Posts
May 23, 2013
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7:41 AM | Can Atheists Be Redeemed?
Pope Francis said some interesting things at mass yesterday. From the Vatican Radio website: Wednesday’s Gospel speaks to us about the disciples who prevented a person from outside their group from doing good. “They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good.…
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7:09 AM | The cleanroom
Before she enters the cleanroom, Marie pins her protocol for the day and a list of her samples to the window between corridor and lab. From the outside. You can barely see through the screen. Although not very old, it is almost opaque with a yellowish haze, and the entire lab looks somewhat disheveled. Not what you would expect from the cleanest room in town. But to keep the room this clean, as free from any modern DNA as possible... Read more
May 22, 2013
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10:50 PM | The algorithms don’t lie, but people may err
For the past year or so I’ve been getting queries about what I think about Eran Elhaik’s preprint on the genetic character of European Jews. I found some of the conclusions frankly a little weird, but I assumed that things would be cleaned up for publication. Well, it’s been out for a while now: The [...]
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8:40 PM | Do species really exist?
I mentioned a while ago that I’d been invited to write about evolution for Nature’s Scitable blog network. The network …Continue reading »
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7:29 PM | The eternal Aboriginal
National Geographic has an interesting article up, unoriginally titled Australia’s Aboriginals. There are lots of great data in there, though not much novel for anyone who has tread this territory before. For example, Aboriginals tend to have much lower morbidity and mortality when they are living their “traditional” lifestyle. This isn’t a particular novel or [...]
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7:10 PM | Flower parts and then some
Most if not all of the readers of this blog know their basic floral parts. Generally there's a perianth in two whorls, sepals and petals, and then there's the androecium composed of a whorl of stamens, and lastly one or more pistils. But not all flowers are so constructed. So here's Calycanthus, Carolina spice bush. It has a lot of floral parts. Perhaps you've never taken one of these flowers apart, part by part to have a look see, but TPP just loves taking flowers
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6:53 PM | White House to recognize open science
Synopsis: A call for nominations for excellent open science researchers and advocatesThe White House is looking to recognize people who are leading in open science efforts, either by providing free access to data or by using data that is already publicly available. I imagine that public education efforts using open data would also qualify for this recognition: "Seeking Outstanding 'Open Science' Champions of Change". The reward is a trip to a White House event June 20.
We are asking for
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I am pleased to have a guest post in my "Story behind the paper" series. This one is from Jeremy Barr in Forest Rohwer's lab about a new PNAS paper.
Bacteriophage and mucus. Two unlikely entities, or an exceptional symbiosis?
By Jeremy J. Barr
Our recent research at The Rohwer Lab at San Diego State University investigates a new symbiosis formed between bacteriophage, viruses that only infect and kill bacteria, and mucus, that slimy stuff coating your mouth, nose, […]
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4:28 PM | Deviance
I hadn’t been to Nancy Fulda’s website in a while. Sadly, she didn’t win the Hugo last year. Another very good story we mentioned on the blog, “The Paper Menagerie,” snatched the title out from under her. She’s obviously staying busy, apparently writing flavor support for an online strategy game.
Anyway, she posted something interesting to her [...]
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3:27 PM | Do Species Really Exist?
" Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the ...
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A delightful partnership of science, poetry, photography and insects, this informative and witty book is an excellent introduction to common British minibeasts, intended especially for young naturalists. How can you introduce a young child to insects and give them a lifelong appreciation and respect for these important creatures? I think Anneliese Emmans Dean has found an appealing formula in her lovely children's book, Buzzing!: discover the poetry in garden minibeasts [Brambleby Books Ltd.,
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A quickie post to assure y’all I’m still around. Got a few proper posts coming soon! Remember our testate amoeba friends, the arcellinids? Here is a pair of Arcellas (Arcellae?) in the midst of division. Organic tests(=”shells”) rust over time, as in they turn yellow and then brown with oxidation. Based on that, you can [...]
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12:39 PM | A science of intentional change
If nothing else, David Sloan Wilson is ambitious. He’s been pushing the multilevel selection wheelbarrow with not much support for close to forty years (although support seems to be growing in some circles). And over the last couple of years, he’s been increasingly promoting the idea of a evolution-centred “science of intentional change” that will [...]The post A science of intentional change appeared first on Evolving Economics.
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12:26 PM | Saiga through the bottleneck…and back?
In the 1980s I was fascinated by the pictorially oriented books on the wildlife of the world which dated to the 1960s and 1970s. One of the great conservation success stories of that era were the Saiga antelope of Eurasia. In 1920 there were only 1,000-2,0000 Saia left in the world. By the 1960s their [...]
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12:00 PM | I Know Why She Swallowed The Fly
Biology concepts – carnivorous plants, minerals in biology, symbiosis, cryptids, The Thing From Another Planet was a 1951 B-horror movie. Arctic researchers find a space ship in the ice and thaw out the pilot. He turns out to be a walking plant that needs blood to feed his little seedlings. Never minds that the plant is growling, feels just fine at -60 degrees, and is wearing clothes. They finally kill him with electricity.The man-eating tree is a cryptid (hidden) organism. Cryptid means […]
Poppinga, S., Hartmeyer, S., Seidel, R., Masselter, T., Hartmeyer, I. & Speck, T. (2012). Catapulting Tentacles in a Sticky Carnivorous Plant, PLoS ONE, 7 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0045735
Buch, F., Rott, M., Rottloff, S., Paetz, C., Hilke, I., Raessler, M. & Mithofer, A. (2012). Secreted pitfall-trap fluid of carnivorous Nepenthes plants is unsuitable for microbial growth, Annals of Botany, 111 (3) 375-383. DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcs287
Schulze, W., Sanggaard, K., Kreuzer, I., Knudsen, A., Bemm, F., Thogersen, I., Brautigam, A., Thomsen, L., Schliesky, S., Dyrlund, T. & Escalante-Perez, M. (2012). The Protein Composition of the Digestive Fluid from the Venus Flytrap Sheds Light on Prey Digestion Mechanisms, Molecular & Cellular Proteomics, 11 (11) 1306-1319. DOI: 10.1074/mcp.M112.021006
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9:05 AM | The Ball State Kerfuffle
Eric Hedin, an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University, has come under fire for an honors course called, “Boundaries of Science.” The problem: the course appears to be little more than thinly veiled Christian evangelism. From The USA Today: “BSU appears to offer a class that preaches religion, yet gives students honors science…
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Join the Poo Crew as they guide you through time in this craptastic and pissarific children's book that tells you about the many amazing uses for poo and wee!After relocating to Germany, I was initially intrigued, then amused, by The Shelf that is built into many German toilets. This shelf is designed so Germans can carefully inspect their fæces before flushing. What are they looking for? I wondered. Let's face it, most people -- children and quite a few adults, too -- are fascinated by
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6:39 AM | A Blitz Through Bizarre Basal Birds
Less words, more pictures in this post, and I’ll get the one lame cake joke out of the way early. I’ve nearly finished my research blitz through the postcranial material of the NHM-Tring’s osteological collection and have made some pit-stops for cakeskulls now and then when I see one that pleases me. Now I shall […]
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1:16 AM | Dog and man: a 30,000 year friendship
To the left is a figure which illustrates the phylogenetic inferences from a new paper in Nature Communications, The genomics of selection in dogs and the parallel evolution between dogs and humans (see Carl Zimmer’s coverage in The New York Times). Why is this paper important? The first thing that jumped out at me is [...]
May 21, 2013
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6:57 PM | Science in the Magic House
Children want to help. That is pretty well established. But why they do it, is not. Robert Hepach has developed a method to explore exactly this: what is it that motivates young children to help? To study this he uses an eye tracker that measures the pupil dilation of children after they performed certain tasks. Pupil dilation is related to „sympathetic arousal“, changes in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system that occur whenever an organism pays attention to something,... Read
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A very excited out-of-work sports caster called TPP on the
phone last night. “Now’s the time!” And after reeling off the current set of
anti-Obama sound bites asked me to sign a petition in support of Sarah
Palindrone (someone who sounds just as dumb forward as backward) running for
the Senate from Alaska. Oh, yes, and a little
donation to the effort would be nice too.
However the response that TPP wanted to leave was not an option.
Now this raises
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Hearts and Prayers to Moore, Oklahoma. I was sound asleep and was completely unaware of the weather and tragedy happening back home. A very bad tornado hit Oklahoma – just south of Oklahoma City. I began getting messages on Twitter, Facebook, and via email asking if I was still in Africa or not. I am. [...]
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4:38 PM | Human mutation unveiled
What a great age we live in. Until recently critical parameters in population genetics such as mutation rates had to be inferred and assumed, even though they served as bases for much more complex inferences. Now with humans (and humans are only the beginning!) much of what was inferred is being assessed in a more [...]
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One of the things I have been thinking about lately is how to further increase my own productivity. Regardless of your career goals, increasing your productivity is only going to help you accomplish more (by definition) and increase your esteem … Continue reading →
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2:17 PM | Whose genome is it anyway?
Fifteen years ago it was the stuff of science fiction. Now, you can just swab your cheek, send it to …Continue reading »
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A comic yet scientifically accurate "Where's Wally"-style examination of how the human body factory works. Everyone is curious to learn how their body works, but understanding the details can often be a daunting task. But a new children's book rises up to meet this challenge, and it does so admirably: Human Body Factory by Dan Green [Kingfisher – An imprint of Macmillan Children's Books, 2012; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US] The author compares the human body to a factory filled with
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1:54 PM | Hey. Where’d you get that fungus?
I’m very excited to be going to this meeting in June that focuses on the microbiome (i.e., all the living microbes) of our built environment – our homes, work places, sewers, etc. I’m used to thinking about the genetics of much larger living things – like chipmunks – where large non-living things – like rivers […]
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10:30 AM | Wild wallabies in the UK
I haven’t had time to provide answers on the previous article, sorry about that. Busy with preparation for the International Symposium on Pterosaurs, this year being held in Rio. Purely for the sake of adding something new (TetZoo podcast followers will understand the motivation, I hope), here’s some recycled text from Tet Zoo ver 2 [...]
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This kit overcomes one of the main challenges for teaching anatomy by adopting a build-it-yourself approach. The book is concise, well-written and engaging and the kit is accurate and interesting and will provide many hours of enjoyment as children and adults work together to build the human body. Sometimes, the best way to learn is to wrap your hands around stuff and ... build it yourself! This perhaps is never more important than when trying to learn anatomy, which is the reason that these
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7:50 AM | A Lesson in Applied Probability
Nate Silver provides the antidote to some dubious statistical reasoning on the part of certain conservatives. He was replying in particular to this column from Peggy Noonan. A column, mind you, that opens with, “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” Goodness! Then she presents evidence like this: The second…
