Africa
gregladen | June 15, 2008By African standards, Kenya's Amboseli itself is small, but it is part of two or more large scale systems that extend far beyond its boundaries. One is the Serengeti Ecosystem, which extends far to the south in Tanzania. The other is the Nilotic (mainly Maasai) Pastoralist cattle keeping culture. It is being reported that lions in Amboseli are in crisis because of conflict between these two systems.
From a National Geographic Society press release:
Lion populations in and around Kenya's Amboseli National Park have dropped so low due to spearing and poisoning by local Maasai that…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2008tags: Mean and Lowly Things, herpetology, reptiles, venomous snakes, amphibians, field research, Congo Brazzaville, Kate Jackson, book review
Are you familiar with the aphorism, "Do what you love and the money will follow"? Well, the money part of that equation is probably questionable, but I think you will be convinced that a person who pursues her passions will never live a boring life, especially after you've finished reading Kate Jackson's book, Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2008). This book tells the…
scientificactivist | May 31, 2008Something very unfortunate happened this week. The US had to revoke eight Fulbright Scholarships for students from Gaza to study in the US due to Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. From CNN:
The U.S. government has taken Fulbright scholarships away from eight students in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, citing Israeli travel restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled zone, a U.S. official said Friday.
The scholarships, which bring international students to the United States to study at American universities, will be given to students in the West Bank, said Stacey Barrios, a spokeswoman for…
gregladen | May 7, 2008It is obvious in the United States that we need to replace the executive with a Democrat and add a few senators in the mix, in order to undo 8 years of Republican policy and replace it with four to 8 years of Democratic policy. This is because Democratic policy is better. Not great, just better. Also, Republican policy has a few elements that are truly evil, far more nefarious than anything the democrats have to offer. For instance, we really don't want to have a supreme court staffed entirely by yahoos. We are almost there now. Let's please not go all the way.
But in the mean time, it…
scientificactivist | May 7, 2008You can file this one under "should have been done about twenty years ago." From the Mail & Guardian:
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist.
Several members of the House of Representatives immediately expressed support for a Bill aimed at removing from any US databases "any notation that would characterise the ANC and its leaders as terrorists".
The House Bill is sponsored by Howard Berman, the California Democrat who chairs the…
scientificactivist | April 28, 2008Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this turn of events by their initial refusal to unload the cargo. The second is that there are deep political ties between Zimbabwe and China, which make this picture much less black and white than it would appear to be on the surface.
It was reported on April 16 that a Chinese ship slated to dock in…
esiegel | April 22, 2008As you may have noticed from yesterday's unusual post, today is Earth Day! I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from space of it, including the famous photograph from Apollo 8 known as Earthrise:
This combination shot made from NASA’s Terra satellite and NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite:
The known satellites at least 0.1 meters in size in orbit around Earth (there are ~11,000 of them as of April 2005, and another 100,000 between 1 cm and 10 cm in size):
Looking at the Earth and the docked Space Shuttle from the International Space Station:
And…
zooillogix | April 21, 2008Zooillogix welcomes you back to our favorite ill-conceived, questionably licensed, death-circus: Tiger Splash Park! Any Arizona state legislators amongst our readers? If so, you might want to put this place to sleep...
Thanks to dedicated reader Judy for making this vid and sending us the link.
gregladen | April 16, 2008A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known.
The survey was part of a one-year project carried out by volunteers from the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL, BirdLife in Sierra Leone), the University of Sierra Leone, and the government's Forestry Division, with help from local communities.
The project, funded by the Disney World Conservation Fund (DWCF), also established a network of trained wardens in…
gregladen | April 15, 2008That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world's aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland seas (but that is another story I won't cover here).
The earlier evidence came from observation of the ontogeny of the kidneys in elephants, during which the kidneys take on the characteristics that are found in aquatic mammals generally. That research was published in 1999…
gregladen | March 27, 2008The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split…
gregladen | March 9, 2008It almost seems like there are two separate research project under way regarding the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. One focuses on recent humans, tends to use DNA as a major source of information, and from this base projects back into the past. This approach tends to confirm the idea that humans share an African origin with a subsequent spread from Africa, with various degrees of complexity in that series of historical events. The other focuses on early human remains, sometimes including remains that would be placed by some in a separate species or sub species. This sort of…
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins."
From the abstract of this paper:
... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including…
gregladen | February 26, 2008Hunting Wolves; Killing Elephants
The Bush administration on Thursday announced an end to federal protection for gray wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, concluding that the wolves were reproductively robust enough to survive.
"Wolves are back," said Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior, in a telephone conference call with reporters. "Gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains are thriving and no longer need
A coalition of wildlife and environmental groups dismissed the government's claims and announced plans for a lawsuit to reverse the decision, which is…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: book review, HIV, AIDS, Africa, epidemic, public health, Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure
"AIDS has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, some wanted power, but all we have ended up with is AIDS."
-- Bernadette Nabatanzi, traditional healer, Kampala, Uganda, 1994.
The occurrence of AIDS in East and southern Africa is uniquely severe: even though less than 3 percent of the world's population lives here, this region is home to more than 40 percent of all those people with HIV infections. Throughout much of the…
gregladen | February 19, 2008
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can't find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on work done by the Grants and others with Galapagos Island finches, by Richard Wrangham and me with hominids, and by Betsy Burr and me with rodents.
The reason for this is simple. There is a rough correspondence between how much energy one can obtain from a food type and…
gregladen | February 19, 2008Comparing living chimpanzees to living humans, in reference to the species that gave rise to these two closely related species, is one way to frame questions about the evolution of each species.
Generally, it is useful to address evolutionary questions by comparing two living species with the reconstructed "last common ancestor" (LCA) of those species. All of the similarities and differences between the LCA and the living form, in each lineage, represent evolutionary "stories" (that could even be worked out as hypotheses). Similarities indicate important, long-maintained adaptations, and…
gregladen | January 21, 2008Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…
gregladen | January 18, 2008They always told you to eat your carrots, to improve your eyesight. Well, a deficiency of vitamin A (found in carrots, and lots of other foods) causes eye disease in a lot of children. In areas where Maize (corn) is a significant staple, there can be a problem because maize varies a great deal in how much vitamin A it can provide via precursor molecules. A new study in Science explores this relationship.
Maize is the dominant subsistence crop in much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, where between 17 and 30% of children under age of 5 are vitamin A-deficient. This results in…