that inhabit it and collectively make up our normal gut flora. The vast majority of these species don't harm us at all, and many are even beneficial: priming our immune system; assisting in digestion; and filling niches that could be colonized by their nastier bacterial brethren.
It…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Male Broad-billed Hummingbird, Cynanthus latirostris.
Image: Greg Scott [MUCH larger view].
Birds in Science
A new study by the University of Exeter, UK has revealed that stressed out birds are more likely to take risks than their relaxed counterparts. The research team selectively bred zebra finches to create "laid-back", "normal", and "stressed" groups of birds. These groups differ by their levels of stress hormone, which in birds is corticosterone. The research team observed the behavioral strategies of birds to…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week.
No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…