biology
razib | June 18, 2007The post on circumcision certainly got a lot of attention! Google news has been sending me a lot of traffic, so I checked the query out and found this article which ended thus:
Ruth Katz, 38, of San Francisco had both her sons circumcised at brises. She and her husband, Michael Rapaport, were astonished when the teacher in their birthing class described circumcision as "immoral" and "not consensual."
"The edict to have your son circumcised was the first covenant with God -- the first challenge to being Jewish," said Katz, pursuing a master's degree in business administration. "I am a…
jlynch | June 18, 2007Afarenis has mentioned the birth of a manta ray (Manta birostris) at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan - notable because this is the first captive birth for the species. Below the fold is video of the birth.
razib | June 16, 2007Evolutionary geneticist Alan Templeton has an article in Evolution, GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION:
Starting with "mitochondrial Eve" in 1987, genetics has played an increasingly important role in studies of the last two million years of human evolution. It initially appeared that genetic data resolved the basic models of recent human evolution in favor of the "out-of-Africa replacement" hypothesis in which anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago, started to spread throughout the world about 100,000 years ago, and subsequently drove to complete genetic…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2007Remember a few months ago, when the news came that circumcision can cut the risk of contracting HIV through sex by 60 percent ... at least, in males, in some parts of Africa? Now we get the bad news. A study just published in the British Journal of Urology finds that what boys lose in the process turns out to be the most sensitive part of the penis. This consequence, one would assume, is universal.
Such conclusions have been elusive until now. Most studies in the past were based on questionnaires, not physical investigation. Which is problematic because most males that do undergo the knife do…
omnibrain | June 13, 2007"Pavlov's Cockroach: Classical Conditioning of Salivation in an Insect," sounds like a great paper and seriously...salivation in the cockroach! that's great stuff ;)
But this is certainly not the first time classical conditioning has been demonstrated in other animals. Heck, Eric Kandel (among others) won the Nobel prize for his work on classical conditioning and learning in Aplysia (sea slugs). If you're really excited about the salivation component of Classical Conditioning here's a little summary from Medical News Today :)
A new study, led by Makoto Mizunami and colleagues at Tohoku…
omnibrain | June 12, 2007Ever see a rat tickled? You can now - and evidently they laugh :)
[via scienceblog]
Here's another video of rats playing with their owner. I knew they could be friendly but this is something new to me. I didn't know that they could have so much personality - I was pretty sure they just crept around sewers or sat in a nest all day.
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007
Quoth the younger Free-Ride offspring, "The rabbits are mating because they want to have bunnies."
While I would not presume to know the volitional states of rabbits, whether real or plastic, I agree with the child's assessment of the activity in which the rabbits are engaged.
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…
omnibrain | June 8, 2007Clearly I'm not a medicine bio person - but this just had to make it onto the blog.
Researchers at Burnham Institute for Medical Research ("Burnham") have provided the first evidence that gamma-secretase, an enzyme key to the progression of Alzheimer's, acts as a tumor suppressor by altering the pathway of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a potential treatment target for cancer. Expedited to publication online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these findings reveal a limitation of targeting gamma-secretase for treatment of Alzheimer's and potentially other diseases.…
tfk | June 7, 2007The April 5, 2004 edition of the New Yorker had a fascinating article about height. (Incidentally, I highly recommend The Complete New Yorker.) It centers on a researcher named John Komlos, an anthropometric economist at the University of Munich, and work he's done to trace heights of different populations over time. In considering the effects of immigrants on a society and vice versa, it's worth considering what we really ought to consider intrinsic. As the author of the article notes, "height, like skin color, seems to vary with geography: we think of squat Peruvians, slender Masai,…
jlynch | June 6, 2007
Anyone have an idea what species of cuttlefish (?) this is? I saw it at the New England Aquarium but never noted down what it was. Thanks.
revere | June 6, 2007Last November a WHO study "stated" there was evidence a genetic factor was at work in the susceptibility to H5N1 because it appeared an abnormally high number of reported clusters involved only blood relatives. At the time I expressed some polite skepticism (Not All in Our Genes). Whether the observed data actually had more blood relative cases than would be expected bdepends on what one would expect. What you "expect" is the so-called null-distribution, which in turn depends on a plausible underlying probability model. Now a doctoral student working with Marc Lipsitch and his collaborators…
moleculeoftheday | June 5, 2007Trehalose is a simple head-to-head dimer of glucose:
Like a lot of sugars, it holds onto water like crazy; some plants use it as a protectant in dry conditions.
Molecular biologists also use it in PCR; apparently, it stabilizes the enzyme, while destabilizing the dsDNA produced by the reaction.
revere | June 4, 2007Most influenza subtypes are said to be diseases of birds, so it is somewhat surprising there hasn't been more study of poultry workers or veterinarians exposed to infected birds in the course of their work. A study by Gregory Gray and his team at , an epidemiologist at the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health has just been published. The results cast into doubt the mantra that transmission of avian influenza virus to humans is difficult and uncommon.
Graduate student Kendall Myers in Gray's team studied the blood sera obtained from…
jlynch | June 1, 2007
As Shelley has pointed out, Stinky Journalism has done a take-down on the Hogzilla II photos (see here and here) and has concluded that the hog was not as large as claimed. Not all of that debunking is, it appear, correct, so you might also want to see this debunking which claims that the photos were manipulated digitally as well as through use of perspective (see in particular figure 3, reproduced above in smaller form).
Predictably, the article resulted in a whole bunch of comments by folks defending the boy-hunter ("Let the boy have is momeny of glory"). My favorite has got to be:
I…
vhughes | May 30, 2007We tend to think of alien life as that which may habitate other planets. But the vast, uncharted expanse of our own oceans is, in many ways, just as alien. To get a better idea of the ecology and dynamics of ocean life, marine biologists, oceanographers, and engineers for the past few years have been outfitting sealife of the Pacific Ocean with GPS-like tags. Since February, these Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) researchers have chronicled their sea voyages on a blog, On Topp of the World.
Since 2002, TOPP researchers from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Lab, the University of California,…
jlynch | May 30, 2007
Golden eagles have bred in Ireland for the first time in nearly 100 years. The species became extinct on the island in 1912, and adults were re-introduced in 2001, giving a population of 46 adults. This year was the first that a pair produced young. More here.
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007[More blog entries about neuroscience, lamprey, computationalmodeling; neurovetenskap, nejonöga, datormodellering.]
In Stockholm on 14 June, my psychedelic friend and fellow honorary Chinese Mikael Huss will present his PhD thesis in engineering (available on-line). He has built software models of bits of the lamprey's spinal cord. The book's title is Computational Modeling of the Lamprey CPG. From Subcellular to Network Level -- CPG means "central pattern generator".
I understand little of this. I just want to eat the lamprey.
Thesis abstract below the fold.
Due to the staggering complexity…
moleculeoftheday | May 29, 2007The atmosphere doesn't just keep you alive and protect you from the sun - it is responsible for the face of life as we know it. One-fifth of the atmosphere is oxygen, happily waiting to accept electrons from whatever's available. Oxidative metabolism turns sugars and the like into CO2, just like fire. This provides loads of energy, of course. This wasn't always the case!
Long ago, there was virtually no O2. During the course of evolution, some humble microbes began to produce oxygen. This wasn't by design, mind you - the oxygen was waste! Photosynthetic bacteria, like plants, gave off oxygen…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2007tags: Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution, biology
I have mentioned this before when the project was first underway, but all of Darwin's letters are now catalogued online for everyone to read. For those of you who don't know, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, regularly writing to nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. Among his correspondents were geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, as well as well-known thinkers and public figures, as well as ordinary men and…