biology

This is the third of four videos NCSE commissioned to help explain how evolution works, and to help people understand the threats posed to accurate science education. It's remarkable what you can fit into a brief video. It's also worth noting that a lot won't fit into a video. If the issue of eye evolution is of interest, check out this recent article from LifeScientist. The Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper they discuss is more technical, but is a really good review.

Two-month old black Jaguar cub born in captivity at the Huachipa zoo in Lima, Peru. (click for larger version) photo source: AP Photo/Martin Mejia/Scanpix hat-tip: Green Expander.

Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) with a vote of 414 to 1. Lauded by most media pundits as an example of "forward-looking" legislation, the bill forbids companies from viewing the genetic profiles of their clients or employees. President Bush has promised to sign the bill. But just how "forward-looking" is GINA? Does current genetic technology really put us in danger of genetic discrimination? How much longer before the themes in Gattaca become reality? Click Here for PollOnline Surveys | Online Poll | Email…

Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain. Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…

tags: Elizabeth Blackburn, Joan Steitz, Albany Medical Center Prize I learned this afternoon that America's highest prize in medicine, the Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, was awarded to two women for the first time in its history. The recipients, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Joan Steitz of Yale University will share the $500,000 prize, which is second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize. The two medical scientists, who work independently of each other, study proteins associated with DNA and RNA, and their work will likely…

Regular readers may remember the paper about a gay necrophiliac duck rapist with sexual staying-power (see here). Andrew Bleiman now gives us this gem - a seal attempting to get it on with a penguin. Disney probably has a lot to answer for.

Whenever the big dog over the back fence barks, our little dog goes racing to the back door, barking like crazy. Forget the fact that if the two dogs actually came muzzle to muzzle, the other dog would eat ours with one mouthful. On the other hand, when dogs bark on television, our dog either lifts her head briefly or keeps on snoozing. I often wondered if dog barks meant anything except making dog noise. You can still assume dogs communicate without requiring them to do it through through barking. And if barking means something, is it just the barks of a dog's own breed or is their cross-…

Back in March of 2007, we brought you the story of an enormous (colossal really) squid, captured by New Zealandish fishermen and brought back for examination at the University of New Zealand. The frozen squid posed challenges for the researchers who realized that it would take so long to thaw that the outer parts would be rotting before the core had even melted (also an appropriate description of my brother Benny's heart). Well the marine biologists made their move today, thawing out the colossal squid in a bath of cool water. Had the water been too hot, they were worried it might crack the…

Vollig Weichgestrikt Sarah Illenberger Those of you who enjoyed JPolka's crochet cabinet in Sunday's Cabinet of Curiosities carnival may also like these cloudlike knitted sculptures by Sarah Illenberger. I'm impressed with how effectively the yarn captures the delicate translucence of human tissues - particularly the vanishingly small arterioles on the heart's surface. Via Adam in the World

Via Alea, a new entry into the best title ever competition: "Option Model Calibration Using a Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm" by J. Dang, A. Brabazon, M. O'Neill, and D. Edelman. That right, using an algorithm inspired by trying to mimic E. coli foraging, one hopes to calibrate a volatility option pricing model. No word yet, however, on whether bacteria will be able to spot CDOs with a large exposure to subprime mortgage bonds.

. . . wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included. . . [Bacon] Welcome to the sixth edition of the Cabinet of Curiosities carnival. Whether your taste runs to Wunderkammern or Curiosities, blogs are treasure rooms for modern collectors of the strange and marvelous. Let's start with this perfect miniature cabinet of crochet motifs by JPolka at the oh-so-aptly named…

Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life, 1953 Via eliz.avery's flickr stream Happy DNA Day! It's been slow here on the blog lately, for a number of reasons - the most salient of which is that I've been on the Hill all week at the Congressional Operations Seminar sponsored by the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown. I highly recommend this course - it was a lot of fun. But unfortunately I didn't have a functional laptop this week, and thus couldn't blog. (At one point, my poor Mac burped up a blue screen of death - I didn't even know such a thing was possible!) Yesterday, I just missed…

This is just plain cool! It's amazing how intuitive data can be when plotted visually. And as of Tax Day, you can plot your own data on a stripped-down version of this software, thanks to Google, which bought Trendalyzer from Gapminder in 2007. I can hardly wait to try this out for myself. . .

Molecule of the Day has a post up about isotopically-enriched food that caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the idea is wildly outrageous, and, secondly, this is something that actually gets joked about quite a bit in an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lab. Any given element can come in various isotopes, which differ in the composition of their nuclei. The nuclei of different isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons, but they vary in their number of neutrons. Because the number of neutrons in a nucleus does not significantly affect the chemical properties…

For years we have been naming flu viruses in a particular way. Now Declan Butler has a news article in Nature observing that the system is being modified for bird flu to be more "politically correct." What is the system that's being modified (still in use for seasonal flu)? It starts off with the type of influenza virus, either A, B or C. The type was originally based on a broad class of antibody response but now is related to genetic markers in two of the eleven proteins (matrix M1 or nuceoprotein, NP). The three types have a common ancestor but only types A and B are of public health…

Good talks are rare gems. Good talks about interesting topics even rarer. Good talks that make you want to change fields and design E. Coli which smell like bananas are the best. I saw a good one earlier this week, and its now online: Learning to Program DNA by Drew Endy. If you get a chance, check out the picture of Drew going off a waterfall in a kayake on the Lower McCloud river. That's very close to where I grew up (and don't you city folk come up there and ruin that beautiful neck of the woods. Stay way slicker!)

A new entry in the best title ever competition: arXiv:0804.2162, "The secret world of shrimps: polarisation vision at its best", by Sonja Kleinlogel and Andrew G. White. Secret lives of shrimp? That sounds more like an expose on the secret drug habits of the Roloffs on the T.V. show Little People Big World, than the title for a scientific article. (Yes it is politically incorrect to call little people "shrimps." Having spent the first many years of my life being stared at for have a little person as a sister, however, I think you can cut me some slack, and just laugh :) ) Let's see if…

In the previous two posts (here and here) we laid out some new results that dissect what might be happening at the molecular level when a patient infected with SARS or bird flu descends into Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) from Acute Lung Injury (ALI) in a just published paper in the journal Cell (Imai et al., "Identification of Oxidative Stress and Toll-like Receptor 4 Signaling as a Key Pathway of Acute Lung Injury", Cell, Vol 133, 235-249, 18 April 2008). We have already discussed their experiments showing that TLR4, a receptor that is part of the innate immune system, was…

tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, speciation, Pod Mrcaru lizard, Podarcis sicula, reptiles Pod Mrcaru lizard, Podarcis sicula. Image: Anthony Herrel (University of Antwerp) [larger view] Evolution has long been thought to occur slowly, due to small and gradual genetic changes that accumulate over millions of years until eventually, a new species arises. However, recent research has been calling this assumption into question. According to a study that was just published by an international team of scientists, dramatic physical changes can occur very rapidly -- on the order of just 30…