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Aliens Are Not Bodybuilders

July 16, 2009

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is willing to bet “dollars to Devil Dogs that any extraterrestrials we detect won’t be muscular guys with deep voices and corrugated foreheads, or even big-eyed, hairless grays.” It all has to do with the way evolution works. In the weekly SETI column for Space.com, Shostak opined […]

Amazing Facts

Dragonflies Are Marathon Champs

July 15, 2009

Step aside, monarch butterflies: some of your fellow insects beat your distance flying wings down. The BBC News reported on findings by a biologist in the Maldives about dragonflies that migrate 14,000 to 18,000 km from southern India to East Africa and back – including 800 km over open sea. How these insects can navigate […]

Dumb Ideas

Stretching Out the Cambrian Explosion

July 14, 2009

“Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin’s dilemma” is the confident-sounding title of an article about the Cambrian explosion in New Scientist. Their solution, however, did not include finding transitional forms. It revolved around “setting the stage” environmentally for the sudden appearance of complex animals. Reporters Douglas Fox and Michael Le Page began by […]

Early Man

The Early Man Gets the Big Brain

July 13, 2009

“Why are human brains so big?” asked Live Science. Why are our brains larger relative to body size than almost all other animals? Rachael Rettner reported on various answers. To her credit, she pointed out the fallacies of trying to test hypotheses when there is insufficient evidence. Rettner evaluated three hypotheses about why […]

Dumb Ideas

Lightning Cooks Up Weird Science

July 13, 2009

Get a charge out of this headline from New Scientist. A couple of scientists from University of Arizona studied fulgurites, the structures formed in sand by lightning strikes. They found that they contain phosphites (oxidized phosphate molecules). They theorized that lightning strikes could have provided phosphites which the primordial soup used to build RNA and […]

Amazing Facts

A Rat Race to Build Whiskered Robots

July 11, 2009

Some scientists at Bristol Robotics Lab are pretty proud of themselves for building a robot with whiskers. It can seek out and identify objects using its whiskers, just like rats do. But they should still take their hats off to their living model, because the rat’s technology is far superior. Science Daily mentioned several facts […]

Terrestrial Zoology

How Did the Turtle Get Its Shell?

July 10, 2009

The cover story of Science this week is about turtle evolution. The caption on the cover illustration, which compares the skeleton of a turtle, chicken and mouse, reads, “The turtle body plan is unusual in that the ribs are transformed into a carapace, and the scapula, situated outside the ribs in other animals, is found […]

Fossils

Greening the Cambrian Explosion

July 9, 2009

Some scientists came up with an idea that simple green plants may have invaded the land earlier than thought, and that this might have helped speed up the rise of animals in the Cambrian explosion. “The plants were only tiny mosses and liverworts, but they would have had a profound effect on the planet,” said […]

Dumb Ideas

Origin-of-Life Researchers Caught Playing With Toys

July 7, 2009

A “virtual primordial soup” cooks up life in a computer program in a “toy universe,” according to reporter Leslie Mullen at Space.com. She wrote, “The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life’s origin.” EvoGrid is “a computer creation concept that would be a digital version of the primordial […]

Marine Biology

Evolution of Foraminifera Questioned

July 6, 2009

A long, long time ago, primitive sea creatures called foraminifera lived on the ocean bottom. One day, some of them invaded a new ecological niche: the ocean surface. There, they became part of the plankton zoo. When the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs occurred, most of the surface foraminifera died. But they recovered in […]

Birds

How the Animals Learned to Count

July 6, 2009

Any evolutionary article that begins with “How…” should be checked for Kipling-style just-so storytelling. Characteristics to watch for include (1) fanciful speculation without evidence: i.e., “made-up” tales that provide an answer to a childish question without appeal to rigorous proof, and (2) statements made with dogmatic authority, like a parent would explain to a child […]

Dumb Ideas

Paper View: Darwin, of All the Nerve

July 4, 2009

American neurons are due to get a workout this day. The taste buds and olfactory neurons will get their exercise first at Independence Day barbecues across the land, then the visual cortex and auditory neurons will max out as the fireworks start after dark. Escorted by the Editors of Science Magazine, Darwin is here in […]

Uncategorized

Divining Plant Evolution from Uncooperative Data

July 3, 2009

A new book on plant evolution came out. How well does it do explaining the diversity of the world’s plants via Darwin’s theory of natural selection? The answer depends on how forgiving you can be with details that don’t fit very well. The book is Paleobotany The Biology and Evolution of Fossil Plants. […]

Mammals

Animals Are Not Malthusians

July 2, 2009

According to Malthus and Darwin, the struggle to survive favors those who have the most fitness to take advantage of limited resources. A study by the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Vienna, reported by PhysOrg shows this is not the case: Charles Darwin and his contemporaries postulated that food consumption in birds and mammals […]

Dinosaurs

Dakota Dino Reveals Skin Cells

July 1, 2009

“Absolutely amazing” and “absolutely gobsmacking” are exclamations made by scientists analyzing the fossilized skin of a hadrosaur.

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