Posts

April 28, 2013

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8:22 AM | Devil Dispatch: MHC the Key to Contagious Cancer Vaccine?

The contagious cancer currently ripping through Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) populations has captivated public attention and imagination. The reasons for this are understandable. First, in a world where cancer kills 7.6 million people every year, just the idea of tumor cells that can be passed along between individuals like a cold or flu is a horrific notion to contemplate—a concept straight out of a cheap thriller novel. Also, the irascible Tasmanian devil has a sort of […]

Siddle HV, Kreiss A, Tovar C, Yuen CK, Cheng Y, Belov K, Swift K, Pearse AM, Hamede R, Jones ME & Skjødt K (2013). Reversible epigenetic down-regulation of MHC molecules by devil facial tumour disease illustrates immune escape by a contagious cancer., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (13) 5103-8. PMID: 23479617

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April 27, 2013

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11:37 PM | Readers Write In: What is This Snake in My Laundry Room (International Edition)?

Dear Readers: Word of your snake-identification skills has been traveling far and wide and across the globe. This week we hear from Dan in Mexico. "Hello David,I was wondering if you could identify this young snake for me, which I found it in my laundry room a year or so ago. I live in Cuernavaca, Mexico (central, almost south Mexico), about an hour south of Mexico City. Semi-tropical, and

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2:16 AM | Baboons kidnap and raise feral dogs as pets?!

No summary available for this post.

April 26, 2013

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7:21 PM | Study: Banning smoking in subsidized housing could save millions in health care costs

Another day, another study that shows investing in public health interventions can make a serious dent in health care spending. A new study has found that banning smoking in all U.S. subsidized housing could yield cost savings of about $521 million every year.

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4:50 PM | Ecology of zoonotic diseases

Figuring out the what, where and when of disease outbreaks By Nadine Lymn, ESA director of public affairs Plague, Lyme disease, Hantavirus, West Nile Virus—these bacteria and viruses are zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted to people from animals like ticks, mosquitoes and rodents and were the subject of a recent Ecological Society of America [...]

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3:55 PM | NC legislature still trying to gag state employees

The Raleigh News & Observer is reporting that the NC legislature attempted to sneak an order gaging state employees (like me) from working on climate change (impacts, social resilience, etc). This is just one of many anti-environment legislative actions including the crazy legislation against sea level rise and the dismissal of the members of the [...]

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3:38 PM | The World We Want to Live In

You get tiny, unexpected tastes of the world perfected in a lot of places, if you watch. I got it last week at my son Eli’s bar mitzvah (which I’ll write more about shortly). Naomi Shahib Nye got it in the place most of us feel as far from the world we want as possible…

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3:25 PM | Taking the pulse of ocean life

We tend to keep track of things we think are important—blood pressure, how many calories are in that muffin, hurricane tracks, stock prices, celebrity rehab details. But sometime we don’t know what’s important until it’s too late, and that ignorance can come back to bite us. Hence the annual physical exams that are standard in [...]

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1:34 PM | Hairy Plants, Hairy Animals: How Species Survive in the Arctic

Take a look at the hairy world of Arctic species with this video.

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1:21 PM | Kids Like Bugs: entomology outreach in elementary schools (Part 2)

On Wednesday, Chris Buddle and Paul Manning posted the first of a two-part series on outreach activities in elementary schools. That post focused on the ‘why’ - this one (also written by Chris and Paul) is about the ‘how’. How to talk to kids about bugs: First thing about talking to elementary school [...]

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1:00 PM | What we’re reading: readings for DNA Day, estimating Ne, and open-sourced data visualization

As we head into the weekend, here’s a few things we’ve noticed that might be worth your screen-time. In the journals Sixty years ago Thursday, Nature published three papers that unravelled (ha!) the molecular structure of DNA. They’re freely available online. … Continue reading →

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12:17 PM | Not using the microphone at conference talks

In some humanities fields, when you present a paper, that’s exactly what you do. You stand at a microphone and read your paper, word for word. I’m glad that none of those conferences are in my plans. Nevertheless, scientific conferences are more formal than our normal teaching milieu. People dress up a notch nicer than [...]

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12:10 PM | Climate Change and Marine Communities 5: Population-level effects of ocean warming

This is the fifth installment of my serialization of a new book chapter on “Climate Change and Marine Communities” written with Chris Harley and Mike Burrows. It is for a new book “Marine Community Ecology and Conservation” that I’m co-editing with Mark Bertness, Brian Silliman, and Jay Stachowicz. The book is more or less a followup to the best-selling [...]

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10:49 AM | Plantwise talks Open Data at G8 event next week… Join us!

What food security challenge could be solved with open access to data? CABI’s CEO and Plantwise representatives will join DFID, host USDA, and delegates from G8 countries in Washington, D.C. next week, April 29-30, to discuss putting the open exchange of knowledge at the heart of food security and global nutrition. This is your chance to weigh in and participate. Watch the event on the [...]

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10:00 AM | Flump (on Friday this time!)

Welcome to the BioDV Flump! Every Friday, we highlight some recent papers that we found interesting but didn’t have the . . .

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8:38 AM | Agroecology – benefiting farmers around the world

This week, the UK Minister of State for Agriculture and Food, David Heath, has announced his support for the use of agroecological farming methods which are seen as the foundation of sustainable agriculture. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology (IAASTD) define agroecology as “the science and practice of applying ecological concepts and principles [...]

April 25, 2013

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6:21 PM | Will Tom Vilsack’s USDA keep its promise to poultry plant workers about their grueling, disabling work?

The USDA Secretary tells Congress that his agency still plans to implement a new poultry slaughter inspection system that will allow producers to drastically increase line speeds, while a disturbing new report on poultry workers in Alabama explain the harmful effects of the current working conditions.

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5:28 PM | Niigaan: In Conversation – Leanne Simpson

A powerful presentation by Leanne Simpson discussing Mississauga Nishinaabeg history. “300 years of entanglement with the Canadian political system has only resulted in the loss of our most precious relatives [...]

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2:34 PM | Energy and the Environment – What Physicists Can Do

The Perimeter Institute is a futuristic-looking place where over 250 physicists are thinking about quantum gravity, quantum information theory, cosmology and the like. Since I work on some of these things, I was recently invited to give the weekly colloquium there. But I took the opportunity to try to rally them into action: • […]

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1:37 PM | Worth reading: Lessons from Texas, H7N9, and putting pedestrians first

A few recent pieces worth a look

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12:12 PM | Teaching efficiently: the muddiest point

I mentioned earlier that I sometimes start classes with short ungraded written quizzes. Now, I’ll tell you how I sometimes end class: a ‘Muddiest Point Evaluation.’ If I have one minute at the end of class, I ask everyone to take out a piece or shred of paper. I ask everyone to write the ‘muddiest [...]

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3:53 AM | Wings Spread

When spring took its first few cautious steps in March, I found a neat little green caterpillar in the yard. Not knowing what it was, I of course put it in a terrarium and fed it so I could monitor its growth and figure out what species it was.The mystery.I gave it grass, since that's what it was eating when I first found it, and thankfully the caterpillar was satisfied with its simple diet. Soon, it progressed through its instars, darkening from a light green to a yellow-green and brown […]

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12:49 AM | More thoughts on SWD trapping for 2013: How many traps should growers use?

After hearing several permutations on a similar question this week, namely "how many spotted wing drosophila (SWD) traps do I need to use?", I posted this information on the Strawberry Growers Information Portal.More informationMore on spotted wing drosophila monitoring: How many traps should growers use? - Strawberry Growers Information Portal

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12:01 AM | Genome-wide recombination patterns and their implications in threespine stickleback fish

[This post is by Marius Rösti; I am just putting it up. -B.]During meiosis – the characteristic cell division in sexually reproducing organisms – the mother cell that gives rise to sperm or ova has to multiply and reduce the number of chromosomes from two full sets to one. During this process, the two homologous chromosomes (one from each parent) can exchange DNA segments. This process is called meiotic recombination. In a paper just published in Molecular Ecology, we demonstrate in […]

April 24, 2013

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10:10 PM | Preventing worker deaths through better building design

Construction is the US industry sector with the most worker fatalities. Designing buildings with construction and maintenance workers in mind can make buildings safer, and green buildings truly sustainable.

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7:27 PM | Reproducibility at Nature

In an editorial in tomorrow’s issue, Nature announces an initiative to increase reproducibility of research results. They state that “From next month, Nature and the Nature research journals will introduce editorial measures to address the problem by improving the consistency and quality of reporting in life-sciences articles”. The announced measures include To ease the interpretation …Read More

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6:41 PM | Vision is for decision

When we typically think of how decision-making works in the brain, we think of new input coming in, perhaps through the eyes or ears, being processed in the relevant sensory areas, and then sent to the ‘decision-making’ areas (the basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, or anterior cingulate cortex) where this information is used to make a decision. [...]

Chubykin, A., Roach, E., Bear, M. & Shuler, M. (2013). A Cholinergic Mechanism for Reward Timing within Primary Visual Cortex, Neuron, 77 (4) 723-735. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.12.039

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6:08 PM | Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors for Mesopredators?

Mesopredator release—the increase in abundance and/or density of small predators when large predator populations decline (Soulé et al. 1988)—is a core concept underlying my own PhD research in Kenya. Although there is solid evidence for mesopredator release effects in a wide variety of circumstances around the globe—from the increases in red fox populations following lynx declines in Sweden (Helldin et al. 2006) to the proliferation of cownose rays as a result of the decimation of shark […]

Kamler, J., Stenkewitz, U. & Macdonald, D. (2013). Lethal and sublethal effects of black-backed jackals on cape foxes and bat-eared foxes, Journal of Mammalogy, 94 (2) 295-306. DOI: 10.1644/12-MAMM-A-122.1

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5:44 PM | Climate Change and Marine Communities 4: Individual-level effects of ocean warming: ecophysiology

This is the fourth installment of my serialization of a new book chapter on “Climate Change and Marine Communities” written with Chris Harley and Mike Burrows. It is for a new book “Marine Community Ecology and Conservation” that I’m co-editing with Mark Bertness, Brian Silliman, and Jay Stachowicz. The book is more or less a followup to the best-selling [...]

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5:00 PM | Mechanisms of Resilience & Other ‘Re-Words’ in Urban Greening

I recently gave a talk at the Horticulture Society of New York’s annual Healing Nature Forum: Planting the Seeds of Health and Sustainability. As could be expected, there was a lot of talk about Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath, and the role … Continue reading →

April 28, 2013

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