biology
esiegel | September 15, 2009Yesterday, I read something in international news that made me so mad I needed to share it with you:
That's right; my home country, the United States, will not distribute this film. There was no problem for the movie Expelled, a poorly argued anti-evolution flop that grossed just $7,598,071 despite appearing on more than 1,000 screens. And this new biopic, Creation, is much more about Darwin's life and personal struggles (which were real, by the way) than it is about evolution.
I have no information about the quality of this movie other than that reviews on the internet tell me it's pretty…
emjohnson | September 14, 2009My previous post on a potential problem for the selfish gene theory in explaining cooperative behavior resulted in a fair amount of heated discussion. However, there are quite a few misconceptions regarding the controversy surrounding the selfish gene, group selection, multilevel selection, generalized reciprocity, etc. that need to be clarified. When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976 it was an instant classic and has been championed for the past three decades as the final answer on how natural selection operates. What has been tremendously useful about the theory, as in…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2009
My wife and I made a short mushrooming excursion to Lake Lundsjön after lunch. Little more than half an hour in the woods garnered us only four species, but huge amounts of one: velvet bolete. We went home early simply because we didn't need more mushrooms. I'm stewing them with cream. Never had shingled hedgehog before.
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Red russula, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
Shingled hedgehog, Fjällig taggsvamp, Sarcodon imbricatus
bioephemera | September 12, 2009According to Reuters, Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds fame is going to create an entire exhibit showing plastinated cadavers in sexual poses. He already includes two "copulating cadavers" in his current show:
German politicians called the current "Cycle of Life" show charting conception to old age "revolting" and "unacceptable" when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should…
bioephemera | September 12, 2009
Perfect for kids, teachers, or paleontologists, this "Paleobet" by artist Rosemary Mosco is cute and educational! You can buy a Paleobet print here.
Thanks to reader Laura for the find!
bioephemera | September 10, 2009My friend John, a Nintendo aficionado, alerted me to this post at Gizmodo about the "AnatoWii." Kinda creepy, if you ask me. ;)
grrlscientist | September 10, 2009tags: paleontology, fossils, dinosaurs, evolution, I am a Paleontologist, they might be giants, music video, streaming video
I have been remiss lately regarding music videos because I was in Finland for awhile, and then was otherwise preoccupied. But I just had to share this song with you; "I am a Paleontologist" is by the group, They Might be Giants and is one of many wonderful songs on their new album "Here Comes Science." If I was teaching biology or evolution this semester, I would use it in class.
You can order They Might be Giants' new album [CD/DVD], "Here Comes Science" from Amazon.
grrlscientist | September 9, 2009tags: leaf, nature, microscopy, streaming video
This video presents images produced by several cameras and microscopes, shifting from one to another as they zoom in closer and closer on a leaf. Finally, as the narrator sadly notes, that's as far as we can go .. for now. By the way, did anyone see a face in the chloroplast?
Zoom into a Leaf
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2009
When I left my PhD student office at the Museum of National Antiquities I rescued a couple of angel wing begonias. One has recently been joined in its pot by spontaneously appearing yellow fungus. Today four sizeable mushrooms popped up! And Dear Reader William identified them: they're Yellow Houseplant Mushrooms, Leucocoprinus birnbaumii. That's an eminently sensible name for a mushroom, by the way.
ejohnson | September 8, 2009In the latest installment of Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturdays, ScienceBloggers Greg Laden and David Dobbs discuss David's book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
razib | September 7, 2009The story about the giant rat discovered in an isolated crater in Papua New Guinea is fascinating. It's kind of atypical in these days, but if you read through really old copies of National Geographic from the early 20th century it you observe that it occurred all the time back then. I would of course much rather live now at the turn of the 21st century than the turn of the 20th, but there's a certain amount of zoological and anthropological wonder that we'll not be able to attain because so much of the sample space of possibilities has been mapped out.
emjohnson | September 7, 2009Unicolonial ants, such as these Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), are genetically unrelated but will cooperate to defeat a much larger adversary.
Source: Alex Wild / Live Science
It has been a mainstay of evolutionary theory since the 1970s. Natural selection acts purely on the level of the individual and any cooperation observed between organisms merely hides a selfish genetic motive. There have been two pioneering theories to explain cooperation in the natural world given this framework: the first was William Hamilton's (1964) theory of kin selection and the second was Robert Trivers…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
-John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2009tags: science, research, postdoctoral fellowship, academic life, unemployment
[Reprise: originally published in 2004]
New York City (AP) - After an unsuccessful two-year-long search for funds to support two more years of research and living expenses, a scientist and freelance writer has offered to fund her research by selling access to her internationally televised death by electrocution and by auctioning all body parts on ebay.
GrrlScientist, an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, uses DNA to research the evolution and historical geographic movements of parrots among the islands of…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: nature, natural selection, evolution, The Tree of Life, BBC One, David Attenborough, streaming video
This streaming video is a beautiful animated clip describing the Tree of Life. Evolution shows how life diverged into the myriad life forms that we see today, and that we know existed in eons past. "The Tree of Life" was part of Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, which was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 1 February 2009. Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough (you lucky, Brits, I am so jealous). [Although, I am told you can supposedly download it for free]. If you can, watch this…
bioephemera | September 6, 2009
Via iO9, a gallery of stunning glass viruses by sculptor Luke Jerram, originally from the Guardian. (The one above is swine flu.)
grrlscientist | September 4, 2009tags: egg inside an egg, chicken, offbeat, birds, streaming video
This video documents opening an extraordinarily large chicken egg and shows what was inside: another, normal sized egg!
What's disgusting about a chicken egg shell? All you have to do is wash it off, let it dry, and you have a really interesting set of eggshells!
revere | September 2, 2009Yesterday one of the questions we asked was whether swine H1N1 would replace seasonal viruses this season. In previous pandemics one subtype completely replaced its seasonal predecessor: in 1957 H2N2 replaced the H1N1 that had been coming back annually at least since 1918; only 11 years later, in 1968, a pandemic with H3N2 replaced the H2N2. H2N2 is no longer circulating but in 1977 an H1N1 returned and has been co-circulating with H3N2 since then. This was a new situation. We could ask why this hadn't happened before with H2N2 and H1N1 or H2N2 and H3N2 or all three together; or we could ask…
oracknows | September 1, 2009Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2009
Phobos-Grunt ("soil") is a planned Russian sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. It may launch in less than two months. On board will among other things be the L.I.F.E. experiment, a small canister full of hardy micro organisms, designed by the US Planetary Society. If all goes well, those microdaddies will go to Phobos and back, and then biologists will be able to compare them to their stay-at-home buddies to learn what the environment out there in interplanetary space really does to an Earth creature. Or to a creature from another planet who might once have been thrown into…