Alien vs. Predator
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. He added, however, "I don't think this is an imminent threat. This is not a 'Be afraid, be very afraid' situation."
Oh, I beg to differ. It begins this way:
MIAMI - The alligator has some foreign competition at the top of the Everglades food chain, and the results of the struggle are horror-movie messy.
A 13-foot Burmese python recently burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole, authorities said.
Yes, there are photos.
The gory evidence of the latest gator-python encounter -- the fourth documented in the past three years -- was discovered and photographed last week by a helicopter pilot and wildlife researcher.
The snake was found with the gator's hindquarters protruding from its midsection. Mazzotti said the alligator may have clawed at the python's stomach as the snake tried to digest it.
In previous incidents, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw.
It's like Thunderdome out there!
Quote of the day
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? For me it's Chapstick.
Registering for the meetings
Hmm... How will I explain this charge to Gretchen?
You've sent a secure payment of $75.00 USD to American Association of Physical Anthropologists through PayPal. The payment will appear on your card statement as "PAYPAL *AMERICANASS". You'll receive an email receipt shortly.
What is it with rampaging apes and restaurants?
Is there a subtle hidden plan?
The incident at the Shaoshan Zoo in Kaohsiung began on Wednesday when the orang-utan pushed his way out of his cage and wandered into a nearby restaurant courtyard.
As zoo officials scurried to bring the animal under control, he overturned picnic tables and motorcycles, forcing diners to cower inside the eatery.
Finally an official shot the orang-utan in the upper body with a stun gun, and he was taken away in the scoop of a small bulldozer.
The orangutan joins last week's berzerk Rotterdam gorilla, Bokito:
A group of people tried to barricade themselves inside a restaurant on the zoo grounds, only to watch in horror as the gorilla, its mouth "covered in blood," bashed his way in through a glass door, according to BBC News.
That was where he was recaptured, though, when a zookeeper managed to sink a tranquilizer needle into him.
Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that the smell of fried food is the only thing standing between us and world ape domination?
Or maybe the zoos actually keep tranquilizer darts in the restaurants, to subdue customers angry at the outrageous zoo food prices.
Evidently, Bokito has become a YouTube phenom.
And Reuters tells us that a Dutch entrepreneur has registered to use the rampaging gorilla's name, Bokito, as a brand name for entertainment products:
The name Bokito has been registered as a brand for DVDs, CDs, magazines, clothing and promotional services, the Dutch trademark office said.
The owner of the Bokito brand will hope to mirror the success of polar bear cub "Knut" at Berlin's zoo. Knut was registered by the zoo as a brand, and he now has a website and a book deal.
For those of us who have always hoped that annoying pre-teen boys will get their comeuppance, Frans de Waal has tried to throw water on the fire:
The Volkskrant quotes gorilla expert Frans de Waal who says Bokito's victim is very luck to be alive. His action was a warning to visitors and zoo keepers.
'Don't try to attract attention, don't try to provoke wild animals,' he says. 'A zoo is not some fun event with real interaction with predators and primates.'
No, I guess not:
"Everyone was in panic, running away, screaming, wailing, screaming kids running around. It was a total drama," one witness told NOS radio.
Badger underground
The subterranean secrets of badgers have been revealed by a BBC film crew.
"When I spoke to one badger expert, I said to him: 'How much do we know about their life underground?', and he simply held up a blank piece of paper.
"This is the first time we have had the opportunity to see real detail down there."
Why do I have the feeling this is really some kind research project by one of the presidential candidates looking for votes this week?
Beeffoot
From MSNBC:
In the latest reported sighting, a group of Teslin residents told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. they heard branches cracking and saw a large human-like creature run by a house. It left behind large footprints, they said, and the hair tufts that were given to wildlife officials.
Perhaps he is still stomping around somewhere, but a DNA test has confirmed that it was not Bigfoot roaming the Yukon earlier this month -- it was just a bison.
Some stories need no comment.
Beer drinking scientists...vindicated?
Last week's story about the negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific productivity has brought out the cutting crew. In this blog post at "Our Daily Diary," the study is skewered:
But it was while I was switching to a magnificent Pacific Northwest microbrew porter that I saw the real problem. Looking at the graph of the 34 data points, it was clear that the entire correlation was caused by the five lowest-output scientists. Without those five data points, the remaining 29 - showing a wide range of scientific output and beer consumption habits - exhibited absolutely no correlation. Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer.
Well, that's a relief.
Beer drinking predicts scientific output
After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists -- beer.
According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
All right, good scientists and bad scientists alike, you know what we have to do: DESTROY THIS CORRELATION!
"Ghosts of reviewers past"
Googling something else entirely brought me this page by Edmund D. Brodie III, chronicling a few of the comments from manuscript reviews he's received over the years.
Personally I'd need a lot more self-confidence than I have to put that kind of stuff out there. Or maybe I'm just not far enough away yet to laugh about it. (Who am I kidding? Alpha Centauri wouldn't be far enough away.)
It illustrates very well why I always try to be as careful in my reviews as I am in my papers.
Bronze Age Briton buried with beer beaker
This seems like a fitting St. Patrick's Day story:
Canterbury Archaeological Trust said the curled-up skeleton was an example of a "Beaker" burial because of the pottery vessel placed at its feet.
Education officer Marion Green said the "beautifully decorated" pot could have been "a type of beer mug".
She said tests on beakers from other sites suggested Bronze Age man was brewing a type of beer from grain.
No word on whether the beer was green.
Brood 13
That's what they're calling the imminent invasion of 17-year cicadas that we're supposed to get here next month.
The red-eyed, shrimp-sized, flying insects don't bite or sting. But they are known for mating calls that produce a din that can overpower ringing telephones, lawn mowers and power tools.
Brood XIII is expected across northern Illinois, and in parts of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. Cicadas live only about 30 days as adults, and their main goal is mating.
My girls are horrified by cicada skins, so I can only imagine their reaction to this:
The insects are eaten in other parts of the world, with descriptions of the taste ranging from shrimp to canned asparagus to not much at all.
Now, there's a fair difference between the taste of shrimp and canned asparagus. Maybe they taste different because of some kind of weird tree sap terroire.
They're supposed to emerge "between Tuesday and June 1." Whoopie!
Apparently, if you're getting married this month, you don't want an ice sculpture:
"We put our tray down and immediately the cicadas came off the ground and attacked the ice. Literally, it was a moving sculpture, this big black ugly mass of cicadas constantly moving," said Nadeau.
"I don't want to talk myself out of work, but that was just too gross," he said.
Did I mention, whoopie!
The cauliflower curry connection
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.
The scientists tested turmeric, also known as curcumin, along with phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC), a naturally occurring substance particularly abundant in a group of vegetables that includes watercress, cabbage, winter cress, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, cauliflower, kohlrabi and turnips. "The bottom line is that PEITC and curcumin, alone or in combination, demonstrate significant cancer-preventive qualities in laboratory mice, and the combination of PEITC and curcumin could be effective in treating established prostate cancers," said Ah-Ng Tony Kong, a professor of pharmaceutics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Now, see, I wouldn't post this except, well, we just had cauliflower curry for supper last night!
And I suppose if the headline were, "Curry and cauliflower deadlier than fugu", I would be worried.
Have to accentuate the positive, right?
Chicken vs. egg: a timeless tale
Is this the definition (CNN) of a slow news day?
It's a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.
Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.
Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.
I'm ready to stand tall against this one.
- It ignores epigenetics -- are we to believe that just any egg can become a chicken without some rather important environmental influence -- starting with the fact that somebody has to sit on it?
- OK, even if epigenetics doesn't argue by itself for the chicken-first hypothesis, we still have the slight problem of how to define the species boundary between Gallus domesticus and its ancestor Gallus gallus. There certainly can't have been only a single egg that gave rise to the species -- that egg must have been part of a community of incipient chickens. What was the transformation rule between these? Was it the mere fact of egg-laying? Or was it...
- Domestication! Clearly, it was domestication that made the chicken. But is domestication something that humans do to eggs? No! It's something they did to red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus), transforming them to chickens. The first chicken was therefore a domesticated red jungle fowl, which had the desirable property of laying eggs around humans and not running away. So it was an epigenetic phenomenon: humans made chickens, which laid chicken eggs!
- Just to support all this, there is the suggestion that the domestication of red jungle fowl was really about making good cockfighters rather than tasty McNuggets. So maybe the first chicken was born a red jungle fowl until humans made it really, really MEAN!
I rest my case.
Michael Crichton, call your office
On the "Chimpanzee Genome Consortium": Gretchen says that anything involving the words "chimpanzee" and "consortium" creeps her out.
Why?
Well, there is this:
"This is the consortium route," she said, "based on our assumptions about the expedition. They're going in big - thirty or more people, a full-scale undertaking.
If you haven't read Congo, you may not know where this is going. Here's a hint:
Once alone, away from the others, he found himself staring into the clear running water and considering the possibility that he might be wrong. Certainly primate researchers had a long history of misjudging their subjects.
OK, you definitely need more than a hint:
Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an insect but, glancing down at this khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a fleshy bit of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then he realized that it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of white optic nerve still attached at the back.
Yep, that's creepy.
I for one welcome our robot chimpanzee overlords
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? No, it's the "Alive" Chimpanzee, from the same company (WowWee) that makes "RoboSapiens" and other animatronic toys.
You can buy it at the Sharper Image. How this would give me a "sharper image", well, I just have trouble imagining. Their image would be a bit sharper if they had their marketing people Google "chimpanzees":
So real, it's unreal! "Alive" Chimpanzee (Latin name: pan troglodyte...if you can believe it)...
No, I can't believe it, since it's Pan troglodytes...
...is a fully animated, life-size bust of the real animal; he has been painstakingly handcrafted to exacting standards.
I guess someone decided that including canine teeth would give it too unfriendly a grimace.
Even so, it seems a ways beyond the talking "Barney" from a few years ago. There's a product review from PC Magazine
At just $149.95 (direct), this is a gadget that, while frightening to some (a few people literally ran out of my office to get away from it), will be well within the realm of affordability for monkey, robot, and special-effects lovers.Ape-lovers. APE-lovers!
Emotional moods. The natural emotional state of your "Alive" Chimpanzee is "Curious" -- one of four distinctive moods; his other emotional states include "Happy," "Fearful" and "Feisty."
When he is "Curious," he is primed to react autonomously to sounds, touch and movement and (depending on what he encounters) his mood can change. Make him "Feisty" and he will swing his head quickly from side to side and he'll screech; make him "Happy" and you'll be treated to one of those giant chimp smiles and hear excited whoops.
I really think this is a candidate to replace the superintelligent killer mice in my nightmares: a "feisty" chimpanzee Terminator!
On the other hand, maybe it would have an appropriately creeptronic effect on students during office hours. Mounted on the wall like a trophy head. AH-ahhhhh!! Eee-EEEEEE!
Today's sweet Valentine story
Couples really do look like each other:
Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another. They asked 11 male and 11 female participants to judge the age, attractiveness and personality traits of 160 real-life married couples. Photographs of husbands and wives were viewed separately, so the participants didn't know who was married to whom.
The test participants rated men and woman who were actual couples as looking alike and having similar personalities. Also, the longer the couples had been together, the greater the perceived similarities.
The article attributes the similarity to similar experiences, facial expressions, and testosterone.
OK, that's not so romantic. Personally, I think it's 50 percent assortative mating, and 50 percent fat.
Dawn of the Robopanda
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. It's beginning to smell like Christmas, and that means it's time for Robopanda!
Uhh...oops...wrong file there...
Ah. Here we go:
Oh, this is a happy little fellow, isn't he? The closer these robot creatures get to that creeped-out teddy bear from AI, the more menacing. And aren't the glowing blue eyes an interesting design choice?
The Engadget techmavens got to play with Robopanda earlier this year.
Sure we may come across as rugged and ultra-suave, but deep down we're really big softies, which is why WowWee's new Robopanda is such a refreshing change from the vicious reptiles and flamethrowing humanoids that the company's usually pushing out the door.
Oh, if you only knew...
Featuring several touch sensitive areas as well as an accelerometer to measure speed (move too fast and it freaks out just a bit), RoboPanda offers numerous methods of interaction.
Whaaa?
Lance Ulanoff's review in PC Magazine mentions this unsettling tidbit:
Like a small child, it issues a steady stream of requests, comments, and silly stories and ideas. At one point it asked me if I had ever been attacked by a panda, adding, "Do you want to be? AARRGH! Just kidding." This is "play" in the Robopanda's world.
Yesssss....like the way that wolf pups "play" in all those cute nature videos...
The 6-year-old sat rooted in front of the Robopanda, responding to every request and often answering verbally, though the robot cannot actually respond to anything anyone says. After a while I had to ask the little girl to leave, and she reluctantly agreed to stop playing with the Robopanda.
Like crack, this one is.
Death, lye thou there
Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest -- dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.
Generally, I'm most interested in the processes that give rise to dry bones. Particularly, dry bones that don't smell bad.
"Syrupy residue," on the other hand, is not really my thing. And I guess it's not really most people's thing:
Getting the public to accept a process that strikes some as ghastly may be the biggest challenge. Psychopaths and dictators have used acid or lye to torture or erase their victims, and legislation to make alkaline hydrolysis available to the public in New York state was branded "Hannibal Lecter's bill" in a play on the movie character's sadism.
The appeal seems to be that this generates fewer emissions than cremation -- think of it as an elaborate sort of carbon sequestration. And it has to be better than pouring embalming fluid down the drain.
UPDATE(2008/05/08): Miguel Capriles writes:
[J]ust a quick comment about your post "Death, lye thou there": the reference to the "syrupy residue" made me recollect one of John Aubrey's Brief Lives when he tells about the coffin of John Colet, broken after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Aubrey tells (in modern English, as I got it on Google Books in a version published in 1982 by Boydell & Brewer):Â
"After the conflagration, his monument being broken, his coffin, which was lead, was full of a liquor which conserved the body. Mr Wyld and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and 'twas of a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawn. The coffin was of lead and laid in the wall about two and a half feet above the surface of the floor."
Definitively it should be a lot nicer in the English Aubrey used.
And that, my friends, is why it is cool to have a blog. Because my readers have much better imaginations than mine.
Ooooh, they tasted it?!
Stupidity is relative, to dolphins
In a case of neuroscience resembling the Onion, we have a Reuters article about how stupid dolphins are. It ends with this quote:
Manger also points to the tuna industry, which under consumer pressure has gone to great lengths to prevent dolphins from being caught and killed by accident in nets. "If they were really intelligent they would just jump over the net because it doesn't come out of the water," he said.
Compare to this passage from the Onion:
Although dolphins have long been celebrated for their high intelligence and for appearing to have a complex language, a team of researchers at the University of Florida reported Monday that these traits are markedly less evident on dry land.
...
"The dolphins were incapable of recognizing and repeating simple gestures," said study co-author Dr. Scott Lindell. "Their non-verbal communications were limited to a rapid constriction and expansion of the blowhole, various incomprehensible fin motions, and heavy tremors while they lay prone on the lab table."
There's actually some serious content to the Reuters article, based on the work of neuroethologist Paul Manger:
Brains, he says, are made of neurons and glia. The latter create the environment for the neurons to work properly and producing heat is one of glia's functions.
"Dolphins have a super-abundance of glia and very few neurons ... The dolphin's brain is not made for information processing it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water," Manger said.
But then, I thought to myself, "Gee, didn't Einstein's brain have an unusually high number of glia?" Yes, indeed, although only in one area of the cortex, which has been argued to be a response to unusually high neuronal metabolic demands.
High neuronal metabolic demands. Hmm... Well, guess if their large brains were really only useful for their aquatic lives, there wouldn't be any small-brained dolphins, right? Which works perfectly except for river dolphins...
D'oh!
References:
Diamond MC, Scheibel AB, Murphy GM Jr, Harvey T. 1985. On the brain of a scientist: Albert Einstein. Exp Neurol 88:198-204. PubMed
What is it with the dots?
From Tuesday's New York Times article:
Dr. Lieberman said that he and colleagues "are relentlessly optimistic that we have all the information we need to answer our big questions, but just haven't figured out the order in which to connect the dots."
But the real problem, he added, with resignation tempering optimism, "is that the fossil record doesn't have enough dots."
From today's Nature perspective:
The fossil record of human evolution is like a pointillist painting: one sees a different picture close up from when one stands back.
I had that happen to me, but they said it was myopia....
Friends, Romans, countrymen...
Has this guy gone over the edge?
Performance artists are known for pushing the bounderies, but one Australian has astonished his contemporaries by having a third ear implanted onto his arm.
The Cypriot-born eccentric Stelios Arcadious spent 10 years searching for a surgeon willing to perform the controversial operation.
Why is it that when I heard about this story, I started hearing the song, "Papa can you hear me?" in my head?
"I hope to have a tiny microphone implanted to it that will connect with a bluetooth transmitter; that way you can listen to what my ear is hearing."
Uhhh...if they are the same voices that this guy must be hearing in his head, that will be kind of scary.
(via SciAm)
I'm not smarter than a fifth-grade caveman
There's this quiz from USA Weekend -- that Sunday newspaper insert magazine:
What's hotter these days than cavemen and fifth-graders? Geico has hit a home run with its cavemen ads, and the hilariously testy portrayal of early man is now in pilot development for an ABC sitcom. And the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" is one of the top new series of the season, airing Thursdays through May 10.
Both pop-culture sensations work well for the very same reason: We watch with the assumption that we have an intellectual edge over the subjects. But in the end, it's the cavemen and the fifth-graders who demonstrate that they're the ones with the real smarts. So we at USA WEEKEND Magazine thought we'd present a fun quiz that combines the two: "Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grade Caveman?"
I have nothing more to say. Other than, some paleoanthropologists have been passing this around on e-mail today, and none of us seem to be able to come up with the right answers. Which I suppose is a bad sign. For somebody.
So which mythological paradise is it?
You've probably seen the story about the Foja Mountains in Papua New Guinea. Here are a couple of paragraphs:
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Describing it as the discovery of a "Lost World," conservation groups and Indonesia on Tuesday said an expedition to one of Asia's most isolated jungles had found several dozen new species of frogs, butterflies, flowers and birds.
"It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," Bruce Beehler, a Conservation International scientist who led the expedition, said in a statement.
OK, so is it the "Lost World" or the "Garden of Eden"? Let's get this straight.
I say, it's the Garden of Eden if it has unicorns, and the Lost World if it has dinosaurs. Gretchen says it depends how bloodthirsty the animals are.
More on genomics
GRETCHEN: "Genomics, that sounds like a Michael Crichton term."
ME: "Yeah, it's sort of fake, like something William Shatner would come up with. (imitating Shatner) 'It's like GENETICS, But. With. The. WHOLE. GENOME.'"
GRETCHEN: "I Crichtonized it, you Shatnerated it."
So, don't plan on grinding his bones to make your bread
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.
By 2004 the "discovery" was being blogged and emailed all over the world -- "Giant Skeleton Unearthed!"-- and it's been enjoying a revival in 2007.
The photo fakery might be obvious to most people. But the tall tale refuses to lie down even five years later, if a continuing flow of emails to National Geographic News are any indication. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
When they say "giant", they mean GIANT -- the "archaeologist" could use this skull's eye orbit as a chair! I'm not going to reproduce it, but you can click the link to see it.
Currently creeping me out
...is Al Gore, who is staring over my shoulder from the cover of Entertainment Weekly that Gretchen is reading:
He's like a freaking Vulcan back there! Whatever you think of Al Gore, that's just a creepy picture!
UPDATE (less than one minute later): Man, he's creepy on the blog, too! I'd better post something long quick so he goes under the fold!
Natural selection in action
In honor of Halloween, the Washington Post has a story on extreme pumpkin-growers. It's a great example of massive phenotypic change in a few generations:
Thousands of new growers, even including some in the warm, pumpkin-unfriendly climes around Washington, have been attracted to the mad-scientist thrill of growing a fruit the size of a boulder. For some reason, at least 80 percent of them have been men.
Over the years, more growers have meant more pumpkins, and more chances to cross one behemoth with another.
As this practice has become more popular, the seeds of certain well-known pumpkins -- such as a 723-pound New York specimen whose illustrious offspring have made it the Alydar of squash -- can bring hundreds of dollars at auction. At training seminars, growers will play "pumpkin poker," for one seed a hand.
Everyone's dreaming that these unions of big pumpkins will produce a generation that is bigger still.
"We've put a man on the moon. We've run the four-minute mile," said Ray Waterman, who runs a seed and supply company outside Buffalo. "And now we're going to grow a 2,000-pound pumpkin."
The world record size has gone from 400 pounds in the 1980's up to 1469 points this month. But it's not all genetics:
While the pumpkin's roots were sunk in the soil, Beauchemin shaded its prized fruit from the elements and placed it on a low-friction fabric. In the weeks to come, he knew, the mega-pumpkin would expand so fast that the roughness of the bare ground might slow it down.
"It never felt the dirt," he said. "And it never felt the rain."
With all their fertilizing and watering, these people are making a pumpkin secular trend. For fame, glory, and -- for the not-so-lucky -- the chance to cut the giant squash in half and fit a trolling motor for a spin around the river.
About that symposium...
Hurwit's newly published research shows that the Greeks did walk around in the buff in some situations. Men strode about free of their togas in the bedroom and at parties called symposia, where they would eat, drink and carouse.
Nah.
Meet your new robotic parasite
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.
A pill capable of wriggling through the gut on its own could be a valuable tool, says Andrew Gardner, an independent medical imaging expert at University College London.
Yes, you have to go over to New Scientist to see the picture. It's two tail spines short of a centipede. And it's crawling through pig guts right now. Eeeeww!
"If something this complicated goes wrong, it could be very hard to get out."
Eeeeww!
Hot dogs cause mutations
Extracts from hot dogs bought from the supermarket, when mixed with nitrites, resulted in what appeared to be these DNA-mutating compounds. When added to Salmonella bacteria, hot dog extracts treated with nitrites doubled to quadrupled their normal DNA mutation levels. Triggering DNA mutations in the gut might boost the risk for colon cancer, the researchers explained.
No word on whether kosher dogs are equally likely to make you a mutant.
Oh, and something about this doesn't scan right:
Future research will feed hot dog meat to mice...
I suppose Chihuahua beats seabirds as mouse chow.
Mafia markets mammoth meat?
Has the Hwang Woo-suk scandal jumped the shark?
"Some of the money was spent in contacting the Russia mafia as we tried to clone mammoths," Hwang told the court during a hearing on Tuesday. "But you can't say that (on the expense claim) so we expensed it as money for cows for experiment."
What, there's really no blank for "mafia mammoth contacts?" What kind of show are they running?
And can you imagine one morning at the Russian mafia call center? Sir, the North Koreans are on line 1 asking for plutonium. Oh, and the South Koreans are on line 2 asking for some frozen mammoth ovaries.
And how hard is it to get animal ovaries, anyway?
Hwang denied any of the funds were used for anything other than research. He described extra expenses incurred when trying to secure animal ovaries in addition to paying for junior researchers' housing and travel.
"Do you know how hard it is to secure four or five animal ovaries at butcher shops? You need to keep the workers there happy."
Oh, well then. Never mind.
Quote of the day
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.
Now, this is a bit personal for me, since I'm learning to skate myself. Fortunately, I've progressed beyond this stage...
Midichlorians, you done us wrong
TechRepublic blogger Jay Garmon pinpoints the problem with the Star Wars prequels: midichlorians.
That's pretty much how I feel about modern human origins...
Killer Navy cetacean squad unleashed by Katrina?
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. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
Apparently Navy personel are demanding to inspect other missing captive dolphins that have been found after the storms, leading some to believe they must have lost their own, which were headquartered near Lake Pontchartrain.
'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' [accident investigator Leo Sheridan, 72] said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'
What, indeed...
Mix it up with menacing macaques
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. Last year, a South African man's forearms were ripped to the bone, and doctors dug out a baboon tooth during surgery.
Yeeaaah!
The deputy mayor of New Delhi, India, fell off his balcony and died Sunday after being attacked by monkeys, his family members say. The city has around 10,000 monkeys, some of which have taken to roaming through government buildings as they steal food and rip apart documents.
Heeeaaaooow!
I work in a gum'nt building! Let's look at that story closer:
The increasingly aggressive animals swing effortlessly between the offices of the defence, finance and external affairs ministries and some have even been spotted in the prime minister's office.
"Swing effortlessly?" But macaques aren't brachiators! What are these, some kind of new gum'nt supermonkeys?
Maybe they're a whole 'nother kind of "swingers"?
"Secret Agent: Monkey Suit" photo credit: TCM Hitchhiker, Creative Commons license
"They are moving in very high security areas," says Defence Ministry officer, IK Jha.
Officials say there is little that can be done.
Does this remind you of those stories where parks are inundated by thousands of Canada geese, who just want to stay there all winter, and there's "little that can be done," because heaven knows you can't just shoot them?
Animal rights activists say the main problem is not the rising number of monkeys but the growing population of humans.
"We have encroached on their homelands, we have taken away their fruits, we have reduced their water sources and we are trapping them from their home range, from their forests, so they are coming to urban areas," says rights activist Iqbal Malik.
Monkeys are adaptable, they can live well on trash heaps and handouts, and their populations are growing. Rhesus macaques are not in trouble -- they're like herd-living raccoons that can climb up your walls and open the windows.
Well, we'd better look back at that first story to see what to do:
Primatologists will sometimes send a macaque warning signal called the open-mouth threat. Basically, form an "O" with your mouth, lean toward them with your body and head, and raise your eyebrows. Female victims might seek protection in a group of men, since monkeys are somewhat afraid of males. But whatever you do, don't freak out; those who scream, wave their arms, and run away are only going to make the macaques even more aggressive.
Remember, whatever you do, don't freak out!
Fascinated by the monkey chow diet
Is it so wrong that my guilty pleasure this week is reading this man's diary of his experiment in eating only monkey chow?
I'm tired of cooking. I hate scrubbing pots and pans. I've wasted too much time in the checkout line. It's time to eat chow.
What is fascinating is that the thing clearly would have ended already, except that people started blogging about it! Now the frustration with the chow is competing with the allure of attention. How much does the attention have to wane before he gives it up?
Should I be ashamed?
Hmm...
The message at the end is maybe the most alarming part:
All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!
I think this has something to do with my visual recognition of pre-twentieth century physicists, daily SSH-usage, and a good memory for the periodic table. Or maybe I'm in denial?
Quote of the day
A conversation:
ME: This Rubin group sequenced cave bear DNA earlier this year, and now they have this Neandertal DNA.
GRETCHEN: So are you at all concerned that they are two thirds of the way to ManBearPig?
ME: I guess that would be NeanderBearPig.
GRETCHEN: This is super serial! We have to stop them from getting pig DNA!
Al Gore preparing to hunt ManBearPig inside Cave of the Winds. Courtesy South Park Studios.
"A slight edge"
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."
Education imitates The Onion
From The Onion:
TOPEKA, KS -- In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.
...
The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.
Violators of the new law may face punishments that include jail time, stiff fines, and rehabilitative education and training to rid organisms suspected of evolutionary tendencies. Repeat offenders could face chemical sterilization.
Here's my favorite part:
Under particular scrutiny are single-cell microorganisms, with thousands of field labs being installed across the state to ensure that these self-replicating molecules, notorious for mutation, do not do so in a fashion benefitting their long-term survival.
Anti-evolutionists such as Hellenbaum have long accused microorganisms of popularizing "an otherwise obscure, agonizingly slow, and hard-to-understand" biological process. "These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem," Hellenbaum said. "We have the fossil records to prove it."
"Worn down by nearly three decades of peril"
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils
...
Over the course of his career, Whitson has been frequently lauded by colleagues for his thorough, methodical examinations of ancient peoples. He has also been chased by the snake-bodied ophidian women of Al'lat in Israel, hunted down by Mayan coyote specters manifested out of lost time and shadow in the Yucatan, and hounded by the Arctic-sky-filling Walrus Bone Woman of the early Inuits.
"It's true, I've got to stop reading the inscriptions on ancient door seals out loud," Whitson said. "I also need to quit dusting off medallions set into strange sarcophagi, allowing the light to hit them for the first time in centuries. And replacing the jewels that have fallen from the foreheads of ancient frog-deity statues-that's just bad archaeological practice."
(via Savage Minds)
Wild primate urine sampling tenth worst science job
From the "any publicity is good publicity" department: Popular Science's list of the worst jobs in science includes "Orangutan-pee collector".
"Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.
The short article does point out the great value of the work in wild primate conservation and biology. And it doesn't call them "whiz kids"!
And it is sure seeming easier than job number 3: "Kansas Biology Teacher".
About that Packers game...
Uhhh...this headline doesn't say it all, but it says enough:
Plummeting temperatures mean frozen balls and sleeveless jerseys
The thermometer here says -6°F.
First step to panda genetic engineering underway
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. This announcement follows on the heels of the Panda Genome workshop held on January 21â22, 2008, in Shenzhen, China. Dr. Hongmei Zhu, a scientist from BGI-Shenzhen stated that, "The goal of this project is to finish the sequencing and assembling of draft sequence within six months."
Naturally, the biggest question on everyone's minds is: What is with these pandas' sexual problems?
Dr. Lin He, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who works at both Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, noted that the panda sequence obtained from this project will greatly benefit our understanding of the reduced fecundity in pandas when living under certain environmental conditions. This is a major issue for breeding programs that are carried out to strengthen the panda species as a whole.
Well, that will be tough, since we really have little idea which genes influence fecundability in any mammal species yet. But the development of knockout pandas will help discover which genes are essential.
"The desire to hug is mutual"
Cutest. Story. Ever.
You haven't had a bear hug until you've cuddled with a panda
Do we really have to read it?
The cubs moved like puppies in a curious, playful swarm. They didn't lick so much as nuzzle. And grab: To our delight, the desire for hugging was mutual, and what began as a careful encounter quickly devolved into fuzzy mayhem as the cubs attached themselves to our arms and legs. At one point, Ronni was dragged to the ground by a clutch of cubs, and she beamed beatifically. "I can't believe this is happening," she said as she freed herself, only to be taken down again.
Oh no! Oh nooooooo!
Wait a minute...I think I know who is controlling this vacation. Must...resist...
The panda portal
Now, see, here's the thing. I was reading this story about how this panda in Washington D.C., Mei Xiang, isn't pregnant:
Her hormone levels had soared after she was artificially inseminated, then dropped last week, signaling a cub could be born. But an ultrasound showed no fetus, and zoo officials determined she wasn't pregnant. False pregnancies are common in pandas, and Mei Xiang has had four.
Yes, the panda reproductive system is a product of genetic drift, in case you're wondering. But at the bottom of the article, where it lists "related stories," there was this headline:
Panda poop to be made into paper
Now, you know I'm going to click on that. So I did:
The center's 40 bamboo-fed pandas produce about 2 tons of droppings a day, but Liao said he was not sure yet how much paper would result.
...
The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from the excrement produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.
And then, at that bottom of that story, there was this headline:
Call to help legless panda
At this point, I'm thinking this is fairly unbelievable. I mean, is this the secret link that will finally suck me into the seventh portal of Hell?
Apparently yes, but not today:
Page not found
Our web servers cannot find the page or file you asked for.
The link you followed may be broken or expired.
Hmmm...this is really too weird to just let it go. So I searched Google News for word of the legless panda's fate. But nothing.
And then, a ray of light from Reuters:
Legless panda needs a hand to improve sex life
Hmmm...I think I know what you're thinking at this point. No, that's not why the panda needs a hand; it's a female panda, and she needs a leg to prop her up for the deed.
"Niu Niu's spirits have lifted, the wound has healed and her appetite has basically recovered. But without her left paw, her loss of balance has directly affected her love life," the paper said.
Staff were appealing to the world's experts for suggestions and hoped to receive a plan for a "meticulously scientific" fake limb as soon as possible, the paper said.
Well, if perchance you've been planning to purvey panda prosthetics, start practicing your product pitch!
Pandalicious
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.
Apparently "Gu Gu" got her own in, and the man is in stitches.
Meanwhile, another reader sends this panda artificial insemination photo essay, which, well, let's just say it may not be entirely work-safe.
And that site (which approaches critter-fetish, I would say) has Google ads from Obey Butterstick!, which just seems weird:
RIGHT THINKING WILL BE REWARDED WRONG THINKING WILL BE PUNISHED OBEY HIS PANDIC VISAGE
For too long we Pandas have been content to cavort for your pleasure.
Eating bamboo, rolling in the mud, flashing our big cute eyes at you.
No more. Panda Power is here.
I'm telling you, all this panda press is just encouraging these people.
On the other hand, it does have some more interesting qualities than this incessant hominid fossil reporting...
Panda pr0n update
If you're waiting for an update on the effectiveness of panda porn -- and I know you are! -- well, here is the story for you:
Porn is a tough sell for bashful panda
But Thai zookeepers keep showing videos, hoping heâll get in mating mood
Apparently, pandas do not respond to television.
Panda poop story has legs
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.
The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odor-free souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals, state media and base officials said Monday.
In other news:
Pandas expand habitat areas in China
Xinhua News Agency said forestry researchers have identified panda droppings in areas beyond known habitats bordering northwestern Gansu province and southwestern Sichuan province.
"This indicates an expansion of the giant panda's habitat - and probably of its population, too," Huang Huali, vice director of the Baishuijiang Nature Reserve Administration, was quoted as saying.
Hmmm...I wonder if they checked to see if those droppings were in the form of, say, picture frames? Surely not...
The house of (not) flying pandas
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.
The body of Xiang Xiang was found Feb. 19 on snow-covered ground in the forests of Sichuan province in China's southwest, the Xinhua News Agency said. He survived less than a year in the wild after nearly three years of training in survival techniques and defense tactics.
It's very sad. Sort of like West Side Story.
I wonder how you train a panda in "survival techniques and defense tactics." Does this involve a Wudang master? I guess not, because then they could just fly around...
They apparently have a strategy to make being "chased by wild pandas" a good thing for the next release:
"We chose Xiang Xiang because we thought that a strong male panda would have a better chance of surviving in the harsh natural environment," Li was quoted as saying. "But the other male pandas clearly saw Xiang Xiang as a threat. Next time we will choose a female panda."
What did I say? West Side Story.
Another panda in an already over-panda-crowded world
You may have heard how I feel about pandas:
YESSSS! At last there is hope! I am so tired of having to hear about it every time a panda ovulates in this country!
I'm reminded today that there are only two ways that a zoo can get in the national news -- either have a panda baby, or engineer a gorilla attack (Chicago, Boston and Dallas). Oh, and then there's this, and this...
The panda's thumb
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.
"When she cried out, the cub became excited and gripped more tightly," it said. "Lisa finally managed to wrench herself free."
About 20 percent of the thumb had been bitten off, Xinhua said.
Don't feed the bears!
Why don't they get it over with and domesticate them?
Pandas, of course. This article about the exceptional 2006 panda birth rate (217) is acccompanied by a photo of a half dozen flopping panda cubs in a pile. So CUUUUTE!
Bleaaah!
The fertility of captive giant pandas is even lower because they do not move much, experts said.
I mean, these animals are bent on extinction! Get this:
The animals' diet consists almost entirely of bamboo, but they will eat only about 20 of the 200 or so species that grow in Georgia. What type they like also varies by the time of year. Sometimes the pandas will eat nothing but one variety for a week, then refuse to eat it anymore. (Sound familiar, parents?)
Clearly, this is why parents with large families die younger! Their children are picky as pandas.
Humans evolved from pigs, not apes!
On the subject of pigs, there is this story from the Weekly World News:
Charles Darwin was wrong -- humans evolved from pigs, not apes. And that explains the Biblical prohibition against consuming the flesh of our oinking relatives, according to a startling new theory.
"It's hard to believe, but you and Porky Pig are kissing cousins," says genetic scientist Dr. Basil Hainwright of London.
"Dim recollections of a time when we trotted on all fours and rolled in the mud with our family members probably survived into Neolithic times."
This should end once and for all the theory that it's only men....
MS Word as scientific authority
In case you haven't been following the "pluton" controversy, here's a pointer to Nature News on the topic. A pluton is a kind of underground igneous rock formation, but the IAU has proposed to use the term itself to describe Kuiper Belt objects. I had to laugh at this:
Owen Gingerich, an astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chair of the IAU committee that created the definition, says that they were aware of its usage amongst geologists, but unaware of its importance to the field. "Since the term is not in the MS Word or the WordPerfect spell checkers, we thought it was not that common," Gingerich wrote in an e-mail to news@nature.com. The geologic definition of the word does appear in common dictionaries, including the Oxford English.
OK, this suggests an obvious game. I don't type in Word, so my user dictionary is blank, and the built-in dictionary is ready for action. A quick check shows "erectus," "Australopithecus," "Neanderthal," and "sapiens," are in, but none of the rest of hominid taxonomy makes the cut. Hmm...is Bill Gates trying to tell us something?
Oh, and it is immensely satisfying to type "hominid" in the clear but immediately get the red underline for "hominin!"
Maybe we can get the astronomers to take that one off our hands...
My next simulation will be quantums
From my secret, "Why I am not a physicist", file:
Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.
Robot love affairs: the dark side
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. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn't the answer, because we're too different from the machines.
You can't explain to your car's navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you've already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won't be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.
This is like the Woody Allen version of robot relationships. Plus, it's hard to set a mood when the robot controls the lighting:
As he watched our window shades mysteriously lowering themselves, having detected some change in cloud cover that eluded us, Dr. Norman recalled the fight that he and his colleagues at Northwestern waged against the computerized shades that kept letting sunlight glare on their computer screens.
"It took us a year and a half to get the administration to let us control the shades in our own offices," he said. "Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it."
I have exactly the same problem with a motion-sensing light control in my office. I have to do some kind of Morris dance around the room to get the light to stay on for more than 10 minutes!
Just wait until the robot gets the TV remote.
"Long pig" moniker confirmed by robotic sommelier
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. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses...like "tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was."
But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot's omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.
But what about the laser beams?
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.
We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.
Their plan is that making the shark smell phantom odors on the left will cause it to turn left, and vice versa -- sort of a horse-and-carrot approach. It's a trick they have already pulled off with rat whiskers:
The team is not the first to attempt to control animals in this way. John Chapin of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn has used a similar tactic to guide rats through rubble piles (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21). Chapin's implant stimulates a part of the brain that is wired to their whiskers, so the rats instinctively turn toward the tickled side to see what has brushed by. Chapin rewards that response by stimulating a pleasure centre in the rats' brains. Using this reward process, he has trained the rodents to pause for 10 seconds when they smell a target chemical such as RDX, a component of plastic explosives.
Now, my question is: will the sharks be our allies when the fearless superintelligent carnivorous, and (now) cyber-equipped mice finally escape our control and drive humanity to undersea refugia? Of course, if all these cyber-equipped animals get hooked to the internet, the mice will just turn the sharks against us to foreclose our escape!
As I see it, our only hope is that the trained dolphin squads are kept implant-free so that they will continue to hew to human command.
"The President buys John Hawks"
Gretchen and I have been laughing for twenty minutes at the Sloganizer. They warn of a danger of addiction. So remember, "Step into the light with John Hawks!"
"Death Space Habitat" doesn't have a nice ring to it."
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. In many respects, it turns out to be more a question of biology and (gasp!) extraterrestrial anthropology than geology or physics.
For example, Shostak says:
What we might complain about is that so many of the galactic sentients [intelligent life-forms] seem determined to live on planets. Truly advanced life is likely to build its own habitats, and escape the limited area and resources of a planet. In Star Wars, it seems that only Monsieur Vader has figured this out, building his own artificial habitat, appealingly monikered the Death Star, even though it's not a star at all. But "Death Space Habitat" doesn't have as nice a ring to it.
Aside from the spoiler questions (how do all those planets have the same oxygen level, anyway?), Bett and Shostak consider the makeup of a galactic empire:
[I]t all seems unlikely, because the various inhabitants, many of which are biological, will have evolved at different times. Consequently, the top species will be many millennia ahead of the number two species, in terms of evolution, and millions and billions of years ahead of your average intelligent species. They won't want to share drinks with them in a Mos Eisley cantina.
But we need them there, to show us how Ardipithecus walked!
Much interesting consideration of the ecological makeup of different planets and whether they would be likely to occur.
But why, oh why did they have to go here:
NG News: What about Naboo, for example, the home planet of Queen Amidala? It's an idyllic world (see picture) populated by peaceful humans and an indigenous species of intelligent amphibians, the Gungans.
Shostak: We have rather few examples of two or more intelligent species simultaneously sharing a planet, but it has happened. The Neanderthals coexisted with Homo sapiens for millennia. So maybe it's possible to share, as long as neither species has the technology to obliterate, enslave, or merely cook and eat each other.
Jar-Jar a Neandertal? In the words of Darth Vader, "Nooooooooooooo!"
Quote of the day
I have to say I love this quote:
[T]he Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
It's ascribed to architect William McDonough by this BBC article, which describes new trends in city-building being tried out in China. I usually am skeptical of futurists because they tend to get the past wrong, and this quote certainly isn't quite right -- don't know that Bronze-Agers were really doing a "re-think." But it's a million-dollar analogy.
Science news from the Swift Report
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. School officials say that they moved to suspend 14 year-old Cody DuFresne after confiscating what they describe as an "evolutionary slur" from his locker. The student had drawn a crude version of the alleged path of primate evolution, depicting a fellow student, 14 year-old Melanie Carthage, as a direct descendent of apes.
I love the drawing itself -- it's classic junior high ("Still stinky!"). And there's this:
But some students at Liberty Junior High School say that they aren't surprised that their classmate ended up running afoul of school administrators. DuFresne, they point out, is known to associate with a group of students who go by the moniker "the Biology Club," and are adherents of the notorious British naturalist Charles Darwin.
Members of the club typically keep to themselves, says seventh grader Katee Danzig. "They wear a lot of black and eat at their own table in the cafeteria," says Danzig. "They're a little creepy."
And in other news,
Members of the Dover, PA school board have ordered science teachers who teach in area high schools to begin each session of their classes with a recitation of the beloved inspirational poem known as "Footprints in the Sand." Board members and some parents say that "Footprints" teaches important lessons about natural history, geology and oceanography.
The site is full of science news satire (hat tip: Evolgen).
Swineshine on my shoulders makes me happy
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.
They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through.
No, it wasn't enough to breed pigs that only partly glow green. They needed their pigs green through and through!
The point is to be able to find human stem cells after injection -- they will be the only ones not glowing.
Yes, the story has pictures of the pigs glowing in the dark. As if you needed to ask.
The researchers say they hope the new, green pigs will mate with ordinary female pigs to create a new generation.
No, the story doesn't have any pictures of that!
"Skull morphology of giant terror birds"
Found this in Nature a couple of weeks ago:
Palaeontology: Skull morphology of giant terror birds
Luis B. Chappe and Sara Bertelli
These monstrous birds were probably more agile and less portly than previously thought.
Here's part of figure 1:
Skull of the terror bird, Patagornis marshi
Hmm.... "Less portly?" I wonder....
Life reconstruction of "terror bird," with its hideous "death grimace."
My toddler is not a Neandertal. I only wish he were...
How could I not look at an article headlined, "Coping with the Caveman in the Crib"? It's a health piece by Tara Parker-Pope, profiling "baby whisperer" Harvey Karp:
In his latest book, "The Happiest Toddler on the Block," Dr. Karp tries to teach parents the skills to communicate with and soothe tantrum-prone children. In doing so, however, he redefines what being a toddler means. In his view, toddlers are not just small people. In fact, for all practical purposes, they're not even small Homo sapiens.
Dr. Karp notes that in terms of brain development, a toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven, instinctive creature that has yet to develop the think