biology
tfk | April 7, 2008Daigoro is a bipedal alligator, and according to the Mainichi (Japan) Daily News, has "walk[ed] into the hearts of aquarium visitors" at the Marine Plaza Miyajima in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. The dwarf caiman alligator has been standing on its hind legs occasionally for a couple of years.
Daigoro is, presumably, planning to follow the course of all bipedal reptiles, to either be killed by a giant meteorite, or go to law school. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine which outcome would be worse for the rest of us.
oracknows | April 2, 2008So there I was last night, in the Twilight Zone between wakefulness and sleep, Late Night With David Letterman on the television, blaring in the background. I was vaguely aware that John McCain was Letterman's guest for the evening and that they were chatting back and forth, Letterman asking the usual rather inane questions that entertainment-oriented talk show hosts often ask politicians and Presidential candidates when they have them on their shows and McCain was winding up to hit the softball questions out of the park.
Then I heard it, in the middle of a commentary about how the…
moleculeoftheday | April 1, 2008One of the most heavily trafficked entries on this site is that on TBHQ. While it's an antioxidant, it's a synthetic one, and some have suggested it might be toxic. Another antioxidant, ferulic acid, found in wheat, works on much the same principle and has found less blame.
Hydroquinone is, too, an antioxidant, but it exhibits some toxicity and potential carcenogenicity. The lesson that all "polyphenols" are not medicines and all "chemical antioxidants" are not toxins is well taken. The dose, the structure, and (perhaps most importantly) the metabolism make the poison.
oracknows | March 29, 2008Hilarious, particularly "big-pimpin'" Daddy Dennett:
I can't make up my mind if it's meant to skewer Dawkins or whether it's meant ironically as a way of making fun of ID creationists and how they view Dawkins...
oracknows | March 29, 2008Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about "intellectual oppression" by those evil "Darwinists" directed against any valiant "intelligent design" creationist or anyone else who "questions" Darwin and (2) lots of blaming the Holocaust and other atrocities (but mainly Hitler and the Holocaust) on "Darwinism," replete with lots of shots of Nazis, Ben Stein clumsily emoting…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2008tags: biology, zoology, lost cat, humor, funny, college life
The poster says;
Cat Found!!!
Black + tan with grey
male
no collar
not very friendly, I think he might be scared
not housebroken either :(
found on Sunset Blvd
And they show two pictures of an opossum. (That's a marsupial for the zoologically challenged).
revere | March 28, 2008Hard on the heels of my semi-facetious prediction that bird flu would return to Germany because Germany had declared itself bird flu free, the Swiss announced an infected wild duck on the shores of Lake Sempach. Since this duck didn't have a passport on him I am sure he never strayed over the nearby border with Germany. We don't know what kind of duck this was [see update, below], a question that is of surprising interest in light of a new paper.
Bird flu is avian influenza, i.e., an infection of birds by the influenza virus. The role of wild migratory birds versus human caused movement of…
bioephemera | March 26, 2008
from Darwin's Natural Heir
Directed by David Dugan; produced by Neil Patterson
I am a specialized advocate: an advocate for the rest of life. I hope that doesn't sound pompous, but all of us should be advocates for the rest of life. -E.O. Wilson
Last Tuesday I visited the National Geographic Society for the premiere of "Darwin's Natural Heir," a documentary by Neil Patterson about the career and life of naturalist Edward O. Wilson. It's a nice little film, with some effective graphics and visual metaphors, and a good dose of humor. But I wasn't there to see the film. I was there to meet E.…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2008
A couple of recent Skepticality interviews (with environmental engineer Kelly Comstock and environmental toxicologist Shane Snyder) taught me something that may seem obvious, but which was radical news to me. Tap water is an industrial product. It occurs nowhere in nature. Water suppliers use natural water to make tap water according to current scientific understanding of what's healthy for humans to drink.
To make tap water, you need to remove a lot of stuff, such as micro-organisms, industrial pollutants, organic residues and mineral particles, perhaps also salt and lime. Then you need to…
oracknows | March 24, 2008I really didn't want to get involved with the whole "framing" debate again. For whatever reason (and they are reasons that I've failed to understand), the very mention of the word seems to set certain members of the ScienceBlogs collective into rabid fits of vicious invective that leave rational discourse behind. And, yes, I know that by saying that I risk setting myself up as a target of said invective, but I don't care. It must be the natural cantankerousness that my low level death crud is inducing in me or maybe it's a lack of judgment brought on by large doses decongestants and…
oracknows | March 23, 2008...because Boston skeptics get to have all the fun with a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub on Monday, March 24 at The Asgard (great name for a pub!) in Cambridge at 7 PM. Keynote speaker for the night is our very own Mike the Mad Biologist. We've done a little blog tag-teaming in the past of some idiotic arguments by creationists claiming that evolution is unnecessary to understand the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria; so it's a shame I don't live in Boston.
Oh, well. One of these days I need to find out if there's a skeptics' group in my neck of the woods.
oracknows | March 22, 2008The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that's basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded "Darwinism" that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private screenings (although how one can call a screening for which almost anyone can sign up on the web "private" is beyond me), and, by serendipity, the screening happened to be in the Mall of America on the Thursday before a large atheist…
tfk | March 21, 2008Congratulations to Dakota Abbot, this year's champion muskrat skinner, and the new Miss Outdoors:
"Oh my God!" a boy in the audience yelled, at the sight of a woman in perfect makeup with her hand inside a muskrat.
Then, from another part of the crowd: an older woman's voice: "She's good."
I wish Ms. Abbott the very best of luck in her pursuit of a marine biology degree. She's clearly well-qualified. While you're at it, check out the video of the event.
Hat tip to: Digital Cuttlefish.
razib | March 20, 2008I just purchased a copy of A Biologist's Guide to Mathematical Modeling in Ecology and Evolution by Sarah P. Otto and Troy Day. My main rationale for getting this book was that I wanted a reference with the kitchen sink included, and, I was curious about mathematical ecology. This text leans a bit more toward ecology than I would have preferred, but it has a lot of good stuff and I'd recommend it if you are curious about the stiff formal side of biology. I liked the fact that there was a section on probability as well as linear algebra; Otto & Day only assume algebra and calculus, so…
evolgen | March 18, 200860 Minutes ran a special on the science of sleep this week. The special included an interview with Scott McRobert about sleep deprivation and mating in Drosophila.
So if lack of sleep impacts our appetite, our metabolism, our memory, and how we age, is there anything it doesn't affect? How about sex? Scientist Scott McRobert at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is asking that very question, studying fruit flies.
McRobert could be seen showing Lesley Stahl a fly in a vial, which he then sucked up in a pooter. He then placed that male, along with a female, in a small dish.
Stahl watched…
bioephemera | March 17, 2008
Nancy Fiddler with her mastodon skeleton
photo by Robert Galbraith
So apparently there's a week left to place your ebay bid on the Rustler Ranch mastodon skeleton. It's only $115K, and ebay helpfully notes that you can get "up to $25 back with ebay MasterCard"! So get out $114,975 (plus shipping) and start planning your new fossil decorating scheme.
The skeleton was discovered in 1997 by ranch hand Eric Pedersen on land belonging to Roger and Nancy Fiddler. But the Fiddlers are finding their fossil charge cumbersome:
The mastodon is so big that it's been separated into pieces and covered in…
tfk | March 17, 2008G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech, was tapped to run the Smithsonian Institution. As we've reported, he steps into a deeply troubled organization. His predecessor allowed infrastructure to crumble, appropriated museum artifacts for personal use in his offices, and focused more on cozying up to corporate sponsors than on the scientific and educational mission of the Smithsonian.
In many ways, Clough seems well-suited to restoring faith in the Smithsonian. He comes with an academic background, which means he will understand the needs of his staff, and appreciate the balance between…
oracknows | March 17, 2008One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use…
purepedantry | March 14, 2008I wish I could do this:
Scientists exposed 4-day-old sand dollar larvae to fish mucus, a sign that danger is close. They found that the larvae created clones of themselves within 24 hours.
"It's the first time we've seen anything clone itself in response to cues that predators are near," said researcher Dawn Vaughn, a biology doctoral student at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories.
Sand dollar larvae are tiny globs that float along with plankton in the sea, an easy target for hungry fish. When they are 6 weeks old, they settle to the seafloor and eventually become adult…
revere | March 13, 2008Few of us had heard of palm civets before SARS. Then these small nocturnal animals came under suspicion as the source of the human SARS virus. Civet cats were a wild animal delicacy in the area where SARS broke out and it was discovered that they were infected with the same virus as humans. Did humans give it to the civet or the other way around? Or is their some third source? Bats have been discussed for SARS.
Now Vietnam is reporting, for the second time, the deaths of civets from H5N1:
Four Owston's palm civets, a catlike carnivorous species that the International Union for the…