Basic Biology
clock | September 20, 2006Amanda makes a correct connection between preformationism of old and the anti-abortion ideology of today. The only thing missing is the connection of both to Dawkinsian genocentrism which is just preformationism with modern rhetoric of DNA and genes and "blueprints of life". The history of the war between epigenetics and preformationism and, within preformationism, between spermists and ovists is masterfully covered in Clara Pinto-Corriea's book Ovary of Eve.
clock | September 16, 2006The phrase "Living Fossil" is second to only "Missing Link" on my list of irks-me-to-no-end abuses of English language. Darren Naish now explains exactly what is wrong with the term, using as the case study the recent rediscovery of the Sumatran rhino. This is your Most Obligatory reading of the day!
clock | September 12, 2006Fundamental Questions in Biology. Here is a quote from the end:
The questions that biologists from diverse subdisciplines are asking have commonalities that make clear the continued existence of fundamental challenges that unify biology and that should form the core of much research in the decades to come. Some of these questions are as follows: What features convey robustness to systems? How different should we expect the robustness of different systems to be, depending on whether selection is operating primarily on the whole system or on its parts? How does robustness trade off against…
clock | September 12, 2006Remember this post from a couple of weeks ago? It was quite popular on tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. It was about endogenous retroviruses and their role in the evolution of placenta (which made the evolution of other mammalian traits possible).
Now, there is a new study in sheep, on this same topic, and it looks very good at first glance:
Researchers Discover That Sheep Need Retroviruses For Reproduction:
A team of scientists from Texas A&M University and The University of Glasgow Veterinary School in Scotland has discovered that naturally occurring endogenous…
clock | August 21, 2006Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop.
PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book :
"....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!"
...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…
clock | August 19, 2006Correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is really ground-breaking:
Study Finds Brain Cell Regulator Is Volume Control, Not On/off Switch:
He and his colleagues studied an ion channel that controls neuronal activity called Kv2.1, a type of voltage-gated potassium channel that is found in every neuron of the nervous system.
"Our work showed that this channel can exist in millions of different functional states, giving the cell the ability to dial its activity up or down depending on the what's going on in the external environment," said Trimmer. This regulatory phenomenon is called '…
clock | August 19, 2006Have You Ever Seen An Elephant ... Run?:
Dr John Hutchinson, a research leader at the UK's Royal Veterinary College (RVC), has already shown that, contrary to previous studies and most popular opinion, elephants moving at speed appear to be running. Now with funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) his team is using Hollywood-style motion capture cameras combined with MRI and CT scans of elephants to build 3D computer models of elephant locomotion to show the forces and stresses at work on muscles, tendons and bones.
The research team has been working…
clock | August 5, 2006 While I am teaching the biology lab, I set this post to show up automatically at the same time. It describes what we do today, the same stuff we did back on April 02, 2006:
So, yesterday was the last, fourth meeting of the lab. We started out by going over their homework questions about the evolution of Vertebrates. I was quite happy that only one person in only one question confused development with evolution - something that I see, unfortunately, very often. The legs of the frog do not "evolve" out of the body once the tadpole starts losing its tail: the frog legs evolved out of meaty…
clock | July 29, 2006 While I am teaching the biology lab, I set this post to show up automatically at the same time. It describes what we do today, the same stuff we did back on March 26, 2006:
This week we had a busy lab, which means I did not have time for much inpired talking like I did last time. We did some exercises together as a group, while some other exercises were set as stations arund the room and each student did them alone, at their own time.
First, the students used the staining technique they learned last week to find out what kinds of organisms live on their fingers. They saw bacteria from…
clock | July 24, 2006Kevin is popular with the ladies....too popular...
It's been awhile since I've written anything so I decided to write up some stuff. Many cultural things have happened, but very few herps. Nearly everything is from Muyu with an occasional trip here and there.
13 July
This is where I last left off. We had left Bancang earlier this morning, around 6am. I do not know if I had written before about seeing two Chinese Pheasants in the road on the drive back. They quickly ran off so I was unable to get any pictures, just have visual images. Oh, and I found out about my "illness" on the trail at…
clock | July 21, 2006According to the referrers pages of my Sitemeter, a lot of you are excited by strange penises, strange penises, strange penises and strange penises (or something like it). So, today we have to move to a different topic, traffic-be-damned, for those without phallic fixations. So, read on....
If science is all you care for you can skip to the bottom of the post because the main character of today's story will be introduced with a poem (also found here):
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
by Muriel Rukeyser
This has nothing
to do with
propagating
The species
is continued
as so many are
(among…
clock | July 21, 2006
Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents.
One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert one of its existing biochemical…
clock | July 16, 2006Do you read Darren Naish's blog Tetrapod Zoology? If not, you should start now. Just check out some of the most recent posts, for example this two-parter on sea snakes: 'A miniature plesiosaur without flippers': surreal morphologies and surprising behaviours in sea snakes and Sea kraits: radical intraspecific diversity, reproductive isolation, and site fidelity.
Or, this two-part post about the importance of the shape of the birds' bills: The war on parasites: a pigeon's eye view and The war on parasites: an oviraptorosaur's eye view.
Or an amazing four-part story about Angloposeidon, a…
clock | July 15, 2006I am teaching the Intro Bio lab right now and thought it would be appropriate to schedule this post to appear at the same time. I wrote it last time I taught this, but today's lab will be pretty much the same. Being second summer session, the class will probably be really small, which will make the lab go even faster and easier.
Yesterday I had my first class of the semster of the BIO Lab at the community college. This is the first time with a new syllabus, containing some new excercises.
At the beginning, we took a look at some cartoons, as examples of Inductive and Abductive Arguments,…
clock | July 7, 2006You really think I am going to put this above the fold? No way - you have to click:
Today's lesson is on the reproductive anatomy of the domestic pig (Sus scrofa domestica), which probably applies to the wild species in the pig family as well. Although we may reflexively think about invertebrates when pondering diversity of copulatory organs, mammals are not too bad in that department either. After all, the sperm is delivered in some species into the vagina (e.g., dog), in others into the cervix (e.g., pig) and in yet others into the uterus (e.g., horse), so different strategies are needed…
clock | July 6, 2006First, there were The Boys From Brazil
not to mention a lof of other science fiction:
like, for example, the cloned dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park:
Then came Dolly, the cloned sheep:
Then came the AskThe ScienceBlogger weekly question: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?...
What followed were (not in chronological order) a bunch of other cloned animals, including:
some cute mice:
piglets: Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrel and Dotcom:
a rhesus monkey, a male named Andy (a female named…
clock | June 29, 2006Here is a wonderful new study that demonstrates that the antifreeze substances in notothenioid fish are not produced by the liver as was believed for decades and taught in Comparative Physiology courses. Instead, it is produced in two places: most of it in the exocrine pancreas, and somewhat less in a portion of the stomach at the entry of the esophagus:
.....AFGPs are secreted into the intestinal lumen where they protect the intestinal fluid from being frozen by ice crystals that come in with seawater and food. Internal fluids in notothenioids are about one-half as salty as seawater. While…
clock | June 23, 2006
Since everyone is posting about spiders this week, I though I'd republish a sweet old post of mine, which ran on April 19, 2006 under the title "Happy Bicycle Day!" I hope you like this little post as much as I enjoyed writing it:
This week's theme for the Tar Heel Tavern is bicycle. I was wondering what to write about. Perhaps about crazy bicycle rides I had as a kid. Or a fun riff on "fish needing a bicycle". Then, I was saved! Because, today is the Bicycle Day! That's just great, because I can go on a scientific tangent with a local flavor.
If you do not know what Bicycle Day is,…
clock | June 23, 2006Here is the fourth part of Kevin's journey. I have just realized that I posted the previous two in the wrong order, thus post #2 should be third and post #3 should be second. I was going by the order in which I received them instead of dates in the journal. And I am doing these things late at night (having them automatically published at a preset time - noon), doing all the HTML for italicising the species names, running the spellcheck, expanding IM-style contractions into full-length words, breaking long paragraphs into multiples of shorter ones for ease of reading on a computer screen,…