biology

"Please Hug Me" artist: J. Keeler, 1987 Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day. I can still remember when I first learned about AIDS, in the late eighties - it was an extremely scary and mysterious thing that the media seemed very uncomfortable covering. No one I knew was talking about it openly - family, friends, or teachers. That's why posters like this were so important. AIDS awareness advertisements represent a history of creative and controversial images - largely because of their sometimes explicit* sexual content, but also because of the stigmas attached to STDs, casual sex, and…

(another own goal, of course.) There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's latest post over at the Discovery Institute's Why's Everybody Always Picking On Me blog may have actually reached a new standard for missing the point. And, as both my loyal regular readers know, that's not an easy mark for Egnor to hit. The current contender is his latest post in a back-and-forth that he's been having with PZ and Orac. Once again, Egnor is attempting to argue that evolutionary biology has not provided any useful insights to the field of medicine. That much is familiar ground.…

Via today and tomorrow

Botanique Sciences naturelles (1951) Via Agence Eureka, some lovely illustrations from a French science textbook. They're perfectly vintage-schoolbook yet also crisply contemporary. See more here.

Check out this crazy video of a rare "elbowed" giant squid recorded from a Shell Oil remote operated vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico.

Andre at Biocurious responds to something PZ Myers said at a talk, with this legit criticism of the "science is beautiful" theme: How far down the road of "science shares more with art than engineering" do you want to go? Our society supports the arts because they provide beauty and insight and enrich our lives. We support science because it is inspiring and let's us reach beyond ourselves to see and understand things that didn't seem possible and because it provides tangible advances that improve the quality of our lives. Those benefits are worth a lot to people. The National Endowment for…

Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that they will be funding Danny Reinberg, Shelley Berger, and Juergen Liebig to sequence three ant genomes.  Their interest is research on aging, hoping that solving the puzzle of why genetically identical ant nestmates can either live for a year as a worker or twenty as a queen will unlock some clues to aging in our own species.   I think that's a stretch, but whatever.  We myrmecologists will be able to probe the ant genomes for plenty of other worthwhile reasons. Three species were chosen to represent varying levels of caste…

Today is the 149th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I'm probably just suffering from a bout of dewy eyed pastoralism, but when was the last time a book which was readable by the general public was also a major work of science? (Not Here That's For Sure) And you will say "but science it is so complicated nowadays!" and "but science is so big these days!" And you will say "only smart people can understand string theory!" and "there is so very much that one must learn in order to even understand today's science!" So then you will go back to your…

There are too many of us on Earth, our numbers keep growing, and we need to do something about it. Now, let's never lose sight of the reason we want to do something about it. I'm not an ecological romantic. I don't think the planet would be better off without humanity. In fact, I think a planet without intelligent life is completely pointless from the perspective of an intelligent observer. Our goal should never be to rid the planet of humans: we need to make sure that humans can continue to live happily and safely on Earth and avoid dying catastrophically. We should save the spotted owl for…

Tarantula Elizabeth Goluch sterling silver, gold, tourmaline Canadian artist Elizabeth Goluch's precious metal insects double as treasure-boxes. From her website: My fascination with nature in general and with insects in particular began while I was a child growing up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. The work that I do reflects the influence of that environment -- the wildlife and the insects, as well the intricacy, the complexity and the order inherent in nature. I am drawn to the beauty, but also to the danger in nature. I relish the visible, yet can imagine much more; which gives rise…

. . . or, brain worms could be on the rise! Mo at Neurophilosophy has a really freaky story/video about a parasitic worm that invaded a woman's brain. This one is worth watching. . . and you can use it on your family if they're refusing to wash their hands!

Chesterfields ad, 1952 Today, November 20, is the American Cancer Society's 33rd Great American Smokeout. Now, be honest: did you even know? The Smokeout doesn't seem to get as much attention as it used to, perhaps because the link between cigarette smoke and cancer is no longer surprising or controversial. After decades of anti-tobacco campaigns hammering the research home, no media-conscious American could plausibly believe that cigarettes are actually good for his or her health. Yet this is a sea change from attitudes in the first half of the 20th century, when cigarettes' health…

Here's a grim thought about the environment. There is no way of life for humans on Earth that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion. Our per capita environmental footprint doesn't really matter at this stage. If we retain our current population and return to a Palaeolithic lifestyle, we're still fucked in the not-too-long run. If we quit having so many children and get back down to a global population in the hundreds of millions, it won't matter any more how each of us splurges and consumes. You don't need to recycle milk cartons. What you really need to…

The terrifying Siberian Vampire Moth I took my cat into the vet on Tuesday, and she immediately bit through my arm. Now I'm feverish and my glands are swollen, thank in part to our little furry friends and their bacteria-laden mouths. But it could have been worse; my cat could have been rabid. Or she could be a rare blood-sucking creature, like the vampire bat, or the even rarer blood-sucking vampire moths. (I am not making this up.) Check out the National Geographic video on the moth. I love when the graduate student says "it's starting to hurt. . ." and laughs nervously. Science is a tough…

One of the good things about the pandemic flu threat (if you'll let me put it that way) is the stimulus it has provided for vaccine technology. While current flu vaccines are still mired in horse and buggy technology of egg-based production, all sorts of alternative ways of making antigen or stimulating an immune response are being worked on. Most of them involve the major antigens of the flu virus, hemagglutinin (the H part of subtype designation) and neuriminidase (the N part). They are on the viral surface and easily "seen" by the immune system. There is also a little bit of another…

These are Food Chain Friends. According to FAO Schwartz, "They're friends. They eat each other. It's a complicated relationship!" Uh. . . okay. You try to explain that to YOUR kids! Via Boing Boing Gadgets

Wall of Fishes, Vanderbilt Museum from Curious Expeditions Nothing symbolizes the amateur naturalist's aesthetic as well as a wall of preserved specimens in glass jars, like the jewellike Wall of Fishes in the Vanderbilt Museum (captured here by the wonderful Curious Expeditions, in a fascinating slideshow treasure gallery of the Vanderbilt). A similar glistening room of glass is found in my revious post about London's Hunterian Museum. The problem with historical specimen collections like these is that slowly but surely, they're falling apart. Storing biological tissue in alcohol or…

This article originally appeared on the old bioephemera September 9, 2007. Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions Hunterian museum One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible. The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln's Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended…

My friend Kiki created this awesome choreography to represent her PhD thesis on sea turtle conservation. Kiki explains, The dance opens with aerial dancers. The suspended fluidity of their movements embodies swimming in the ocean. The swinging and dancing couples are sea turtles mating. In the wild sea turtles breed and nest in the same time and place that shrimpers fish and so the sea turtles can get caught in the nets and drown. This is depicted by the dancing trio as well as the aerial dancer. As the female sea turtle dancer leaves her mate to swim ashore and nest she is caught by the…

The things I do for my readers. I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…