biology
tfk | September 1, 2006A week ago, I wrote:
The world is full of beautiful and strange things. Indonesian insects with eyes on stalks, African mole rats, Amazonian parrots and Chinese snakehead fish.
We can get so caught up in the exotic world of other places that we forget the strange and fascinating right under our own noses.
I'll make it a Friday mission to remind myself and my readers of a few of the things that we might otherwise miss.
Today's Friday Find is a Sphinx moth caterpillar, or I guess parts of it. Here we can see the feet of the caterpillar, holding tight to the plant it's chewing away on.
Click…
purepedantry | August 28, 2006Wouldn't we all like to know how to control hairiness? Women complain that they have too much, and spend half their lives eradicating the little bastards. Men have too little on the tops of their heads, and, let us say, carpets in other places. Well the molecular pathway that regulates hair density has been established. (Is there anything science can't do? I will answer. No.)
Setting aside for a moment the issue of putting this information to medical use, the issue of how hairs are created can also be generalized into one of the great problems of molecular biology: how to take a…
tfk | August 27, 2006Ask A ScienceBlogger:
The destruction of the rainforest was a hot-button topic in the early '90s, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages. Are the rainforests still being destroyed wholesale? Are they all gone? Is it still important? Is the coffee I drink making it worse, and is "free trade" and/or "shade grown" coffee any better?
It is still a problem, and I've been remiss in not answering this question.
The simplest guide can be seen in this satellite image of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the Haitian side, where forests nationwide have declined 5% between…
tfk | August 25, 2006The world is full of beautiful and strange things. Indonesian insects with eyes on stalks, African mole rats, Amazonian parrots and Chinese snakehead fish.
We can get so caught up in the exotic world of other places that we forget the strange and fascinating right under our own noses.
As fortune has it Gary Bichelmeyer and three friends had their eyes open as they kayaked the Wakarusa River last weekend.
Edit: Not the Kaw, I'm stupid
The Lawrence Journal-World tells how
the Aug. 16 trip turned uncommon in that, by day’s end, their kayaks were loaded with the upper jawbone and four intact…
revere | August 25, 2006An excellent story from Bloomberg News by John Lauerman brings us up to date on an issue we raised yesterday concerning giving breaks on biologicals (like vaccines) to countries who deposit sequence data in publicly accessible databases like Genbank:
Poorer countries where bird flu is spreading may license virus strains isolated from their residents and poultry as a way to leverage better access to drugs and vaccines that come from studying those strains.
The plan is being advanced by a new program, announced today, that urges participating countries to place genetic information about their…
revere | August 24, 2006A new initiative on sharing avian influenza data has just been announced, called the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). This is the latest in a series of developments that have opened up influenza sequence data to the world scientific community to an unprecedented extent, a dawning recognition that the usual rules of scientific behavior and etiquette about who "owns" data need modification in the face of a potential devastating pandemic, where weeks or months head start on a scientific pathway can make an appreciable difference.
Last month Indonesia gave permission…
evolgen | August 23, 2006To be filed under: "Every dude who's gone swimming in a cold pool in the Hamptons could have told you that."
Polar bear genitals are shrinking:
The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to industrial pollutants.
Scientists report this shrinkage could, in the worst case scenario, endanger polar bears there and elsewhere by spoiling their love lives and causing their numbers to peter out.
Is it possible that the shrinkage could be due to the fact that they live in the arctic? You know, where…
revere | August 23, 2006Good news from CDC. Yesterday they announced immediate public release of some 650 influenza gene sequences. The new openness is part of a collaboration with the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL):
Through the new collaboration, CDC expects to provide genetic information for several hundred influenza viruses per year as a way to encourage more research on influenza. The sequence data will be available in nearly real time through Genbank, a public-access library for virus sequences managed by the National Institutes of Health, and through an influenza database housed at Los Alamos…
evolgen | August 22, 2006
Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a trend. The manatee in the Hudson River was an accident -- the Christopher Columbus of manatees if you will. The manatee in Rhode Island is a coincidence. I blame it on the grad student from our lab who moved to Florida to study manatees. She probably told them all about how great it is to live in the Northeast United States, so they came up here to check it out. Let's hope she didn't tell all of them about it; I don't want any trendy manatees hanging out in my neighborhood.
tfk | August 22, 2006The first lab I worked in was a fruit fly lab. As a budding mammalogist, this wasn't the most optimal environment, but it had its advantages. I learned to work with flies, and the advantages of model systems. I learned to clean glassware with speed and grace. I learned that science involves a lot of failure. And I learned about Wolbachia (Tim Karr, mentioned in that article, was the lab's head).
Carl Zimmer reports some of the tricks that bacterium can play:
If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will…
razib | August 21, 2006Unfortunately I haven't had time to set aside a good portion of time to read Coming to Life with any level of depth...so my review will be tardy. But, I do want to point to the others at SB who are stepping up.
Shellee the Church Girl.
Bora
RPM
Nick Tall Dark and faux British
PZ
Others...including me, at some point in the future.
evolgen | August 21, 2006During the early part of the twentieth century, biological research was somewhat disjointed. Naturalists studied organisms and populations in the wild; geneticists were working out the mechanisms of heredity; and other researchers were figuring out how animals develop from a fertilized egg to an adult. One important union occurred when the naturalists and geneticists came together to study the genetics of natural populations. This led to the field of population genetics, which is still providing us with insights into the mechanisms of evolution today. Another major advance occurred when…
tfk | August 21, 2006Bora, discussing whether elephants run, tells a joke:
Two elephants are sitting on a tree. A third elephant flies by. The first elephant turns to the second elephant and says: "Hmmm, I bet her nest is close by"
Which reminds me of the classic question: Why do elephants paint their nails red?
Click through for the answer.
The answer, of course, is that it helps them hide in cherry trees. If you doubt the truth of this, ask yourself when you last spotted an elephant in a cherry tree.
Bora also observes that it was Ogden Nash's birthday a few days ago, which obliges me to post my favorite bit…
scientificactivist | August 21, 2006Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development
by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Kales Press: 2006. 176 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
If you examine yourself in the mirror, take a closer look at your favorite pet, or even contemplate that pesky fly that just won't leave you alone, it's difficult to not come away with a starry-eyed appreciation for life. With their overwhelming complexity and astonishing consistency, but seemingly endless diversity, these everyday animals are almost enough to make you believe in God. And, I don't just mean some vague modern spiritual presence. No, I'm talking…
sb admin | August 20, 2006
Welcome to the new Thoughts from Kansas. I've moved a few of the posts I'm most proud of across from the old Blogger site, and I encourage you to check them out, that's probably the easiest way to get to know me, and don't be afraid to dig into all the archives back there.
By way of quick introduction, I'm a graduate student finishing my dissertation at the University of Kansas. That explains the second part of the title. I am not a native Kansan and never claimed to be, but this is where my thoughts originate.
My research is on the spatial distributions of species, and the ways that…
razib | August 19, 2006William Saletan has a roundup and commentary on the ruckus surrounding circumcision and HIV transmission. There are two issues here,
The health & public policy
The cultural angle
The think the evidence is pretty clear from individual studies and cross-cultural comparisons: all things being equal, circumcision cuts down on the rate of HIV transmission (especially from female-to-male). On the other hand, there are the important cultural issues that are often not mooted with clarity, especially in the United States. You see, the USA is one of the few nations where adult circumcision…
revere | August 19, 2006WHO has taken note (.pdf) of the increasing genetic diversity of the H5N1 influenza/A viral isolates as the disease spreads geographically. Clades are genetically related viruses with common ancestors. Since 2003, two such clades have appeared (clades 1 and 2), distinct from the original H5N1 viruses from the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak (now called clade 3). Clade 1 viruses have been isolated in southeast asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos), sandwiched between clade 2 viruses from southern China and Indonesia and Malaysia.
Until now, the experimental human vaccines have been made with seed…
revere | August 18, 2006Another bird flu death has occurred in the same village where two other cases were recently reported. This one is a nine year old girl. The others were the 17 year old we discussed in a recent post, who left the hospital against medical advice and is reported to be recovering at home, and his deceased 20 year old cousin. Cikelet village is in West Java, 990 km from the city of Bandung. Authorities say the village is rife with bird flu, with dead or sick chickens common (Reuters).
Health authorities say they are on top of this outbreak, have taken blood samples from neighbors and relatives and…
evolgen | August 17, 2006David Haussler and colleagues have identified a 118 base pair sequence that has evolved really fast along the human lineage relative to the chimpanzee lineage (Carl Zimmer has a good review). In fact, this sequence differs by two base pairs out of 118 between chimpanzees and chickens, and 18 out of 118 between chimps and humans. Differences in relative rates usually indicate changes in selection regimes along at least one lineage. These changes could be due to increased selective constraint along one lineage, relaxed constraint, or adaptive evolution. More on that later.
Also interesting is…
evolgen | August 16, 2006Check out this interview with Penn State football coach Joe Paterno:
On the fragility of life: "I do a lot of walking, and every once in a while, I step on an ant. And I say to myself, 'You know, we ain't nothing but ants.' "
I wonder if JoePa has ever looked at the back of a dollar bill . . . on weed. The boys at EDSBS think JoePaPa (the extra "Pa" is 'cause he's freakin' old . . . older than dirt, even) has been dabbling in a little E.O. Wilson:
So JoePa's either been reading chapter 27 of Sociobiology, or...well, the other option's just not possible.
Is Coach Paterno smokin' the doobies…