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gregladen | December 3, 2007Where the White-Tail Roam
There certainly are plenty of deer. Wildlife experts estimate 32 million white-tails -- by far the country's dominant species of deer -- roam America's woods, fields and backyards. Last year, hunters killed 6.6 million of them.
My friend Kathy has this story: She was raised in, if I recall correctly, the farmlands of Illinois. Back in the 1930s (this is not Kath's recollection... this comes from her dad) her uncle caught a white tail deer. He actually captured it alive. He built a pen for it and put it on display. This was near the train station, and people…
grrlscientist | December 3, 2007tags: books, blog carnivals
The 2 December issue of the Books Carnival is now available for you to enjoy. This carnival looks like it is filled with press releases, however, I think the press releases will be obvious to you after a few seconds of browsing. The book reviews written by real people are also fairly obvious (including a few of mine!) so be sure to look for those as well.
gregladen | December 3, 2007... You'd think it would have been mentioned by now, by some wine taster or another ...
"Ah, yes, a rather wooden palette, and a stuffy nose, but a remarkably close finish... Oh, and a distinct overtone of the key ingredient, resveratrol..."
Scientists at the Sirtris Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts ... have located chemicals that mimic resveratrol, the key ingredient in red wine. ...
Previous studies on the positive effects of the chemical resversatrol found in red wine find that it acts as protection against fatty diets and resultant cell degeneration that occurs in the aging…
nisbetmc | December 3, 2007On January 4, the National Academies will release its revised and updated report on Science, Evolution, & Creationism. After the news conference that day, the booklet and brochure will be available for purchase or for free electronic download here. A description is below:
Science, Evolution, and Creationism
This completely updated edition of the landmark booklet Science and Creationism is written for anyone who wants to learn more about the science of evolution. It provides a succinct overview of the many recent advances from the fossil record, molecular biology, and a new field known as…
cmcclain | December 3, 2007Photo from the Cephalopod PageThe reason I ask is the Giant Australian Cuttlefish, the world's largest cuttlefish at 23lbs and near 4-5 ft long, may be facing a tougher future. Giant Australian Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, are confined to southern Australia between depths of 0m-100m. One of the largest breeding grounds for this species is Port Bonython which is being targeted by the mining industry for large deep-sea port to ship out billions of dollars of uranium, copper, gold and other minerals.
The state's Chamber of Mines and Energy is lobbying Premier Mike Rann and senior ministers to…
pharyngula | December 2, 2007
As I've mentioned before, my class has been reading Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is in large part an account of the amazing work Seymour Benzer accomplished over the course of his long career. Now I've got sad news to break to the students tomorrow: Seymour Benzer has died at the age of 86, after a long and exemplary career as a "scientist's scientist".
cmcclain | December 2, 2007The ends of Permian and Triassic periods were a very bad time for marine invertebrates. Suffering, starvations, watching loved ones die...very hard times indeed. A whole spectrum of hypotheses is out there to account for mass extinctions including giant asteroid impacts, major shifts in oceanographic conditions, and various climatic changes. A new paper by Powers and Bottjer in Geology examining an unusual animal group may shed some light on what occurred. The authors collect data on Bryozoans, a group still occurring today with 5,000 species, of the early Permian to the Late Triassic.…
cmcclain | December 2, 2007OCEANA Europe is not pleased with European Commission's proposals for 2008 shark quotas for Total Allowable Catches (TACs). Two of the species included in the proposal are both considered Critically Endangered in the North East Atlantic by the IUCN and thus Zero TAC's are needed. For the spurdog (Squalus acanthias) the EC recommends a 25% decrease from last year but the 2,752 ton catch limit is still far above the scientific recommendations for these species. Much of the problem centers on deep-sea sharks which are particularly susceptible to overfishing due to their late maturity, slow…
zooillogix | December 2, 2007Hi Friendly Readers,
In our ongoing efforts to conquer the interwebs, we hope that you might take one minute to favorite us on Technorati or BlogCatalog, give us a thumbs up on StumbleUpon or whatever app you use to denote cool kids. Thanks!
gregladen | December 1, 2007A quick update on the effects of Sidr on the world's largest Mangrove Swamp.
The world's largest mangrove forest bore the brunt of the cyclone that smashed into Bangladesh on November 15, killing more than 3,200 people and wiping out thousands of villages.
"The cyclone has left huge devastation in the Sunderbans unseen for decades. Some 1,500 square kilometres (600 square miles) of the forest was damaged," chief government forest conservation official A.K.M. Shamsuddin said.
"At least seven percent of the (Bangladeshi portion of the) forest was severely damaged... while another 17 to 18…
loom | December 1, 2007The great biologist Seymour Benzer passed away yesterday. If you know Benzer, it's probably through Jonathan Weiner's masterful book, Time, Love, Memory, which focused on how Benzer discovered the influence of genes on behavior in fruit flies. But Benzer was one of those rare scientists who had enough time in his life for more than one great project. Before Benzer turned to fruit flies, he studied E. coli. And in studying that wonderful microbe, he helped to figure out what genes are in the first place.
In the early 1950s Benzer gave up a career in physics for biology after reading Erwin…
jlynch | December 1, 2007In his discussion of West’s recent talk in Minnesota, PZ notes:
I am extremely impressed with the fact that the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota has a historian and philosopher of science on their faculty -- more biology departments ought to make those kinds of strategic alliances to broaden and deepen their discipline.
I wholeheartedly agree. Here at Arizona State, the School of Life Sciences is the home for not only the Center for Biology & Society, but also the History and Philosophy of Science Program. We also have recently started a…
cortex | December 1, 2007PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache:
Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions.
Unlike most Americans, I don't believe in angels, the devil or the possibility of eternal salvation. I think Armageddon has more to do with nuclear proliferation than the Book of Revelations. But attacking the ideas of religion fails to address the real value of religion. People don't go to church because they want to read the same old fantastical…
sb admin | November 30, 2007By Aman
Cross-posted with permission from Technology, Health & Development
Tomorrow is World AIDS Day and instead of âbarraging you with [another set of] statistics, gruesome photos, or heart-wrenching storiesâ (quote credit to Mr. Casnocaha), I want to alert you to something we prefer here - solutions, problem solving, technology, and creative thinking. Piya Sorcar, a doctoral student in Stanfordâs Learning, Sciences & Technology Design program has used her considerable skills to figure out how to reach the minds of children in devleoping countries when it comes to HIV/AIDS…
grrlscientist | November 30, 2007tags: philosophia naturalis, blog carnivals
The 15th edition of Philosophia Naturalis, a blog carnival devoted primarily to physics, astronomy and the earth sciences, has just been published for you to enjoy. I am pleased to report that they included a piece that I wrote, so I am happy about that!