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cmcclain | March 23, 2008Snail over at A Snail's Eye View, one of the best blogs on the triple -W, casts a firm vote for the Mollusks. Snail reminds also reminds us that Google delineates a clear winner. Arthropods also suck. And just in case Peter and Kevin get a little confused and start thinking about corals. For a recap of everyone's stance...
Mollusca:
Cephalopodcast
Snail's Eye View
DSN 1, 2 , 3, & 4.
Crustaceans:
DSN (thanks to that traitor Kevin)
Not Exactly Rocket Science To Figure Out Mollusks Are Better
Echinoderms:
Dr Joan Bushwell's Refuge For Invertebrates That Suck
The Intersucktion
A Blog Around…
gregladen | March 23, 2008Generally, inhabitants of Bohemia (western region of the Czech Republic) are known to drink more beer than people from Moravia (eastern region of the country). This difference was confirmed for my sample of researchers: researchers from Bohemia drank significantly more beer per capita per year (median 200.0 litres) than those from Moravia
What's it all about? You need to see this study of Open Access Beer by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock. Seriously.
pharyngula | March 23, 2008Remember to tune in to Atheists Talk radio on Air America this morning! I'm going to be traveling, so I'm going to miss it … but I'll catch it later on their podcast.
cmcclain | March 23, 2008
This week's challenge is help instill sense of awe in children about the ocean . Teaching our children about the ocean, creating passion and connections for it's life, is one of the most important things we can do. Educating them about the mistakes we've made may prevent them from doing the same.
For this challenge I have picked two projects with Donor's Choose. The total amount needed is just over $400. That's about $10 a piece for everyone who has signed up. The first proposal is to provide funds for materials so students in a Kansas school can prepare for an Ocean Science…
petnoyer | March 23, 2008J Nichols of the Ocean Conservancy and Ocean Revolution is a hero for the environment. He works with fishermen off Baja California to spread the word about sea turtle conservation. One of the problems he faces is the Mexican tradition of consuming sea turtles and their eggs during Lent. We covered the story last year concluding that if the Pope won't save sea turtles, supermodel Dorismar will. She's willing to try, anyway.
This Easter, J blogs about the ongoing problems for sea turtles off Baja in a post called Easter Ocean. Go check it out. An excerpt is below.
"Easter season can ... be…
gregladen | March 22, 2008 .. according to a forthcoming article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, this paper argues for a trend in increasing morphological complexity, observed in several different parallel lineages of Crustacea.
From the abstract:
The prospect of finding macroevolutionary trends and rules in the history of life is tremendously appealing, but very few pervasive trends have been found. Here, we demonstrate a parallel increase in the morphological complexity of most of the deep lineages within a major clade. We focus on the Crustacea, measuring the morphological…
gregladen | March 22, 2008I and the Bird # 71 is here.
I am covering both Gene Genie and Berr Go Round, so please send me your gene and plant submissions over the next couple of days!
pharyngula | March 22, 2008Remember the Warda/Han affair, that daffy, sloppy, plagiarized paper that made it into Proteomics? That little pot is still simmering. If you can read French, you can read Quand un "puissant Créateur" s'invite dans une revue scientifique.
esiegel | March 21, 2008Remember the TV show Saved By The Bell? It was a high school comedy that was popular when I was in Junior High, and it was, of course, completely preposterous and cheesy. Like what you'd get if you married Beverly Hills: 90210 with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then cleaned it up to make it G-rated. There were two long-time couples, Zack (the blond preppie) and Kelly (the hot cheerleader in the sundress), and Jessie (the frizzy-haired neurotic) and Slater (the macho/sensitive latino).
Well, Jessie (Elizabeth Berkley), the frizzy-haired girl on the left, is finally back on TV hosting…
kevin z | March 21, 2008Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science ha an awesome post highlighting recent research on the unique vision of mantis shrimps. At the end of his post he (rightfully) dismisses the sea cucumber:
"Personally, I think mantis shrimps kick the crap out of sea cucumbers, but they're on a par with squid, which incidentally also use polarised light for secret communication."
This makes me slightly conflicted as someone who is describing a new species shrimp. Really, I love all the invertebrates, but like any well-meaning parent with a gazillion children, I certainly have a few that are favorites…
drorzel | March 21, 2008Congratulations to Davidson, who just knocked off Gonzaga. It's a 7-10 game, so not that big an upset, but there aren't a lot of liberal arts schools winning NCAA games, so let's hear it for the Wildcats.
gregladen | March 21, 2008Please note that the Boneyard Web Carnival is looking for submissions RIGHT NOW. HURRY!
CLICK HERE
grrlscientist | March 21, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Just Write Blog Carnival
The 21st of March edition of the Just Write Blog Carnival is now available for you to enjoy. There's lots here to read, so this should help you fill those extra hours of daylight that you have every day.
cortex | March 21, 2008Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" - it still manages to carefully dissect the data. In short, the author concludes that the earlier behavioral work was more interesting and definitive than the more recent study that looked inside the black box of the brain. Anyways, it's worth a read. (Longtime readers will know that I've got a few quibbles with brain imaging boom myself.) What I'd really…
cmcclain | March 21, 2008In general, among Mollusks, the mouth opens into a buccal cavity. In most classes of Mollusks, the buccal cavity contains a tongue called the odontophore. The odontophore possess multiple rows of teeth called radula that chitonous and flexible. Among Mollusks the number of teeth can range from a few to over 100,000. The size, number, and arrangement of the radula also vary considerably and often used as diagnostic tool for distinguishing species. In some gastropods the radula is used in a rasping or conveyor belt fashion and be used to drill holes through hard parts of other organisms.…
cmcclain | March 21, 2008
Don't get me wrong this is pretty freakin' sweet, but echinoderms are not the only large Antarctic sea creatures.
But this is way cooler...
That is Syrinx aruanus, the Australian Trumpet, described by Linneaus in 1758. They are found Northern Australia and Eastern Indonesia and can reach sizes of about three feet in length (those above are on the smaller side). And yeah they're predators.