biology
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2007A guest entry, graciously granted by Secular Humanist warrior queen Felicia of Life Before Death, with her own photograph.
As I start writing this post*, the air has an autumn tang to it, it is windy, and definitely not as warm as it could be in August. And yet, the bees are working. There's something comforting about how their lives go on irrespective of what happens in the world of humans. All they care about is the turning of seasons, the treachery of weather, the health of their queen.
Around Stockholm, where we live, the bees usually don't have anything to show for their labour at this…
tqa | September 25, 2007
Most of the readers of this blog are intelligent, interested, scientifically literate individuals, but I'm guessing that at least a few of you aren't familiar with one of the nouns in the title. Those of you who do know what a conodont is are probably wondering what it has to do with the others. If you bear with me for a little bit, the connection will be clear shortly. It has to do with fossils, fossilization, and the latest spectacular misunderstanding of those two things at Uncommon Descent.
Conodonts are (or, rather, were) an interesting group of animals. They were around from late in…
hrynyshyn | September 25, 2007From the "everything you thought you knew about X is wrong" files: an exposé on exercise. Seems there really is no evidence that working out or running hard will help you lose weight. Instead, it all comes down to diet. From New York magazine:
For the last 60 years, researchers studying obesity and weight regulation have insisted on treating the human body as a thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference (calories in minus calories out) ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the…
jstemwedel | September 21, 2007While discussing poop with a bunch of life scientists -- in particular, we were discussing its utility in a wide variety of research projects -- one of the scientists at the table related a rousing cheer which I simply must share:
Starts with an S
and it ends with a T.
It comes out of you
and it comes out of me.
I know what you're thinking,
but don't call it that!
Let's be scientific
and call it SCAT!
I'm told this has them in stitches at sixth grade camp.
jstemwedel | September 19, 2007Avast, ye bloglubbers!
We be starin' down the crow's nest at another International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a holiday marked in these seas by the seizin' o' this bucket by the Dread Pirate Free-Ride. Aye, it happened last year, and by the beak o' the squid guardin' Davy Jones' locker*, it's happened again.
What's that ye be sayin'? Pirates didn't really be sayin' "Arrrr"? Shove some hardtack in that mouth or I be usin' it to scrape the barnacles off this bucket!
Me deckhand Smee be askin', "Why is it we seafarers be callin' each other scurvy dogs? Do dogs be gettin' scurvy?"
A fine…
revere | September 19, 2007The bird flu influenza subtype, H5N1, that has been infecting humans with high mortality is the highly pathogenic (HPAI) version of a virus that also exists in a low pathogenic form (LPAI). The high and low path designations refer to effects on poultry, not humans, but only the HPAI versions have been of public health importance. On the other hand, the HPAI strains have all come from LPAI ones via a variety of genetic mechanisms and LPAI strains are themselves of importance to the poultry industry where they decrease productivity of the flock. For these and other reasons there is a need to…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2007The Scientist has just published an online version of an upcoming print story on their site. This story asks the question, What are your three favorite life science blogs? I noticed that they asked seven men this question (not one woman, hello??!) and predictably, nearly all of the top blogs that they listed were written by .. men!
Quite frankly, I am offended. Are women life science blog writers really second-class citizens, undeserving of recognition and top honors? If you think that women have something of value to say about the life sciences, get on over there and be sure to let the…
tfk | September 18, 2007Reposted from the old TfK, in honor of the late, great Greg Beck.
Over at Death's Door, there is a certain degree of consternation about the possibility that mallard ducks would be gang raping each other.
There is a bunch of confusion wrapped around that so let's start slow.
I also wasn't aware that duck's had duck cocks to gangbang with. I never eaten a duck but I've eaten a lot of chicken, and when you buy the chicken in the store and pull out that little pouch of giblets and shit, I've never seen a tiny chicken cock sittin off in there.
So, what do duck dicks look like, and why don't you…
evolgen | September 14, 2007
I'm sure by now you've heard of the ginormous spider web that was spun in Texas. The thing was huge -- 200 yards long -- and it was spun by multiple different species. That interspecific collaboration got Bill Poser thinking, so he blogged about it at Language Log:
The web covers hundreds of square meters. Not only was it built by hundreds of spiders, who normally build isolated webs and eat each other if they get too close, but entomologist Allen Dean reports that they belong to twelve different families! We're talking massive inter-species communication here folks, and not particularly…
omnibrain | September 14, 2007In what sounds like a whole lot of hand waving (but hey! I study vision what do I know!), scientists have 'discovered' that creepy old men running after their daughters friends has led to an increase in life expectancy for human kind. Just think that people like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, and Michael Jackson have led to your grandma living a much longer life. Ok.. maybe not M.J. since he likes little boys and they don't have babies but Woody Allen - totally!
Basically...
Human ability to scale the so-called "wall of death"--surviving beyond the reproductive years--has…
razib | September 14, 2007I've spoken about Vitamin D a fair amount on this blog before. Not only have I presented it as a major selective pressure for light skin in the northern latitudes after the switch to agricultural lifestyles (and the concomitant nutrient deprivations due to reliance on a predominantly starch diet), but I recently found that I myself suffered from a lack. Though I eat a salad most days, and try to eat meats and fish, the fact that I have dark skin and live at a relatively high latitude and in a region characterized by cloudy winters was a combination which naturally led to low levels of…
hrynyshyn | September 13, 2007This is not good. A report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme says toxic pollutants, presumably estrogen mimics and other organochlorines, are skewing the sex ratio in Greenland.
The Guardian reports:
Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).
The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their…
evolgen | September 12, 2007As I was making my way back from a seminar on skin color genetics yesterday, I noticed a couple of bugs perched on the outer wall of my building. This wouldn't be a blog worthy moment, except that the bugs were huge . . . and in mid coitus. I hurried inside and ran upstairs to grab my camera. I returned -- with both my camera and another grad student -- to find the bugs in the same position as when I left them.
This wasn't exactly a high energy sexual encounter. In fact, the male appeared to be just sitting on the back of the female -- as if he were in the process of pinning her in some kind…
tqa | September 11, 2007
I was out walking yesterday morning when I saw several very large spiders sitting on webs. I had my camera with me, so I shot a bunch of pictures, and got a couple of really nice ones. I think I've managed to identify the species for a couple of the spiders, but there's one that I'm not quite sure of.
I'm pretty sure that three of the spiders are golden orb spiders (Nephila clavipes). The body shape is right, the markings are right, the site (League City, TX) is within the known range of the species, the habitat (marshy scrub along the bank of Clear Creek) is right, and the behavior (head…
omnibrain | September 10, 2007According to MSNBC:
A small number of companies have linked health factors to what employees pay for benefits, but the practice is expected to grow now that some federal rules have been finalized, spelling out what's allowed by law. Employee advocates worry that other anti-discrimination laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act won't cover the person who is 20 or 30 pounds overweight.
I can't think of one legitimate reason why people shouldn't be charged more for living an unhealthy life style. After all, the inflated health care costs are in large part due to peoples unhealthy life…
omnibrain | September 10, 2007I know why I pee on myself (It usually involves wind or alcohol...or both) but I've always wondered why monkeys do it as well. Ok, I lie, I had no idea that monkeys (yeah yeah, I know it's a chimp but monkey is a more fun word) peed on themselves... well, besides this one.
According to News @ Nature, it's all about trying to get laid:
Miller and her team noticed a link between urine washing and attention-seeking.
Alpha males, for example, doubled their urine washing rates when being solicited by females. The researchers think this might be how males encourage females to continue paying…
revere | September 8, 2007I'm not a fish ecologist (you noticed?), so maybe there are things about this story I don't get. I'm looking for an explanation, which I assume a knowledgeable ecologist could give me. It seems that a decades long program to restore the endangered and almost extinct greenback cutthroat trout (Colorado's official state fish) has run afoul of a discovery that the restocking was being done with a closely related subspecies native to the other side of the mountain, the Colorado river cutthroat.
The first thing I don't understand is this sentence in the (otherwise excellent) Rocky Mountain News…
evolgen | September 6, 2007Among my many pet peeves are when people refer to Drosophila as fruit flies (they are not). Real fruit flies (Tephritids) feed, mate, and lay their eggs on live fruit -- for this reason, many are agricultural pests (e.g., the medfly). Drosophila, on the other hand, feed on the micro-organisms found primarily on rotting fruit or other rotting plant parts. For this reason, I like to think of Drosophila as one of the most refined insects because they prefer fermented sugars (like beers and wines).
While the majority of Drosophila feed on rotting plant material, some have found an even more…
tqa | September 4, 2007
When it comes to teaching first and second graders about things, nothing beats the classroom pet. The little kids learn so many important things. They learn about animals. They learn about responsibility, and about the importance of taking care of things. And they learn about death.
A lot.
It's now the second week of school, and my son's second grade class is on its second hamster. We're scheduled to take the hamster home the last weekend of October. Anyone want to start a pool on what number hamster gets to take refuge in our house?
tfk | September 4, 2007If I heard right, the radio offered an unusual explanation for a local traffic disruption. I was still only half awake, so it's possible that I misheard or misunderstood, but I believe that a mass exodus of slugs was said to be interfering with the morning commute.
I made it in safely.
An attempt to verify this with Google mostly turned up complaints from Britain about their wet summer and the slug infestations which have destroyed people's gardens. No mention was made of dangers to drivers.
One Welsh paper managed to see the silver lining, pointing out that the bounding invertebrate…