biology
worldsfair | May 15, 2007"One way for ecologists to define and correlate these varied environments is by categorizing these areas by the types of plants that inhabit them. These categories are called biomes. Categorizing each biome by plant life is not an end in itself; instead, indigenous plant life acts as an indicator of the animal life, soil composition and the climate of an area."
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worldsfair | May 15, 2007"Ecology is a study of interactions or relationships between organisms and the environment; the connectedness between living systems and non-living systems on the Earth. Ecology is, in a sense, a historical field, founded upon the Earth's far reaching and ever evolving natural history."
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worldsfair | May 15, 2007"In the simplest terms, gastrulation is a stage in early development; in human beings it occurs between two and three weeks after fertilization. It is that stage when a two-layered cell mass undergoes a set of specific movements and interactions that establish the three germ layers of the embryo (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) and the beginnings of a three-dimensional structure. The end result doesn't look like much of an animal, but it has set up pools of cells that will contribute to specific future cell types, and has laid down the rough outline of tissues along the body axis."
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worldsfair | May 15, 2007"The pharyngula stage: the pharyngula is a vertebrate embryo that has assembled the outlines of the body plan. It has the key features of vertebrate morphology -- a post-anal tail, a notochord, a dorsal neural tube, a segmented musculature, and an array of branchial arches ("gill" arches). The major organs have begun to form."
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evolgen | May 14, 2007
The Canadian research organization Genome BC has unveiled a science education website, Genomics Education. One of the features of the website is Floyd the Fruit Fly, who, we can only presume, is some sort of cartoon drosophilid. Or maybe he's a tephritid, but I highly doubt it. When you hear "fruit fly" and "genetics", you think Drosophila, even if they really aren't fruit flies.
In the accompanying illustration, we see Floyd with smelly feet. Apparently, Floyd thinks that his foot stank is due to mitosis. He then learns, via a disembodied voice backed up by a soundtrack from an early Ron…
evolgen | May 14, 2007Paul Erdos was an extremely prolific and mobile mathematician who has left a legacy in academia in the form of the Erdos Number -- a count of your "academic distance" from Erdos. Anyone who published a paper with Erdos has an Erdos number of one (Erdos, himself, had a number of zero), people who published with anyone with an Erdos number of one have an Erdos number of two, and so on. It's a point of pride for a mathematician or other researcher to have a small Erdos number.
There is no widely recognized equivalent of the Erdos number for the life sciences. Given the diversity in the field, it…
evolgen | May 13, 2007Have you heard of the Encylopedia of Life? If not, get out from under the rock, dude. Seriously. The hype machine has been going at full steam. This is supposed to be a database of all known species of organisms on earth. It's the incarnation of E.O. Wilson's call for a database of all species. It's a database of all species! All species! Every species!! Hooray!!
Rod Page, the best biological databases blogger, isn't all that enthusiastic. He doesn't like the layout. He's seen similar ventures fail in the past. And then there's the whole issue that the EoL doesn't even exist yet. It's just a…
hrynyshyn | May 11, 2007The new Encyclopedia of Life may be the best new thing since sliced bread, but not necessarily just because a catalog of every living species is a pre-requisite to understanding our planet. By making it clear just how little we actually know about life on Earth, EOL could be just the thing biology needs to spur new interest among students, government funding agencies, and the public at large in basic science. That might be overselling it a tad, but it's hard not to use hyperbole when addressing the enormous gap between what the average person thinks we know and what we actually do know.
The…
tfk | May 11, 2007In honor of the local paper's attempt to get an in-depth look at events around Lawrence for 24 hours, I spent a little time outside city limits with a bug net and a camera. While a bug-on-the-street interview is less traditional than other coverage the day generated, I think that a look at the activities of our tiniest residents is as important.
Below the fold: Craneflies, spiders, snakes, beetles and dragonflies comment on May 10 in Lawrence. Dialup users, beware!, there are copious photographs. Nature lovers, rejoice!, there are copious photographs.
I took a walk through an oldfield…
revere | May 10, 2007Stories like this always seem to end badly. But they keep happening:
Imported red fire ants have plagued farmers, ranchers and others for decades. Now the reviled pests are facing a bug of their own.
Researchers have pinpointed a naturally occurring virus that kills the ants, which arrived in the U.S. in the 1930s and now cause $6 billion in damage annually nationwide, including about $1.2 billion in Texas.
The virus caught the attention of U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers in Florida in 2002. The agency is now seeking commercial partners to develop the virus into a pesticide to…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2007tags: five-second rule, food, bacteria, microbiology
Have you ever heard of the five-second rule, where you can pick up food that has fallen on the floor within five seconds and eat it without risk of illness? Do you follow it? In 2003, a then-high school science intern at the University of Illinois, Jillian Clarke, conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of adult men and 70 percent of adult women knew about the five-second rule and many said they followed it. Clarke then conducted an experiment to find out if various food became contaminated with bacteria after just five…
omnibrain | May 9, 2007I know how you all love panda porn - so I figured I'd share this little Turtle sex story Jennifer sent me.
Enjoy :)
George is not what you would call a stud. When I visited him in 1985, he was thought to be a relatively young adult, maybe 50 years old, but he was already a confirmed bachelor. He hadn't shown any interest in two females of a similar species placed in his pen. One had flipped over and drowned in the wading pool. The keepers weren't positive that George had driven this tortoise to her death, but he definitely hadn't been doing any Barry White serenades.
A few years later, in…
jlynch | May 5, 2007
I used to be a semi-serious birdwatcher back in Ireland. When I came to the US, I (for some unknown reason) didn't keep up the hobby and have only in the past year begun keeping track of the species I see (and even then only sporadically). Today, I saw a pair of Zone Tailed Hawks (Buteo albonotatus) ... making 100 species since I began to keep count.
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: Venus flytrap, plant, biology, mechanics
A Venus flytrap lies open, waiting for an insect to set off its trap. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and colleagues have shown that the plant uses stored elastic energy to operate its hinged leaves.
Image: Yoel Forterre.
How does the venus flytrap accomplish what most people cannot? How does a mere plant capture live flies? The mystery of the Venus flytrap's rapid movement lies in storing and releasing elastic energy, says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Harvard University.…
evolgen | May 3, 2007Here's some interesting science:
A commonly used medicinal leach may have been misidentified as the wrong species.
Here is a description of the Human Variome Project, which seems more focused on mapping disease genes than doing cool population genetics. That's too bad.
Science has an article on the benefits of undergraduate research. The most important one: to get into grad school.
You can use molecular markers to determine that a lonesome tortoise has no reason to feel alone.
The central nervous system is homologous across all animals.
What is the greatest innovation? I've tackled this…
tfk | May 3, 2007Boing Boing informs us that:
The Houston Museum of Natural Science will pay $0.25 each for the first 1,000 living cockroaches brought in by the public at specific times over the next two weeks. The roaches will be part of an exhibit on the "'sanitary' engineers of the insect world'" within the new Brown Hall of Entomology. Those who bring in cockroaches after the 1,000 are already collected receive passes to the new exhibition hall.
Somehow, I suspect there are quite a few Texans sitting on biological goldmines right now. Just remember, the cockroaches have to be alive.
evolgen | May 2, 2007Spring is in the air. The obvious signs are everywhere: the temperature is rising, the flowers are blooming, and everyone's writing about boners. There's this post from Darren Naish on turtle gonads, and Carl Zimmer has an article on duck phalluses (don't call them penises, as Darren explains) in the NYTimes (and a blog post advertising it). Carl's article summarizes the findings of this study. The basic story is that some ducks have really big penis-like structures (penises are unique to mammals, so a bird schlong is called a phallus), and the females have crazy reproductive organs to match…
omnibrain | May 1, 2007
A male chimpanzee may beg for food from another chimpanzee by gesturing with an extended arm and open hand.
But the same gesture may also be used to ask a female chimpanzee for sex, or between two males as a sign of reconciliation after a fight, said primatologist Frans de Waal, a member of the research team.
"Typically they may use it for food ... but they may use the same gesture for something totally different, so for instance a male may invite a female for sex by holding out an open hand to her," Dr de Waal said.
Soo... well... do female chimps sometimes get the wrong idea and give the…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2007No one should ever be granted a degree in science without being able to finishing this little gem of an aphorism: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble...
...It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Various sources attribute the quote to Mark Twain, or Will Rogers or Henry Wheeler Shaw. Chances are probably fair that none of them was the originator, but that's not the point. The point is, things change, especially our understanding of nature.
A perfect example appeared recently in the journal Hydrobiologia. It isn't going to rock ecology, like the recent finding…