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| Ben Goldacre, badscience.net |
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| Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science |
In North America’s Sonoran desert, there’s a fly that depends on a cactus. Thanks to a handful of changes in a gene called Neverland, Drosophila pachea can no longer make chemicals that it needs to grow and reproduce. These genetic changes represent the evolution of subservience – they inextricably bound the fly to the senita cactus, the only species with the substances the fly needs.
When William Buckland was a kid, an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1790s — around the time George Washington had just finished being President — he pulled a prank that was so rude, so smart, and so biologically sophisticated for his day, I think he deserves a second crown, this one for Best Use of Grass Ever. |
| [from Nieman Storyboard] |
A nice little post at The Last Word on Nothing reminded me of the ever-changing cairn garden near one of the old lime kilns in the Pogonip near UCSC. The photo at left, taken in the fall, doesn't have enough contrast to do the cairn-builders justice. The cairns are always changing, sometimes incorporated into mazes, sometimes riding the limbs of surrounding trees as well as inhabiting the ground.
My neighborhood, as I've mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money's on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it's more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup. 
In 1988, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist now at Michigan State University, launched the longest running experiment on natural selection. It started with a single microbe–E. coli–which Lenski used to seed twelve genetically identical lines of bacteria. He placed each line in a separate flask, which he provisioned with a scant supply of glucose. The bacteria ate up the sugar in a few hours. The next day, he took a droplet of microbial broth from each flask and let it tumble into a new one, complete with a fresh supply of food. The bacteria boomed again, then starved again, and then were transferred again to a new home. Lenski and his colleagues have repeated this procedure every day for the past 24 years, rearing over 55,000 generations of bacteria.
The cheetah's spots look like the work of a skilled artist, who has delicately dabbed dots of ink upon the animal's coat. By contrast, the king cheetah – a rare breed from southern Africa – looks like the same artist had a bad day and knocked the whole ink pot over. With thick stripes running down its back, and disorderly blotches over the rest of its body, the king cheetah looks so unusual that it was originally considered a separate species. Its true nature as a mutant breed was finally confirmed in 1981 when two captive spotted females each gave birth to a king.
Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in the woodlands around Lake Eyasi, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.
HULK GREEN BUT NO CAN FIX OWN CARBON. THAT MAKE HULK ANGRY!
Eagle regains ability to preen & drink w/ 3D-printed prosthesis. [Rusten: The sequelae to the prosthesis are interesting. Not a simple story.]
Mmmm… natural fractals as seen through Google Earth [Rusten: Go to the Google Earth Fractals site for more.]
We have all held leaves, driven miles to see their fall colors, eaten them, raked them, sought their shade. Since they are everywhere, it’s easy to take them for granted.
In The Bourne Identity, the eponymous hero is presumed dead by his former employers, but turns out to have merely lost his memory. Thus unburdened, he attempts to change his fate.
Here's yet another reason why humans are weird: menopause. During our 40s, women permanently lose the ability to have children, but continue to live for decades. In doing this, we are virtually alone in the animal kingdom. From a cold evolutionary point of view, why would an animal continue to live past the point when it could pass on its genes to the next generation? Or put it another way: why don't we keep on making babies till we die? Why does our reproductive lifespan cut out early?
