Eyes seem to be flavour of the month at the moment 🙂 PZ has just put up a fascinating post – about using MRI technology to see the images forming in the visual cortex of volunteers as they look at pictures of letters of the alphabet. Truly. But he points out that it’s not like Big […]
Continue readingTag: new science stories
how to s*x a moa
Time for look at another paper. This one’s on something I think I referred to earlier – the use of ancient DNA to determine the sex of New Zealand’s giant, flightless – & alas! extinct – moa.
Continue readingevolution of the eye
I’ve written before about the evolution of the eye (here & here for example. Now there’s a whole issue of the most excellent science education journal Evolution: education & outreach devoted to this very topic – & it’s free on-line right here! So if you’re interested in following up on some of the latest work on this […]
Continue readingmore on copy-number variations in chimps & humans
A little while ago now I wrote about the creationist take on a recent paper looking at chimp/human genetics – more specifically, copy-number variations in particular gene sequences. I intended to read the original paper & blog about it, because the Sensuous Curmudgeon made it sound so interesting. So you may imagine that I was just […]
Continue readingmore on tiktaalik
Tiktaalik roseae is a lovely example of a transitional fossil – it has a number of morphological features that clearly place it on the ‘fish-to-tetrapod’ transition. The type specimen is a remarkably well-preserved fossil that’s been very carefully analysed. A recent paper by Jason Downs & his co-workers described the results of their examination of […]
Continue readingshades of jurassic park
A couple of nights ago I caught the end of a TV ‘news’ item about mammoths. Molecular biologists have managed to sequence the mammoth genome – the next thing, said the reporter breathlessly, will be bringing mammoths back to life…
Continue readingunforseen consequences of megafaunal removal
It can be hard to predict the outcomes of human interference in an ecosystem, even when it’s done with the best of intentions. This paper looks at the unforseen consequences of removing large herbivorous mammals from part of an African savannah, & demonstrates just how complex ecosystem interactions can be.
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 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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