I suscribe to the wonderful website, SciTechDaily – it’s an excellent way of keeping up with the science headlines. Recently an article on ‘deep time’ caught my eye, & I thought I’d mention it here because the concept of deep time came up (implicitly) in my post on Earth’s birthday.
Continue readingMonth: November 2008
rain man? – rainfall & autism
I get a daily compendium of science-related headlines – yesterday one in particular caught my eye. It said: Autism linked with rainfall in study: Children who live in the US Northwest’s wettest counties are more likely to have autism, but it is unclear why.
Continue readingegg-eating foxes
Animals may put food away for a rainy day – or at least, for a time when supplies are in short supply. Squirrels do it, storing nuts in hollow trees or holes dug in the leaf litter. How many they find later is another matter! But I didn’t know that foxes are also into caching […]
Continue readingancient shaman’s burial site
This one’s really hot off the press – & even then lots of people have beaten me to it! Oh well. In the latest issue of PNAS, Leore Grosman & her colleagues describe the ornate & unusual burial of an elderly woman who lived 12,000 years ago in what is now Israel.
Continue readingvolcanic eruptions & human bottlenecks
We know, from looking at the amount of genetic variation in the global human population, that it went through a fairly pronounced bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This has been variously attributed to the founder effect, with only small populations moving out of Africa into Europe & Eurasia, and to the devastating consequences of the […]
Continue readingwind farms & bird kill
Here’s another exercise in thinking carefully about the question: wind farms & bird kills. In the US, it’s been suggested that up to 40,000 birds might be killed by flying (splat! poof!) into wind farm turbines each year. Figures like this are put forward in arguments against wind farms but – in relation to bird kills […]
Continue readinglong-legged (weta) males have more s*x
Here’s a neat bit of research that I was alerted to while reading the newspaper: a team of scientists studying the Cook Strait giant weta (Deinacrida rugosa) found that smaller males with longer legs are much more successful in gaining copulations (Kelly et al. 2008). (There’s a lot of information & pictures on NZ soil invertebrates […]
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