biology

Today FAS put up an online public archive of documents produced by the Office of Technology Assessment. As you may know, the OTA was a legislative office authorized in 1972 to produce comprehensive nonpartisan reports for Congress on a variety of scientific topics. It was defunded and closed in 1995, and the bulky paper reports it produced have been rather hard to find. Although these reports no longer represent the state of the science, they are remarkable, often prescient time capsules - a fascinating look at how teams of experts tried to predict the trajectory of new technologies we now…

Eppendorf's new ad campaign features this inexcusable yet mesmerizingly cheesy boy-band ode to something called "epMotion." Even though they are individually reminiscent of various best-forgotten members of N'Sync and Color Me Badd, the crooners satisfy the needs of a lab-coated blonde graduate student with too many 96-well plates. Girl, it's time to automate! (Ringtones, mp3s, and screenshots available on demand. . . )

This octopus has 96 arms. That's just not right! See PinkTentacle for more on this bizarre critter, and another 85-armed specimen. Euw! via Ectoplasmosis and lots of places.

We all know that Drosophila are the gayest bunch of gays that ever gayed up genetics. This is especially true when you create mutations in fruitless (nee fruity), "the gay gene". Male flies with mutations in fruitless will try to get it on with other males (e.g., doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81802-4). That's gay! But fruitless is an old school gene that needs to be fucked up to turn the flies gay (doi:10.1093/molbev/msj070; the first author on that paper is, I shit you not, named Gailey). Drosophila really aren't as gay as they are made to appear in the articles describing fruitless mutants.…

tags: conjoined twins, siamese twins, ornithology, birds, avian, barn swallows, Hirundo rustica Conjoined twin Barn swallows, Hirundo rustica, found July 17, 2008 in Searcy, Arkansas after they fell from their nest. Image: Samuel Peebles (Daily Citizen, AP Photo). Last week, a homeowner discovered a pair of young barn swallows that had fallen out of their nest after a sibling flew off to learn to forage from its parents. That's a common event, but this particular pair of young birds were remarkable: they were joined at the hip -- literally. Conjoined twins -- sometimes known as "siamese…

A man in northern Sweden recently found a giant vertebra in a lake at 210 meters above sea level. A preliminary statement from the National Museum of Natural History suggests that it may belong to a whale. The find spot hasn't been near the sea since the end of the latest ice age. I'm looking forward to a radiocarbon date. Via Aftonbladet. Update 18 September '09: Verdict: recent sperm whale.

Arachnologist and diplopodologist Dr Jason E Bond at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is most recently well-known for naming a spider (Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi) after Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young. Kristin Day of The Daily Reflector is now reporting that Professor Bond has agreed to name a spider after Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's host of "The Colbert Report." When news emerged in May that Bond had named a species of trapdoor spider after Neil Young, the biologist could not escape Colbert's web: "Where's my spider? I have lots of animals named after me: turtles,…

tags: researchblogging.org, speciation, adaptive radiation, , diversification, ecological opportunity, community assembly, species interactions, North American wood-warblers, Dendroica species, Daniel L. Rabosky Yellow-rumped warbler, Dendroica coronata, After Hatch Year male. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]. Several questions that motivate my own research and thinking are; How do species arise? Where does all this biodiversity that we see on Earth come from? Does speciation occur as a series of slow and gradual accumulated changes or is it an explosive process that occurs within a…

You may have already seen this video over at Boing Boing, but I thought it was worth posting anyway: a flock of what look like starlings doing some seriously creepy flocking. Check out the ribbon formation about ten seconds in. It literally gave me goosebumps! Link

Those of you in the greater DC area may be interested in the NIH Science in the Cinema Film Series at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. Starting tomorrow, July 9, there will be free weekly screenings of films centered on various medical conditions - like Alzheimer's (Away from Her), locked-in syndrome (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and HIV/AIDS (Life Support). The films will be followed by commentary from researchers in the field and a Q&A session, which could be interesting, given the directorial liberties that are often taken in films dealing with medicine and biology. If…

Sloan-Kettering's online lung cancer risk calculator tells smokers what their relative risk of cancer would be if they quit. I'm all in favor of getting people to quit smoking, but this kind of risk can really only be calculated for groups, not individuals. Will people using the calculator understand that? Sloan-Kettering recommends the tool for "people who meet all of these conditions: Age: 50 to 75 years old; Smoking History: 10 to 60 cigarettes a day for 25 to 55 years; Current Status: Current smokers, and former smokers who quit 20 years ago or less." My mom is one of those people, but…

GONE Isabella Kirkland, 2004 The sixty-three species painted in Gone have all become extinct since the mid-1800's and the colonization of the new world. Isabella Kirkland's Taxa series are beautiful, intricate, large-scale indictments of humanity's destructive potential. Drawing stylistic cues from 17th and 18th century European still lifes, Kirkland's huge oil paintings depict species driven to extinction or near-extinction, introduced/invasive species, and illegally traded species. GONE (detail) Isabella Kirkland, 2004 Each of the paintings is accompanied by an outline key that…

Yesterday, I was depressed. Today I'm a little irritated. I'm irritated because I came across a study from a couple of weeks ago that's actually a really cool study that applies actual science to the question of how diet and lifestyle changes might alter biology to improve health. It's exactly the sort of study that can apply help understand how diet affects health. It's a study by Dean Ornish, who's widely known for his advocacy of a lifestyle-driven approach to treating atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and producing evidence in the early 1990s that such a lifestyle alteration could…

tags: Underwater Astonishments, marine biology, evolution, streaming video David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, including a shape-shifting cuttlefish, a pair of fighting squid, and a mesmerizing gallery of bioluminescent fish that light up the blackest depths of the ocean. He focuses on the work of two scientists: Edith Widder at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, and Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab. [6:01]

Wired Magazine has published an article by Chris Anderson arguing that theory is dead (The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete). The argument: with our ability to generate vast amounts of data, there is no need for theory. Now, it's hard to parse what Anderson means by "theory" from the article. But he seems to be arguing that scientists are merely looking for correlations between various parameters, and claiming that's a sufficient analysis. Is it? Well, sometimes, yes, if it's based on a sound theoretical framework. Deepak Singh has already called out…

Jacques Donnez Fertility and Sterility Jacques Donnez, a doctor in France, was conducting a routine hysterectomy when he discovered the ovary was coincidentally in the process of expelling an egg. He captured these photos, which clearly show what a dramatic event it is. The word "explosive" seems apt enough, but it's not quick; Donnez captured these photos over a period of 15 minutes. I don't know what's more alarming: that these are the best images to date of how each one of us started life, or the realization that my own personal ovaries have done this more than 200 times. Yowch! Donnez'…

Got up early this morning, six thirty, and slipped out for an hour's walk. The sun was already pretty high but still veiled in mist. I walked past vineyards and olive groves toward a farmhouse until yapping guard dogs made me turn on my heel, and then I left the road. The area is heavily altered by agriculture, but still there is quite a lot of woodland and brush. I descended into the valley of a little stream, dodged bushes and a large spider web, and found water trickling at the bottom of a deep-cut little channel, like a ditch among the bushes. Stepping over, I entered untouched greenery.…

The National Academies Press is selling books at half price for the summer, meaning you can get Robert Hazen's excellent Gen-e-sis for cheap. It's perfect reading whether you're at a deep-sea vent, tidal pools or floating on the surface of the primordial ocean.

...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures. Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…

Ornithine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in the body, but mostly as an intermediate in your body's nitrogen disposal cycle. It rarely occurs in proteins, and we weren't sure why until some people tried to make some ornithine-containing polypeptides. Turns out it's not very well behaved, since a six membered ring will form, given any opportunity. It self-cleaves.