Topics
I've called this section of the weblog the "topics" section. Unlike the "reviews" section, entries here often don't review anything. Sometimes they are just links to other sites with comments; sometimes they are contextualizations of material I find elsewhere.
The section is divided into categories where I put things. The biggest categories are "meta", which is blogging about science and blogging, "biotech", which has entries about biotechnology and society, and "humor", where you can decide for yourself if I have any.
Here are the categories:
And following are short excerpts of the entries in each category:
I have many essays delineating the major topics of human evolution...
They kill more people in Africa than any predator, and now they're hitting the capybaras:
GULF BREEZE, Fla...
DarkSyde at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has done an interview with paleo-artist Carl Buell, which has some of Buell's great illustrations, along with his experiences as an illustrator...
Nature has a short feature by John Whitfield about the new wave of Darwinism in literary criticism...
The AP is reporting on a new cave art find in France...
Carl Zimmer has
a very nice piece on the evolution of crying and colic on his weblog, The Loom...
In Carl Zimmer's New York Times article, he recounts how he signed his daughter up to match wits with a chimp...
I really like that quote, by computer security expert Bruce Schneier...
On the topic of group decision making, I recommend this interesting column that gives a quick review of creativity research in psychology...
A news article from Computerworld:
A Japanese university announced scientists there have developed a new technology that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for thousands of years...
Linked on Evolgen, I found this post from Nobel Intent that gives a quick summary of reasons the U...
I got pointed to this Ronald Bailey article in Reason, which describes the approaches of some ethicists to the prospect of "genetic enhancement" of humanity...
I draw your attention to an essay by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in the current Scientific American Mind...
National Geographic News has a story about the ubiquity of gene patenting, following on an analysis in Science (subscription required) by Kyle Jensen and Fiona Murray...
The Boston Globe has a story about geneticist George Church and his quest to bring whole-genome sequencing below $1000...
After yesterday's post on sex selection, a reader sent me a link to a BusinessWeek article from earlier this year that discusses a new hypothesis for the elevated proportion of males in many populations:
Many people think the reason [for reduced female birth ratio] is abortion and the killing of newborn girls...
I was reading The Scientist because RPM sent me to this article, titled "The Human Genome Project +5"...
OK, I just think the Mozart skull DNA extraction is creepy...
I discuss biotechnology and society in my genetics course, and today I wandered across this working paper discussing sex control of offspring, including selective abortion in the US and abroad, preimplantation and prefertilization screening, and possible future effects of the technologies...
I'm usually very skeptical of claims that widespread DNA testing will result in bad effects -- "Big Brother" finding out your genotype and discriminating against you, for example...
Jocelyn Kaiser writes:
The work involves a simple bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium that Venter's eponymous institute in Rockville, Maryland, has been tinkering with for years...
Carl Zimmer has a very nice post describing recent work in bioinformatics, with a view toward explaining what the field is and how it works...
Paul Elias of the AP reports on how geneticists are trying to make tastier hogs:
Even before the pig genome is completed sometime next year, top commercial producers such as Pig Improvement Co...
On the topic of biotechnology, this AP article describes Ventria Bioscience's field tests of rice altered with a human gene:
Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines...
Amy Harmon explains some dog genetics in the NY Times today, in an article focused on whippets...
Now, I hadn't considered this:
How would the world feel, how do you feel, knowing that at the moment you are reading this you may be wearing transgenic underpants...
This is a nice little article in the times by "collaborative problem solving" director Denise Caruso
A NEW generation of genetically engineered crops that produce drugs and chemicals is fast approaching the market -- bringing with it a new wave of concerns about the safety of the global food and feed supply...
Planting time has arrived in most of the country -- even here in zone 4 -- so you may be reading those seed packets carefully...
Elizabeth Pennisi's story about maize genomics is a good reminder for why biology will continue to grow in importance toward our understanding of human history:
With $9...
Genetically engineered creeping bentgrass has been found growing miles from a test plot where it was planted two years ago, according to a NY Times story:
Two years ago, scientists at the E...
Either this continues today's Kansas theme, or this week's genetics theme...
That's the strand of this LiveScience article:
Contamination from bacteria DNA generally make up 50 to more than 90 percent of the raw DNA extracted from the bone and muscles of ancient specimens, [University of Copenhagen reseracher Tom] Gilbert said...
Nicholas Wade writes to answer the mammoth cloning question...
Here's an AP story about cloning bullfighting bulls...
"Horse racing editor" Mike Brunker checks in with an excellent MSNBC article on cloning in the horse racing world...
The New England Journal of Medicine is carrying an article by researcher Gretchen Berland, which describes her work documenting the health access needs of the wheelchair-bound:
By the time Galen Buckwalter's physician knocked on the exam-room door, Buckwalter's video camera had been recording for nearly 40 minutes...
I read two interesting articles today on brain performance-enhancing of one kind or another...
I couldn't help but wonder after reading this story:
Bacterial biofilms can form almost anywhere, even on your teeth if you don't brush for a day or two...
This story caught my attention:
In a controversial study, researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and now sits frozen in the human genome...
I'll be lecturing on hemoglobinopathies again this week, and I stumbled across this 2001 article by Malcolm Gladwell, profiling Fred Soper and the early 20th century effort to eradicate malaria...
I very much liked Carl Zimmer's Slate piece about foodborne pathogens and their lessons for defending against bioterrorism...
The International Herald Tribune is running a story by Larry Rohter about the dispute over rights to blood samples taken from Brazil's Karitiana tribe more than 10 years ago:
"We were duped, lied to and exploited," Renato Karitiana, the leader of the tribal association, said in an interview here on the tribe's reservation in the western Amazon, where 313 Karitiana eke out a living by farming, fishing and hunting...
I've been lecturing about various genetic enhancement strategies in my genetics course the last two weeks...
William Saletan wrote in favor of chimeras in the Washington Post last weekend (via Eye on DNA):
The Stanford experiment wouldn't actually produce a human brain...
What greets my RSS reader this morning...
They'll never tire of trying to find Columbus' hometown...
The proper forms were filed, and the family made the request, but some of the Gipps are angry about it:
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich...
On the topic of increasing scientific illiteracy, we have this frozen mammoth sperm puff piece from the AP:
It isn't exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives...
Slate has an interesting slide-show by Jon Lackman about efforts to resurrect the quagga...
I've been telling people this week that there is some sense to which the evolutionary future will be determined by the cultural impact of technological changes -- genetic engineering being the most prominent example...
It seems clear that we have only one hope against superintelligent fearless killer mice: Robots that carry out our telepathic commands...
This is from the Nicholas Wade article on James Watson's genome:
Some scientists believe that it will be medically useful to sequence patients' genomes when the cost of sequencing falls to around $10,000 or less...
Maybe you believe you have an identical twin somewhere...
A few months ago, a particularly egregious neighbor dog left a gift on our lawn -- while my fascinated girls watched out the window...
The AP is running this:
LONDON - Scientists are racing to develop a test to catch athletes who may attempt to boost performance by manipulating their genes...
Gretchen Reynolds reports in the NY Times on the gene therapy treatment Repoxygen as a means of athletic enhancement:
It was a single line from a longer e-mail message...
First, there was Michael Crichton's guest op-ed:
YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place...
This week's Science includes an article by Elizabeth Pennisi naming "Human Genetic Variation" as the science breakthrough of the year...
This is a great story by Amy Harmon in the NY Times:
Stalking Strangers' DNA to Fill in the Family Tree
They swab the cheeks of strangers and pluck hairs from corpses...
In Erika Check's Nature article on celebrity genomes, she includes a passage in which Francis Collins points out a problem with public access to private genomes:
But it's not clear that all of the genome pioneers are acting altruistically...
Nick Wade has the story:
A $10 million prize for cheap and rapid sequencing of the human genome was announced today by the X Prize Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif...
Writer Amy Harmon has a touching article in today's NY Times, profiling the yearlong adjustments faced by a 23-year-old woman who tested positive for the Huntington's gene...
I missed this story about immigration and DNA testing when it was printed earlier this year...
Amy Harmon profiles Dan Stoicescu, a Swiss-living millionaire who has become the first paying customer of the genome-sequencing company, Knome...
AP reporter Matt Crenson has a story on the "twisted path" of one man's DNA-aided search for his biological father...
The NYTimes has been very helpful for human geneticists lately, at least when it comes to providing good articles for class discussions...
Amy Harmon brings several patients' stories to this article, "Fear of insurance trouble leads many to shun or hide DNA tests...
I think this Times article by bioethicist Robert Klitzman is chilling:
"I pleaded with my sister, Susan, to get genetic testing, but she refused," a woman recently told me in my office...
Another thing I didn't expect to see today: DeCode Genetics went looking through James Watson's genome sequence for evidence he is secretly black:
A new analysis of Dr...
Nicholas Wade writes about the sequencing of James Watson's genome:
A copy of his genome, recorded on two DVDs, was presented to Dr...
Back in May, Nature ran an article (non-free) titled, "Celebrity genomes alarm researchers," by Erika Check...
This week's Nature includes a report on the sequencing of James Watson's complete genome by a new process developed by 454 Life Sciences...
The most dramatic illustration of bipedalism is the pelvis, and the most dramatic specimen demonstrating pelvic morphology is the relatively complete skeleton from Hadar, Lucy, AL 288-1...
The BBC is running this article about a new study that evaluates the bipedality of A...
The skeletal adaptation to bipedalism is well documented in early hominids...
Brainethics writes about the recent Austrian no-human-rights-for-chimp decision:
But what if the ruling have ended otherwise...
Working on a paper about early hominid lineage diversity, Milford has pointed out a sticking point in consideration of niche breadth in early hominids...
I was discussing animal (and plant) rights in class yesterday, and now I see that the Spanish Socialist Party wants to make apes legal persons (via Althouse):
The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for "the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings...
This Reuters report certainly has a sinister undercurrent:
"If you think how easily a baboon could rip a person apart, the fact that they don't is quite remarkable," [Jenni] Trethowan said...
...
In contrast to the terrible white buffalo stories, there is a fairly genetically enlightening story about Argentine ants, by Jeanna Bryner...
Science has a NetWatch feature that pointed me to the Bushmeat Mapserver from the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force...
A new paper in Current Biology documents the mortality suffered by Taï Forest chimpanzees as a result of common human respiratory ailments during the last ten years...
A Cornelia Dean article explores a theme that concerns many primatologists, indeed anyone who studies threatened animals: When you confine a small set of animals to a tiny patch of forest, they can't move when their patch starts to degrade...
Good news for bonobos:
Congo has announced the establishment of a rain-forest preserve intended to shield the bonobo, one of human beings' two closest ape relations, from wildlife poachers and deforestation...
This is just a fascinating story from the international Der Spiegel:
Knut Should Be Killed, Say Some Animal Activists
Berlin's polar bear cub Knut is more famous than ever...
The title of the one-page paper by Magdalena Bermejo and colleagues tells most of the story: "Ebola oubreak killed 5000 gorillas...
Here's a happy AP article:
BRISTOL, England - A western lowland gorilla has given birth at a zoo in southwest England after being given a fertility drug that is normally used on humans, zoo officials said Friday...
This Reuters article is just brutal:
Lions in the area [southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique] have developed a taste for human flesh because people have been sleeping outdoors to protect their crops from raiding bush pigs, which the cats follow onto croplands, a leading expert said...
I ran across this story about unusual disease affecting hybrids of Asiatic and African lions in Indian zoos:
NEW DELHI - Nearly two dozen crossbred lions are slowly dying in northern India from a mysterious disease afflicting the hybrid offspring of Asiatic and African cats paired in a discontinued experimental program...
The NY Times has an article about the licensing fees that zoos pay to China to keep giant pandas in the country...
There's a nice long AP article about the possible trade-off between conservation and experimentation on sooty mangabeys...
OK, this was local news here, and now it's national news:
MILWAUKEE - A farm in Wisconsin is quickly becoming hallowed ground again for American Indians with the birth of its third white buffalo, an animal considered sacred by many tribes for its potential to bring good fortune and peace...
Rex Dalton reports on Charles Musiba's efforts to preserve the Laetoli footprints with a new museum:
[The weathering to the trackways] prompted Tanzanian anthropologist, Charles Musiba, now at the University of Colorado in Denver, to call for the creation of a new museum to reveal and display the historic prints...
Julien Riel-Salvatore has been following the fungus problems at Lascaux...
This comes from the same news article cited in the last post, but I thought it deserved its own entry...
From the AP story:
BERKELEY, Calif...
In a roundtable interview yesterday, President Bush commented to reporters that "both sides [i...
Here's an online symposium on science and religion at the Cosmic Log site sponsored by MSNBC...
In an article on AlterNet, plant breeder Stan Cox gives an eyewitness account of the Kansas Board of Education hearings on the proposed statewide science standards (hat tip: Panda's Thumb)...
Religion writer Hanna Rosin has an article in the New York Times Magazine on the creationist "avant-garde": trained geologists arguing that Noah's flood can explain the fossil record...
So I was reading yesterday's total softball exhibition review in the New York Times, on the new Ken Ham-built Creation Museum:
For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle...
Man, camp has gotten a lot more boring since I was a kid:
At the summer camp at Timber-lee Christian Center in East Troy, Wis...
The AP is running an article about Darwin Day this Sunday, and Gretchen spotted it on MSNBC accompanied by a photo of Janet Monge...
Now this (Sydney Morning Herald) is just sad:
An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin, which is slated for the National Museum of Australia later this decade, has failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution...
Patricia Cohen's piece in the New York Times today is headlined, "A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin...
I got e-mailed this terrible article from the Chronicle of Higher Education...
Thanks to a student, I have a link to
an opinion in the online edition of the Valley Morning Star from Harlingen, Texas...
An excellent discussion of the legal issues involved in current attempts to put intelligent design in public school curricula is
an article by Michael C...
Nature is carrying an interview with Kenneth Miller and Kevin Padian about their recent experience as expert witnesses in the Dover trial:
Why did you feel it was important to testify...
Check out the judge's opinion if you are interested...
American Scientist has an article by Gregory Graffin and William Provine on scientists' self-described religious beliefs...
Razib has a challenge: "If you had 10 words or less, what would you have the public master about evolutionary theory...
Notably not good:
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools...
...
The New York Times has a profile of "Flock of Dodos" filmmaker Randy Olson:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth...
In his current Newsweek column, George Will writes a short retrospective on the Scopes evolution trial, which happened 80 years ago...
The Economist had a recent story about the global reach of creationism...
Thanks to all those who wrote after yesterday's opinion column ran...
Here's a line from a Reuters story about intelligent design education in Britain:
Among the guidelines, applying to children up to the age of 14, is a suggestion that pupils act out the debate by playing the roles of Galileo, Charles Darwin and the current best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins...
Via the Kansas City Star (sign-up required), John Hanna of the Associated Press has reported that two Kansas Board of Education members have not actually read the proposed standards:
Board member Kathy Martin, of Clay Center, elicited groans of disbelief from a few audience members when she acknowledged she had only scanned the proposal, which is more than 100 pages...
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article by Evan Goldstein about ways that evolutionary theory have been embraced by some Jewish traditions:
"It is the power of the Torah that all theories can be included," wrote one Montreal-based Orthodox rabbi in the summer of 1925, at the time of the Scopes trial...
I just watched the new Nova documentary, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial...
I'm from Kansas, and proud of it...
The Kansas Board of Education voted yesterday to accept the proposed changes to the state science education standards, pending outside review, according to this CBS News report (Lots of stories covering this, but the CBS one has a clever graphic with Michelangelo's God picking Darwin's nose...
MSNBC is carrying an Associated Press article covering the Kansas State Board of Education discussions on evolution and intelligent design...
"We're going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles," Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey...
Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy has a review of the 1997 book, Summer of the Gods, the real history of the Scopes trial (via Althouse)...
Scientific American has put online a long discourse between Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, about how scientists should approach religion...
Lawrence Krauss has commentary in the NY Times about the recent Kansas State Board of Education elections:
But perhaps more worrisome than a political movement against science is plain old ignorance...
There is very nice article at Kuro5hin with that title...
The LA Times is carrying a story by writer William Lobdell about the apparent conflict between the Book of Mormon and DNA evidence for New World settlement...
The following quote really sums up the problem with "intelligent design" as science, and why it is not taken seriously...
A great commentary in the Times this morning:
Someday the Sun Will Go Out and the World Will End (but Don't Tell Anyone)
By Dennis Overbye
...
OK, I have to take a moment off from Just Science week, to note this AP article about creationist protests of the National Museums of Kenya:
"I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it," says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya's 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers...
On November 13, most PBS stations will be showing a Nova episode called, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial...
Ron Bailey at Reason magazine gives an accounting of the beliefs about evolution and creationism of all the major party candidates for U...
New York Times reporter Cornelia Dean writes about a unique retraction by 84-year-old chemist Homer Jacobson:
Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N...
Writer John Scalzi takes note of the fact that he's right in the neighborhood of the Creation Museum, and now offers to write a full, "snarkilicious" report if his readers come up with $250 for his PayPal account in the next week...
John Scalzi's readers ponied up for him to visit the Creation Museum and post his reactions...
The NY Times has an article about the scientists' boycott of the Kansas evolution hearings...
Burt Humburg and Ed Brayton have a very readable account of the Dover trial in Skeptic magazine, available now online...
Last week's Science has an article about "public acceptance of evolution" by Jon Miller, Eugenie Scott and Shinji Okamoto...
WordPress...
...
Utah's legislature rejected the anti-evolution bill before them:
SALT LAKE CITY - Public schools in Utah won't have to change the way they teach evolution, after the state's House chamber on Monday gutted, and then killed, a bill that would have required science courses to mention alternative claims...
The paper Wisconsin Dells Events has a story about Bill Mielke's efforts to bring a creation museum to the Dells:
What Mielke found was government-recognized artifacts that he believes seriously challenge evolution by depicting dinosaurs and humans living side-by-side...
From Reuters:
BOSTON - A Christian biologist is suing the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, claiming he was fired for refusing to accept evolution, lawyers involved in the case said on Friday...
Today I lectured on the earliest hominid samples for my graduate course on australopithecines...
McEwen and Wingfield (2003) discuss the concept of allostasis...
On the subject of insane feats of endurance, please allow me to draw your attention to this story about extreme children endurance runners:
Marathon children collapse in a copycat race for glory
From Ashling O'Connor in Bombay
A TEN-YEAR-OLD girl from a remote village in eastern India has become the country's latest under-age long-distance runner in a growing craze that has prompted allegations of abuse and exploitation...
We're pretty much obsessed with the Tour de France here...
Thus says the "Ultramarathon Man," Dean Karnazes, as profiled by Wired (via Instapundit)...
On a bit of a writing junket for his book, Mankind Evolving, in 1963 Theodosius Dobzhansky put an essay in Current Anthropology titled "Anthropology and the Natural Sciences -- The Problem of Human Evolution...
Scientific American has an editors' blog, SciAm Observations...
Viral evolution is different from human evolution chiefly because viruses mutate faster, exist in larger populations, have much shorter generations, and have a sharp multifold population structure, including within-host subpopulations and global (and potentially local, regional, or species-specific) metapopulations...
Bees, dogs, and cattle have all provided interesting evolutionary stories this week...
Nature has a news report on a problem with seabirds on Gough Island in the South Atlantic...
I'm reading through the volume Integrative Paths to the Past (Corruccini and Ciochon, eds...
Olivia Judson's blog, "The Wild Side" has quickly become a worthwhile weekly stop...
The Sunday NY Times has a long, entertaining article about the defenders of British red squirrels...
Now I'm back home again, and catching up on some reading...
Andrew Sullivan has been posting comments from readers about why evolutionary biology is comprised of "theories" rather than "laws...
I thought for a long time about how to respond to Razib's challenge:
My post asking to define evolution in less than 10 words elicited a lot of response (some of it outside the parameters I set in regards to length)...
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
New research led by UC Davis anthropologist Tim Weaver adds to the evidence that chance, rather than natural selection, best explains why the skulls of modern humans and ancient Neanderthals evolved differently...
Last year around this time, I noted that I happened to be reading Sewall Wright during a TV episode that mentioned Sewall Wright...
A bee orchid...
Papilio caterpillar...
Rudbeckia flower, viewed in ultraviolet light...
Skeleton of an Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History...
This week's NY Times Science section is devoted to evolution, with articles by:
Carl Zimmer, on microbial evolution
John Noble Wilford, on human paleontology
Nicholas Wade, on recent human genetic evolution
Carol Kaesuk Yoon, on evo-devo
An essay by Douglas Erwin, about evo-devo and Darwinism
A video interview with my UW colleague, Sean Carroll
And several other things...
The Hawaiian cane toad is a classic case of an invasive species, and its genetics have long been a subject of study for those interested in the spread of species into new habitat...
It's a short piece by John Noble Wilford, and there may be little more to say:
Remains of the extinct dwarf buffalo were found 50 years ago in a cave on Cebu, an island in the Philippines, but were not brought to the attention of scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago until recent years...
Like mathematician Terence Tao hasn't heard that one before, hyuk...
LiveScience has a story about the qualities of good racing horses...
At Nobel Intent, Jonathan Gitlin writes about the diversity of lab mice:
Now, scientists don't use just any mice; you couldn't trap one in your attic and then bring it to work...
A paper in this week's Science by Hopi Hoekstra and colleagues (DOI link) ends with this provocative paragraph:
This work has specific implications for understanding the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for adaptive phenotypic change...
I'm not into whale-blogging, but with a quote like that, the narwhal has become today's subject...
Who'd'a thunk it...
Who knew...
At the moment, our yard here has many more butterflies than the "butterfly garden" at the zoo...
That was the message that just flashed surreally on my TV screen, from the old U2 "ZooTV" tour...
The embargo has now ended on the second, and far more important paper that I mentioned the other day...
Spring has finally come to us here in the North, and it's time to start thinking about planting...
--Originally posted August 24, 2007...
Massimo Pigliucci gives a combative review of Michael Lynch's new book, The Origins of Genome Architecture...
I've had a very busy couple of days, and haven't been maintaining my reading-and-linking as much as I had hoped...
Like most good stories in biology, this one begins with Darwin...
RPM at Evolgen has a post raising a concern I've been seeing a lot the last week or two:
If you add up all three classes of mutations -- deleterious, neutral, and beneficial -- and figure out how many have fixed over the time scale you're looking at, you get the amount of evolutionary change along the lineage in question...
Usually an FAQ starts with the easiest-to-answer questions...
I ran across this paper from a few years ago by John Avise and DeEtte Walker, which considers the implication of reticulation-based species concepts for mtDNA-generated phylogenies...
Here's the story:
Officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly...
I found this paper by E...
R...
The New York Times has given over free access to its e-archives, normally behind the "Times Select" paywall...
Here's the main idea of this BBC story:
Scientists are increasingly convinced that tragedies in the deep past have shaped human evolution...
The NY Times has an article by Sandra Blakeslee describing geological evidence for recent (i...
John Wilkins has a neat post about the effects of the first burrowing worms during the Cambrian, based on a recent paper...
The climate of the Early Pliocene differed from that of the Miocene primarily by the appearance of a cooling and drying trend across Africa, where early hominids evolved...
This is a neat story:
GREENSBURG, Kan...
Mars and the moon are in conjunction tonight, as I happened to notice outside...
A local story:
MILWAUKEE - A 76-year-old Kenosha County man in whose cornfield the skeleton of a mammoth believed to be about 12,500 years old was dug up in 1994 is interested in selling it, and officials of the Milwaukee Public Museum are interested in it...
Every introductory class in biological anthropology talks about wisdom teeth, the common name for human third molars...
A Slate column by Meghan O'Roarke discusses the latest trend in male vilification:
A man who doesn't want to watch his wife give birth is a jerk...
Here's some good news in medicine:
A 450-year-old piece of Charles V's pinkie lends support to the theory that it was gout that led one of the most powerful rulers of all time to abdicate, Spanish researchers report...
An article in the Washington Post by Guy Gugliotta discusses the identity of Christopher Columbus, on the 500th anniversary of his death...
I'm coming late to this story, but it's still timely...
From the AP story "Mozart mystery just gets murkier":
After months of sophisticated DNA sleuthing reminiscent of a "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" episode, forensics experts admitted Sunday on national television that they still can't say with certainty whether an ancient skull belonged to the composer, as some believe...
On the subject of Craig Venter, I ran across this old interview from Bio-IT World magazine...
I've been reading Ron Amundson's new history of biology book, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought...
A book excerpt in the Telegraph by David Attenborough asks this question:
Animals were the first things that human beings drew...
British physiologist Harry Rossiter suggests that ancient Greeks were more physically fit than modern endurance athletes:
Dr Rossiter measured the metabolic rates of modern athletes rowing a reconstruction of an Athenian trireme, a 37m long warship powered by 170 rowers seated in three tiers...
This is a nice passage by Alfred Crosby about the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century historians:
Rather than make a display of our "superiority" over scholars now dead and buried (thus anticipating the smugness or our own successors), let us praise our forebears...
The Beagle Project Blog lists me as one of the top ten senders of traffic to their site, which reports on the efforts to replicate the original voyage:
We aim to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators...
A letter to the editors of Nature by Jasmina Muzinic notes the new translation of Darwin's works into Croatian:
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man have at last been translated into Croatian, thanks to the work of the renowned science and theology translator Josip Balabanic...
The Darwin Correspondence Project has put the text of 5000 Darwin letters online...
Jim Endersby presents a review of two recent books on Darwin -- a Variorum edition of the Origin, and a new edition of Darwin's correspondence -- in the Times Literary Supplement...
This Saturday (2/8/2008) is Darwin Day here at UW...
Alfred Crosby gives a short quote from chapter 19 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and I found it interesting enough to look for the full context...
The folks at Savage Minds are still whuppin' away on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, in posts About Yali, On cargo and cults - and Yali's question, Diamond's argument about the haves and have-nots, Malaria in Africa and Asia, and more...
The sad part of this story is that nobody cares about the identity of the other guy:
The mystery surrounding the skulls began in 1826, 21 years after [Friedrich] Schiller died in Weimar, when the local mayor had 23 skulls retrieved from a mass grave in which the poet was buried...
Norwegian scientists are digging her up for DNA testing:
SLAGEN, Norway - Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife...
I read this post by Grant McCracken some months ago, and I wanted to remind myself of it on September 1...
I think many biologists have a pretty vague picture of why Linnaeus was important...
Not the work of Georgia O'Keefe, but of Carl Linnaeus according to this NY Times article observing the 300 years since his birth...
Afarensis reviews the book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor:
In Chapter Three, Mayor discusses discovery of bones in the Greek Pre-classic and Classic...
I was checking on the Thomas Jefferson mastodon story for the last post, and I came across an episode I hadn't been aware of...
What an interesting book review by Abigail Zuber, of a new book about Charles Lindbergh's medical collaboration with famous surgeon Alexis Carrel...
Remember that story from last month about how fruit flies have some kind of free will because they navigate their flight in nondeterministic directions...
I found this passage in the discussion following T...
A reader asked me this morning when the word "paleoanthropology" first came into use...
I really like this Neurophilosophy post on Dostoyevsky's epilepsy...
The AP article ends this way:
Wasilewski said a 10- or 20-foot python also could pose a risk to an unwary human, especially a child...
From Ann Althouse:
Do you ever romanticize the caveman and think, yes, it might be all right to be a Neanderthal, and you then think of one modern product that you want so much that you can't even seriously contemplate the savage life anymore...
Hmm...
Is there a subtle hidden plan...
They could have just asked...
From MSNBC:
In the latest reported sighting, a group of Teslin residents told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp...
Last week's story about the negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific productivity has brought out the cutting crew...
Umm...
Googling something else entirely brought me this page by Edmund D...
This seems like a fitting St...
That's what they're calling the imminent invasion of 17-year cicadas that we're supposed to get here next month...
From Science Blog:
Curry and cauliflower could halt prostate cancer
Rutgers researchers have found that the curry spice turmeric holds real potential for the treatment and prevention of prostate cancer, particularly when combined with certain vegetables...
Is this the definition (CNN) of a slow news day...
On the "Chimpanzee Genome Consortium": Gretchen says that anything involving the words "chimpanzee" and "consortium" creeps her out...
So Gretchen was flipping through our Newsweek with all the holiday gift ideas, and staring out from the page at her was this:
The "Alive" Chimpanzee
Remainders from Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes...
Couples really do look like each other:
Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another...
It's cute, it hugs its own little toy, and it's brought to you by WowWee, the same nice people who built the "Alive" Chimpanzee...
Hoowuulyeaaaach...
In a case of neuroscience resembling the Onion, we have a Reuters article about how stupid dolphins are...
From Tuesday's New York Times article:
Dr...
Has this guy gone over the edge...
There's this quiz from USA Weekend -- that Sunday newspaper insert magazine:
What's hotter these days than cavemen and fifth-graders...
You've probably seen the story about the Foja Mountains in Papua New Guinea...
GRETCHEN: "Genomics, that sounds like a Michael Crichton term...
National Geographic is reporting on an internet hoax:
A digitally altered photograph created in 2002 shows a reclining giant surrounded by a wooden platform -- with a shovel-wielding archaeologist thrown in for scale...
...
In honor of Halloween, the Washington Post has a story on extreme pumpkin-growers...
Hmmm...
One of those things that says, "Please stop reading now" :
Doctors currently explore the gut using endoscopes, which have to be fed through the body, or "camera pills" that must be swallowed by a patient...
This just in:
Extracts from hot dogs bought from the supermarket, when mixed with nitrites, resulted in what appeared to be these DNA-mutating compounds...
Has the Hwang Woo-suk scandal jumped the shark...
James Lileks, on novice ice skaters:
When not skating they're gripping the handrail and making their way around the giant rink with the exaggerated care of a stoner making his way down the burro path at the Grand Canyon...
TechRepublic blogger Jay Garmon pinpoints the problem with the Star Wars prequels: midichlorians...
On the topic of animal intelligence, there is this from The Observer:
It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina...
Michelle Tsai of Slate tells what to do when monkeys attack:
Baboons, which sometimes attack humans in Africa, are much more dangerous: They're bigger and less predictable, and they're armed with 3-inch-long canines...
Is it so wrong that my guilty pleasure this week is reading this man's diary of his experiment in eating only monkey chow...
Hmm...
A conversation:
ME: This Rubin group sequenced cave bear DNA earlier this year, and now they have this Neandertal DNA...
From The Onion:
Human Evolution Gene Discovered
"I heard that, coincidentally, it's also the same gene that diminishes interest in bananas to a reasonable level...
From The Onion:
TOPEKA, KS -- In response to a Nov...
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils
...
From the "any publicity is good publicity" department: Popular Science's list of the worst jobs in science includes "Orangutan-pee collector"...
Uhhh...
The first seal is broken, and the Giant Panda Genome Project commences:
Giant Panda Genome to be Sequenced
BGI-Shenzhen is pleased to announce the launch of the International Giant Panda Genome Project...
Umm...
Now, see, here's the thing...
In the "great minds think alike" category, Gretchen sends me this:
Man bites panda in Beijing zoo as retribution
BEIJING - A drunken Chinese migrant worker jumped into a panda enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, was bitten by the bear and retaliated by chomping down on the animal's back, state media said Wednesday...
If you're waiting for an update on the effectiveness of panda porn -- and I know you are...
My headline being an homage to the legless panda story earlier this month, I note the continued interest in panda dung recycling, which has now combined with the Beijing Olympics to create the ultimate in Shi Shi couture:
BEIJING -- Nothing says "I love you" like a photo frame made from panda poop...
Problems with panda releases:
Panda that was released into wild dies
BEIJING - The first panda to be released into bamboo forests after being bred in captivity has died, and a Chinese nature preserve official said Thursday it may have fallen from trees while being chased by wild pandas...
You may have heard how I feel about pandas:
YESSSS...
From the AP:
She was wearing gloves and feeding the panda bamboo on Tuesday morning when "suddenly, the panda bit into her thumb," Xinhua said...
Pandas, of course...
On the subject of pigs, there is this story from the Weekly World News:
Charles Darwin was wrong -- humans evolved from pigs, not apes...
In case you haven't been following the "pluton" controversy, here's a pointer to Nature News on the topic...
From my secret, "Why I am not a physicist", file:
Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted...
Product design guru Donald Norman looks at this year's crop of "smart" machines in this NY Times article, and reminds us why future robot sex ain't all it's hacked up to be:
Until recently, Dr...
Signs that the Japanese robot industry has gone too far:
Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, "an electromechanical sommelier", capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d'oeuvres...
I'm catching up on some blogging, and this story in New Scientist has been sitting on my computer for a couple of days:
Stealth sharks to patrol the high seas
IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour...
Gretchen and I have been laughing for twenty minutes at the Sloganizer...
National Geographic News is running an interview with space scientists Seth Shostak and Bruce Betts on whether the extraterrestrial worlds in the Star Wars films are realistic...
I have to say I love this quote:
[T]he Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones...
If you need a laugh, try this piece of fake news from The Swift Report:
PRATT, KS--A junior high school student in this south central Kansas town has been suspended after he implied that a classmate was descended from monkeys...
I have a history of quality pig-blogging here, and this BBC story has all the right ingredients:
Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that glow in the dark...
Found this in Nature a couple of weeks ago:
Palaeontology: Skull morphology of giant terror birds
Luis B...
How could I not look at an article headlined, "Coping with the Caveman in the Crib"...
I can't believe my #1 Google search this month is "Humanzee"...
My eye was drawn to this LiveScience story about "virtual professors"...
ME: There's this long-running debate about limb proportions in australopithecines...
OK, I wouldn't be so concerned about "Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless" (New Scientist):
The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US...
In honor of the season, I ran across Radar Magazine's list of 10 dangerous toys from years gone by...
In honor of the season, HowStuffWorks...
I've been noticing lately an awful lot of stories in which some celebrity blithely espouses total pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo...
With apologies to James Taranto, this from Science Blog caught my eye:
Doctors at Michigan State University have developed a revolutionary treatment plan that will allow primary care physicians to more effectively treat people who suffer from medically unexplained symptoms...
The Cowardly Lion costume in The Wizard of Oz film was made from real lions...
From Don Surber, with reference to the music at "Live Earth":
In fact, Pink Floyd's hit - "The Wall" - is as contemporary today as "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" was in 1969.
I always get the most interesting mail right after any kind of news interview...
In a New Scientist story about the feet of H...
JOHN: Now, that's a frightening headline...
GRETCHEN: You mean that I wouldn't have been tall enough to leave Africa...
John: I got the strangest e-mail today...
OK, I have to admit I went looking right away for a Mr...
I was putting together some anagrams on human evolution-related phrases, which turns out to be a bit of a challenge...
In a LiveScience article about how capuchin monkeys wash their hands and feet in urine:
"So we think the alpha males might use urine-washing to convey warm, fuzzy feelings to females, that their solicitation is working and that there's no need to run away," [primatologist Kimran] Miller said...
From a Carl Zimmer story about the incredibly long phalluses of certain ducks:
Gazing at the enormous organs, [Patricia Brennan] asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before...
In an otherwise very interesting story about the mechanism of behavioral dimorphism in fruit fly mating:
The next stage was to find out how effective the artificially induced songs were as mating calls...
The National Geographic story about gorillas mating in the missionary position is one of those unique science stories: it's full of lines that sound innocuous to stodgy science-types, but would make any 13-year-old boy giggle uncontrollably...
In a press release about the successful application of green bottlefly larvae to cure (by chewing on) foot ulcers in diabetic patients, by University of Manchester researcher Andrew Boulton and colleagues:
"Maggots are the world's smallest surgeons...
So, a monkey in North Carolina was controlling a robot in Japan, using only its brain waves...
From a story titled, "Porn sparks panda baby boom in China":
The audio-visual approach [i...
Not exactly a metaphor, but certainly of questionable taste in this story titled, "'Sex Pest' Seal Attacks Penguin":
Marion Island is the only place in the world where Antarctic fur seals are known to hunt king penguins on land, so the idea that the fur seal was trying to eat the object of its attention made sense...
From p...
From an Althouse commenter:
A friend of mine took a DNA test and found out what part of Africa his ancestors came from 186,000 years ago...
Writer Brian Alexander, on the future of sex:
We're at that 1939-World's-Fair moment in which there's just enough new technology out there to spark some creative thinking about the shape of boinking to come.
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
The present more or less unstable condition of the circumstances surrounding organic beings, together with the known mutations of climate our planet has undergone in past geological ages, points clearly to the agency of physical conditions as one of the chief factors in the evolution of new forms of life...
Ann Althouse, confronting the Laetoli footprint-makers reconstruction at the American Museum of Natural History:
Is this really what we are and, if so, is it horrifying or is it wonderful that we figured it out...
Ann Althouse, deep in the comments wrapping a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest metaphor:
Academia is, apparently, a mad house, and this blog is my bus ride and fishing expedition...
Ann Althouse, on the death of an albino squirrel:
Sometimes Mother Nature does the hawks a favor and serves up an easy lunch.
Ann Althouse, on spouting off about topics outside one's expertise:
There are many problems that, for me, provoke only this thought: If it were my job to solve this problem, I would work on it, and, in this process working on it, anything I have to say about it now would be something I wouldn't waste my time on.
Ann Miller in On the Town:
Yes, you see there are not too many modern males who can measure up to the prehistoric.
Owen Lovejoy, quoted in an Ann Gibbons news piece:
To resolve this debate [about the style of early hominid bipedalism], says anatomist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio, researchers should also look at the pelvis, back, foot, and ankle of other early hominins, still under analysis...
Alec Baldwin, appearing in "Walking With Cavemen":
Surrounded by all these skulls, it feels like we're not doing history at all -- it feels like something more immediate...
Last words of the real-life Bat Masterson, found "in his typewriter in the column he had been writing":
There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours...
Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature:
Naturally, anybody who feels heresy to be a danger will devote some care to being conscious of his or her own presuppositions and will develop a sort of connoisseurship in these matters...
