Over at hosting blog 360 Degree Skeptic, Andrew Bernardin has posted the 27th Carnival of Evolution, with a fine assortment of contributions from Deep Sea News, The Tree of Life, and Greg Laden’s blog, among others. Also, there’s a nice piece from Byte-sized Biology that makes a great tie-in with today’s D&T post about the evolution of cooperation.
Tag Archives: blogging
Science online, counting chlorophylls edition
Photo by Jonathan Cohen.- It’s the hot new pigment this season. A just-discovered form of chlorophyll allows the algae that produce it to photosynthesize using infrared light. (Wired Science)
- One, two, three … many? Studies of monkeys, babies, and chickens suggest that the ability to count small numbers is innate, and separate from the ability to count larger numbers. (The Thoughtful Animal)
- Can you hear me now? On the Galapagos islands, marine iguanas listen for the alarm calls of mockingbirds to know if a predator is approaching. (The Thoughtful Animal)
- Crocodile tears from the Adaptationist Programme. Crying confers fitness advantages by eliciting empathetic responses. Or something like that. (NPR)
- Long-term forecast: 60% chance of dueling results. Remember all that oil in the Gulf of Mexico that hadn’t magically disappeared? Analysis of DNA microbial DNA sampled in that oil plume just found lots of oil-eating bacteria. (Deep Sea News, Wired Science, NPR; original peer-reviewed article in Science [$a])
- Climate’s changing, with or without you. As temperatures warm throughout the Mojave Desert, Joshua tree, my favorite woody monocot, may disappear from 90% of its present range. (Voltage Gate)
- 10-mm frogs. Discovered living inside pitcher plants. (io9, Wired Science; species description in Zootaxa [PDF])
I start another semester as Teaching Assistant for Mammalogy next week, so here’s David Attenborough discussing mammalian dentition, with reference to an ancient omnivore I’d never heard about up to now.
Scienceblogging.org will be one-stop shop for, um, exactly what it says on the tin
And right on the heels of the Carnal Carnival launch, Bora has another big announcement: a new site aggregating online science writing from pretty much everywhere, appropriately located at scienceblogging.org. The site draws from every science blogging collective I follow—ResearchBlogging, Discover Blogs, Wired Science, Field of Science, the still-shiny new Scientopia, and good ol’ ScienceBlogs—along with a lot I don’t run across as often.
Right now there’s a single page listing recent feed results from all these group blogs, and another devoted to science-y blog carnivals, but no independent blogs (ahem), and no particular way of sorting through the contents. It looks more like a starting point than a finished product, and that’s just fine—Bora and his co-founders Anton Zuiker and Dave Munger are still looking for input. Says Dave:
The site is really just an aggregator of aggregators. Everything you see on the front page is a feed from some other bundle of blogs. In a couple cases, we made our own bundles using Friendfeed. The site is flexible enough to add additional bundles as bloggers and publishers form new blogging communities. It’s not ideal — I think the ultimate science blog aggregator will allow users to view blog posts by topic, and perhaps have some way of identifying the best posts. But it’s flexible enough that with some input from the community, we might be able to shape it into something really special. Check it out, and let us know what you think.
As a blogger without a network, I’m naturally interested in seeing independent blogs added to the ScienceBlogging.org stream (although, as Bora points out, we’re already partially accounted for by including the Research Blogging feed). The large number of indy science bloggers would make this challenging, to say the least, but I think many of the issues are the same ones that show up, in smaller scale, on the new ScienceBlogging.org homepage—how to make it easy for a visitor to sift through a large number of posts to find writing by particular people, on particular topics, written in a particular time-frame.
Maybe what’s needed is an analogue to ResearchBlogging that aggregates all posts from member blogs and sifts them into topic-labeled feeds—but that’s a whole different class of infrastructure, and effort from member blogs, than what’s provided at the new site right now. Still, the value of a true one-stop shop for online science writing should be great enough to justify the effort. In the meantime, I’ve added a new bookmark, and I’ll be keeping an eye on ScienceBlogging.org.
Introducing the Carnal Carnival
A brand-new blog carnival promises to unleash the naughtier impulses of the science blogosphere which, let’s be frank, were never particularly tightly leashed to begin with. Except for the ones that are into that sort of thing.
Ahem.
Anyway, the inaugural edition of the Carnal Carnival is now online at A Blog Around the Clock, where host Bora Zivkovic called for any and all posts relating to poop, feces, dung, and/or excreta. The only shit-related question left unanswered in this fecund roundup is, shouldn’t they have saved this topic for Carnal Carnival #2?
Science online, older than we thought edition
A little brown bat covered with the white nose fungus. Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Northeast Region.- First Ginsu salesman still millions of years away, though. Newly discovered bones bear scratch marks that could have been made by flaked stone cutting tools 3.4 million years ago—more than 800 thousand years earlier than previous evidence of such toolmaking by human ancestors. (Greg Laden’s Blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science)
- I thought they said it had all magically disappeared? As much as 70% of the oil spilled by the now-plugged Deepwater Horizon well is still out there, somewhere. In fact, it’s probably suspended in the deep ocean, where microbes expected to break down oil may take months to finish it off. (Deep Sea News, Wired Science)
- Thesis, antithesis. Synthesis! Razib Khan describes how R.A. Fisher united Mendelian genetics and quantitative trait theory into a single mathematical model. (Gene Expression)
- Really? Life doesn’t look a day over 640 million. New 650-million-year-old fossils may be the oldest examples of animal life. (Science Daily, Highly Allochthonous)
- Being pecked to death never looked so unpleasant. Stress analysis of terror bird skulls suggest they killed prey by repeatedly stabbing it with the dagger-like tip of their beaks. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
- Is there an HVAC engineer in the house? We might be able to save bats from white-nose syndrome by heating their hibernation caves. (Wild Muse)
And now, via Ed Yong and BoingBoing, Humbolt penguins chasing a butterfly:
If your idea of a fun time might include snarky dissection of illuminated manuscripts,
Then you should definitely be following Got Medieval. You might also consider checking out Carl Pyrdum’s blog if your idea of a good time might include being told another way in which Newt Gingrich is an ass. If your idea of a good time does not involve such things, consider following those links anyway; you many rapidly change your mind.
Giants Shoulders #26 online at Neurotic Physiology
Host Scicurious has just posted the 26th edition of the Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival, and wow, it’s a doozy. The “Fools, Frauds, and Failures” theme drew a huge list of contributions in all three categories (including my own piece on Sewall Wright and Linanthus parryae). And Sci introduces it all with a lovely olde-worlde flourish.
Greetinges, all ye who enter here.
Beholde, before you doth appear
A moste unusual carnivale!
And this one hath a grand moral.
This speakes of fools, failures and fraudes.
Those findings no longer we applaude.
I may very well spend the rest of the month until the next edition reading it all.
Science online, developmental pointilism edition
Mosaicism. Photo by docman.- Probably delicious with a nice Chianti. A new species of monkey has been discovered in the Amazon, and is already critically endangered. (Short Sharp Science)
- Also link to fewer knitting patterns than crafts bloggers. A systematic comparison finds that science bloggers link to more original scholarly articles, and fewer news media sources, than political bloggers. (CMBR)
- Don’t panic. Yet. The evolution of drug-resistant bacteria may mean the end of usefulness for current antibiotics within a decade. (The Guardian; Original article in Lancet Infectious Diseases)
- We should probably set up more. On balance, marine protected areas seem to have improved biodiversity and productivity. (Conservation Bytes)
- We’re all mosaics. Patterns of cell proliferation and specialization during development are pretty, as well as informative. (Pharyngula)
- Brought to you by the government agency responsible for Tang. Scicurious walks through a ground-breaking NASA study of urination in zero gravity. (Neurotic Physiology)
- Adds up to trouble. American students don’t fully understand what the “equals” sign means. (Cocktail Party Physics)
Video this week: the first part of a USGS-made film about desert tortoises, which are awesome, and very, very endangered. Via Chris Clarke, who posted the whole thing.
Science online, speak up in the speakeasy edition
Nope. Not going for a single-entendre in the caption, either. Photo by law_keven.- Oh, that’s why he didn’t respond when I asked for a phone number. Drinking alcohol induces measurable hearing loss. (Neurotic Physiology)
- No naughty intro necessary. Male ducks adjust when to grow a penis, and how long to grow it, based on the presence of competitors. (Wired Science, Discoblog)
- They’re just hopping on the alternative energy bandwagon. Spotted salamanders may be effectively photosynthetic, thanks to algae living inside their cells. (Nature News)
- Thousands of species in the sea, most of them not fish. A new comprehensive census of marine biodiversity estimates that for every known species in the sea, four are waiting to be discovered. (EveryONE)
- Wild. Radioactive. Boars. More than 24 years after the Chernobyl disaster, Germany’s booming population of wild boars are still radioactive. (The Two-Way; original article in Der Spiegel)
- Sip, don’t swig. Dave Munger sifts through evidence about the effectiveness of caffeine, and concludes that if you must drink coffee, it’s best in small, regular doses. (SEED Magazine)
- Smells like adaptation. Selective breeding has reshaped dogs’ brains, particularly the location of the olfactory bulb. (80beats)
- Batpocalypse now. The most common bat species in eastern North America could be extinct in the region within decades, thanks to a mysterious disease striking overwintering colonies. (Wired Science, original article in Science [$a])
Here’s a good video description of the syndrome that might wipe out those bats. (The Kentucky state biologist interviewed is exceptionally careful in her use of the word “hypothesis,” too.)
Carnival of Evolution #26 at The Thoughtful Animal
I’m late to the party on this one: the 26th Carnival of Evolution is on over at this month’s host, Jason Goldman’s The Thoughtful Animal. This round of submissions is more concentrated on the “endless forms most beautiful” than directly challenging creationism, which is a welcome change if I do say so myself. Don’t get me wrong; creationists need (apparently endless) debunking. But I think the argument is made just as effectively by showing that there’s “grandeur” in the scientific view of life—which these posts do in spades.