biology
bioephemera | August 21, 2008
Today I wandered over to the National Zoo and saw the baby golden lion tamarins, who are just about a month old now. I've never seen anything so cute in a zoo in my life. The babies leap on any adult in reach and cling as the adults scramble across branches - clearly raising these babies is a team effort. This photo by RoxandaBear captures the excessive cuteness.
Shortly afterward, an orangutan climbing along the O-line dropped feces on the crowd (he missed). You can trust primates to bring the cuteness and the grossness, in rapid succession. . . they are our cousins, after all.
photo via…
bioephemera | August 21, 2008
Bibliodyssey just published an outstanding collection of illustrations depicting the development of the microscope. I recently saw these antique microscopes at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and I enjoyed trying to match my photos with the engravings.
This ornately decorated microscope was made by Christopher Cock (~1665), designed by Hooke and used by him in preparing Micrographia. (NMHM, "The Billings Microscope Collection," 1974) Note the similarity to the microscope in this plate from Hooke's seminal book Micrographia (via Bibliodyssey):
I love the NMHM's period…
oracknows | August 19, 2008Every scientist has had manuscripts rejected by various journals, and most who submit to the really high impact journals like Nature or Science end up being rejected without review. Few, however, have the creativity or cojones to respond to such a rejection in such a creative and amusing manner.
Sadly, in the medical literature, there really are no structures in the body left that can be named in such a manner; there really isn't a way I could respond to a rejection in quite the same manner. I'll have to think of something different the next time it happens.
tfk | August 19, 2008Military penguin becomes a 'Sir':
A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo.
Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since 1972.
Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo.
During the ceremony, Nils had a sword dubbed on each side of his head, where his shoulders should be, to confirm his regimental knighthood.
The Beeb also reports that "The proud penguin was on his best behaviour throughout most of the ceremony…
revere | August 19, 2008News reports that nonagenarians had robust antibodies against the 1918 flu strain were intriguing on several levels but I wasn't sure how many doors were still open to these being antibodies that developed in the years after 1918. After all, the 1918 subtype was H1N1 which circulated freely until the 1950s when it was displaced by the next pandemic strain, H2N2. H2N2 in turn was pushed aside by H3N2 in 1968. Then H1N1 returned in 1977 (some say it escaped from a Russian laboratory) and since then H3N2 and H1N1 have been co-circulating. Some years are predominantly H1N1, some predominantly…
terrasig | August 15, 2008The statin class of cholesterol-lowering agents is rich with history and lessons in the power of natural products, the potential of the prepared mind, and just how precarious the path of drug development can be.
American Scientist, the official publication of the scientific research society Sigma Xi, hosts this issue an absolutely lovely article entitled, "Statins: From Fungus to Pharma."
Expertly and engagingly written by University of Pennsylvania biology professor Dr Philip A Rea, the article launches with the story of a then-young Japanese biochemist, Akira Endo. (Evidence of my…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for "I am not a stamp collector" :) ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone's rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I'm supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I…
bioephemera | August 7, 2008This remarkable orb spider web is courtesy of reader Matt:
This individual was in my garden, and the colors of the web caught my eye. I don't think I've ever noted something like this before, and was quite surprised it showed on the photo. The outer edge of the nickel sized web pattern is iridescent blue, the inside fades into a purplish-magenta. No colors are visible when shaded.
How did the spider make a color gradient in its web? I'm really not sure. Although spiderweb can refract or diffract light quite spectacularly, the result is not as organized as this - it's more of a rainbow effect…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008tags: virology, mimivirus, sputnik, virophage, microbiology, molecular biology
Now here's an astonishing discovery that's hot off the presses: a virus that infects other viruses! This amazing finding is being published tomorrow in the top-tier peer-reviewed journal, Nature.
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was taught that viruses could only infect other living cells, and further, I was taught that viruses are not living cells. So, logically, one could conclude that viruses cannot infect other viruses. But a new discovery by a group of scientists in France reveals…
bioephemera | August 6, 2008
Leave the Shame Behind
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Following up on my previous post, Chris Peters' memento mori-flavored show, "The End and After," opens this Saturday at Copro/Nason Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
The Lovers
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Peters follows in the tradition of Renaissance anatomical illustrators, who portrayed the human skeleton in lifelike, even emotional poses, laden with symbolism. For hundreds of years after Vesalius, skeletons and "muscle men" continued to be drawn in attitudes of contemplation, regret, and even prayer, with…
oracknows | August 4, 2008It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.
Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent:
SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…
evolgen | August 1, 2008About a month ago, we were told that theory is dead. That was the thesis of Chris Anderson's article in Wired. Rather than testing hypotheses using the scientific method, Anderson argues that scientists are merely generating loads of data and looking for correlations and stuff. The article was a bit muddled, but that's Anderson's main point . . . I think.
Well, now the Times Higher Education has published an article by Tim Birkhead in which he argues the opposite (In praise of fishing trips). Birkhead says that the scientific establishment is too attached to hypothesis testing. This means…
bioephemera | July 30, 2008
Between meaning and material (h.H.R.)
Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper
32 x 32 inches
Christopher Reiger, 2007
My friend Christopher Reiger is appearing in several group shows this summer, so I thought it was a good time to spotlight his work. Above is one of my favorite pieces, between meaning and material (h.H.R.).
I actually got to know Christopher online through his writing - he maintains a blog, Hungry Hyaena. He's written a number of provocative essays on the changing relationship between humans and nature, drawing on his extensive personal experience as an…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dinosaurian soft tissue, fossils, bacterial biofilms, paleontology, endocasts, formerly pyritic framboids, collagen
Figure 1. EDS spectrum of framboid. EDS spectrum of framboid showing an iron-oxygen signature. Pt is from coating for SEM. Area in red box was scanned for elements. [larger view].
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002808.
Some of you might remember a paper published in Science that rocked the paleontological world by revealing that a broken thigh bone from Tyrannosaurus rex contained soft tissue. When this soft tissue was analyzed, it was identified as…
bioephemera | July 28, 2008
Photo by Kevin Ambrose
Apparently dozens of DC ducks are dying, right in front of traumatized tourists:
National Mall visitors watched park police wade through the water collecting more than 20 lifeless birds Saturday afternoon. The latest incident comes just two weeks after 17 other ducks mysteriously died at the reflecting pool. The Environmental Protection Agency and FBI (web) agents have tested the water and the air around the pool, but so far there is no word on what's causing the ducks to die.
The National Park Service says the deaths are a natural event that is triggered by wildlife…
evolgen | July 26, 2008So, I'm just hanging out here by the side of the water waiting for my lunch. Sure, I could go in the water and get my lunch. But that's not how I roll. I wait patiently for my prey to get within striking distance, and then I attack. So, here I am just hanging out by the side of the water.
Click to enlarge.
There they are. Just a bunch of cichlids waiting to be eaten. By me. Lunch would be good right now. But they won't get close enough. So I'll just hang out here with my jaw agape.
And I can see them. They're not too far away. Maybe one of them will swim close enough to the shore. And then I'…
evolgen | July 25, 2008Last month I mentioned that I had been in Barcelona at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference. I arrived in Spain early in the morning, and, after I got checked in to my hotel, I went with a couple friends to the Barcelona Zoo. This zoo is famous for housing Snowflake, the albino gorilla who lived at the zoo from the mid-1960s until he died in 2003. They still have an impressive collection of primates despite the loss of the zoo's icon.
Additionally, the zoo has a roaming band of peafowl. The peacocks and peahens have free reign of the grounds, and you'll often see them…
bioephemera | July 25, 2008
Silent Dredge, 2008
Tiffany Bozic
Currently showing at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery: "A Complicated Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives," featuring the work of Tiffany Bozic, among others:
Our dominion is complicated and comes with profound responsibility. Humankind has become adept at leveraging natural resources and scientific advances to not only ensure our survival, but also to support and spread various political agendas. Along the road we have developed life-enhancing technologies and become more widely informed about the necessity of our participation in…
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2008
On my evening walk, while listening to a Skepticality interview with secular humanists Mel Lipman and Lori Lipman Brown, I took some pix of fireweed growing in weird places. (That's Epilobium angustifolium, Sw. rallarros, mjölkört, "railroad man's rose", "milk plant"). The plant propagates by wind-borne seeds like thistledown, and they can apparently sprout anywhere. Some were growing out of a crack in a vertical cliff face.
Others appeared to have been planted on Mr. Kight's, my ground-floor neighbour's, balcony.
As it turned out, he had simply left a little planting soil with his…