biology

The beavers are rallying in Sweden, multiplying and repossessing old habitat. The other day I rode my bike to Lake Källtorpssjön and photographed some beaver work.

Place your bets...

Sexual Reorientation: The gay culture war is about to turn chemical: If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won't be in the room when it happens. Parents control medical decisions, and surveys indicate that the vast majority of them would be upset to learn that their child was gay. Already, millions are screening embryos and fetuses to eliminate those of the "wrong" sex. Do you think they won't screen for the "wrong" sexual orientation, too? Liberals are slow to see what's coming. They're still fighting the culture war. The Toronto…

Vitamin D: New way to treat heart failure?. It's been in the news so I figured I'd point to Think Gene's roundup. It seems in the health sciences occasional fads for miracle-nutrients show up, so take it all with a grain of salt. I'm less interested in Vitamin D's relationship with late in life ailments such as cancer and heart disease as I am with its more global impact on immune function, because it is the latter which has the most evolutionary impact (most people done breeding by the time heart attacks and cancer take their toll).

My boyfriend, an uber-networked Congressional staffer, has fallen out of love with his Palm, and is counting the days until he can acquire a 3G iPhone. I'm trying to accept that I bought one half as good for twice the price a few months back. . . after all, I did enjoy the self-satisfied glow of the semi-early-adopter, fielding all kinds of covetous glances and inquiries from strangers on the Metro. ("No, it's not an iPod Touch.") But I can pass the techno-torch to the next generation gracefully. Maybe. At least I can console myself with the wave of new third-party apps, many of which will…

Carl has an excellent post up, Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn't Bark in the Night: ...Erwin Chargaff, an eminent Columbia University biologist, called genetic engineering "an irreversible attack on the biosphere." "The world is given to us on loan," he warned. "We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it." At the same time, people…

Twilight for the Forest People: If they are removed and survive the exposure to diseases they have never encountered, it is likely that the unique knowledge and beliefs that define them, the spirit of their life, will probably slip away. I am to understand that governments like Brazil are better about this, but there has long been a problem with these tribal groups disappearing in 2-3 generations because of their lack of immune faculties to deal with the pathogens they're newly exposed to. Something to think about.

Phylogeny Friday -- 30 May 2008 Research on animals in under attack throughout the world. Animal rights activists not only stage rallies against animal testing, but they also engage in criminal behavior. They vandalize property, sabotage experiments, and terrorize researchers. How can scientists fight back? Michael Conn and James Parker have written book documenting the animal rights issue from the scientists' perspective (The Animal Research War). Conn and Parker have also briefly described their position in the FASEB Journal. Here is how they summarize their book: This book is a personal…

Bill Gates thinks that robots are at the equivalent stage that computers were when he and Paul Allen and a ton of hobbyists helped fuel the PC revolution. But is he right? Here is a radical proposal: might not bioengineering be the next field where amateurs have a huge impact? Such is the hypothesis of DIYbio which had its first meeting in Cambridge, MA on May 1st: In the packed back-room of Asgard's Irish Pub in Cambridge, a diverse crowd of 25+ enthusiasts gathered to discuss the next big thing in biology: amateurs. Mackenzie (Mac) Cowell led-off the night with an overview of recent…

Stories on the wires this weekend highlight a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggesting that some bird flu viruses are adapting to the human respiratory tract, thought to be a prelude to increased transmissibility and possibly ushering in a pandemic of influenza in humans. We need to sort out a number of things here, beginning with the idea that "avian influenza viruses" are mutating in a way woy to make humans more vulnerable. Let's take it apart. First, influenza. Influenza can either be a syndrome (a package of clinical symptoms and signs…

A few weeks ago I mentioned that there is some debate as to the taxonomy of the Polar Bear; specifically, as to whether it was simply a clade of the Brown Bear species. Interesting, I note that today a Polar Bear-Grizzly hybrid was shot in Canada: There have long been stories of oddly coloured bears living in regions where the two territories overlap. But until now, grizzly-polar hybrids, dubbed "grolar bears" or "pizzlies", have been found only in zoos. The hybrid bear was shot last month by an American big game hunter on Banks Island, Northwest Territories, Canada. His guide, Roger Kuptana…

My advisor has recently got me listening to Whad'ya Know. My first reaction: It's like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Only not as funny, not as interesting, and not as good. I've been downloading the podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure whether I'll keep subscribing in iTunes. I'm only bringing this up because last week's episode contained a very egregious example of someone knowing just enough biology to get themselves in trouble. The sad part was that the person should have known better. Why? She teaches biology at the university level. What happened? At the midpoint of the…

Neal Desai took first place in the contest. Desai is a 10th grader in Kansas City, MO's Pembroke High School, but clearly identifies as a Kansan, and the Alliance for Science assures me he lives in the Sunflower state. The contest allowed students to address either of two topics: Agriculture and Evolution or Climate and Evolution. Desai's essay addresses agriculture, and especially the complex moral, economic and social consequences of plant breeding and the use of evolutionary biology to engineer lines of crops. "Because we, as farmers and scientists, were looking to create plants with '…

Monday night, the British Parliament voted on embryo science laws for the first time in nearly 20 years. After weeks of debate, the House of Commons voted 336 to 176 to reject a proposed ban on the use of human-animal hybrid embryos in scientific research. Human-animal hybrids were first created in 2003, by Chinese scientists who fused human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2004, researchers in Minnesota created pigs with pig-human blood cells. So far, this kind of research has been banned in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy. Do you agree with Parliament's decision? Click Here for…

Steven Wiley, writing in the Scientist, discusses the contradiction of the recent fad for "hypothesis-free" research: Following a recent computational biology meeting, a group of us got together for dinner, during which the subject of our individual research projects came up. After I described my efforts to model signaling pathways, the young scientist next to me shrugged and said that models were of no use to him because he did "discovery-driven research". He then went on to state that discovery-driven research is hypothesis-free, and thus independent of the preexisting bias of traditional…

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Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, a trapdoor spider recently discovered in Alabama and named after Neil Young. Arachnophiles can click to enlarge - arachnophobes probably don’t want to.

I notice that the Moon-man is flogging Carl Zimmer's new book. So I feel it's time to pile-on, buy Microcosm! Carl is of course giving a series of talks at fine bookstores near you....

...and suddenly he reveals his true stripes. Oh, well, at least the Hitler Zombie hasn't eaten Jason's brain, as he has so many of the others who complain about being Expelled! Yet. Thanks, Jason. I needed the laugh after the events of yesterday and today. Oh, and congratulations on getting tenure!

The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study: 38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms. 65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth. 47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. 21% of Americans do not believe that the…