Remember that episode of The Office in which Jan explains the reasoning behind her decision to seek artificial insemination rather than procreate with her doofy but attentive significant other? She tells the camera, "If I were twenty-two and had time to have lots of children, sure, why not let Michael have a shot at one. But I'm not. This one has to count."

Egad! thinks the audience. Using offspring simply just to test out if a guy is responsible or not? Terrible! (Especially in the case of this particular guy; the kid in question would be lucky to make it to age five without blowing himself up with a Speak 'n' Spell.)

Well it seems that fish do that all the time. Seventeen years after the hypothesis was first made public, Andrea Manica has collected data to support the idea that female such fish leave males small "test" batches of eggs to see if they are effective guardians. Though A small fraction of the female fish population does this, usually at the start of the breeding season, before the males' proficiencies are known. Only if the male fish can both protect and refrain from eating the eggs do the female fish return for the mother lode.

Exhibit A: Fossils indicated many, many species of large mammals living in North and South America before the arrival of human beings.

Exhibit B: Lack of fossils indicating the absence of such many, many species of large mammals after the arrival of human beings, strongly suggesting that we came, we saw and then we kicked some giant sloth ass.

Exhibit C: Lots of alternate hypotheses from scholars including asteroid strikes, climate change.

Exhibit D: New research out of the University of Wisconsin shows another take.

This article has some interesting moments. Specifically, the way the team gathered the data involved measuring levels of spores that would have been deposited as part of animal dung and looking at things like the growth of oak forests, which were made possible by the disappearance of large grazers. That is an interesting thought. The truly "wild and untouched" North America may have looked entirely different from the one first encountered by European settlers. In other words, the extinction caused the climate change, not vice versa. The dating of the fossils show that the animals were extinct before the asteroid in question hit and also before the arrival of the Clovis culture. However, butchered mammoth remains in Wisconsin remain a wrench in the gears.

A team headed by Oregon Health and Science University's Eric Gouaux has just finished mapping the complete molecular structure of a closed glutamate receptor common in the human brain. It's thought that this receptor might be "crucial" to learning and memory. There were a few surprises. For one, the pairs of subunits differ from each other "completely."

Possible applications? Treatments for Alzheimer's, treatments for epilepsy and zapping children's brains so that they can spend less time in our dinosaur industrial-revolution-model educational system and more time at the sort of hands-on learning that took place through most of human existence without sacrificing the raw science, history and math that they need to survive in a post-industrial world. (That last one may take a while.)

In other news, I've been scouting around for word on the Yangtze soft-shell turtles. It seems that the Suzhou Zoo did attempt to breed them again, but nothing hit the mainstream news.

I'M GOING TO GOREFEST YAY and here's a meme.

1. Pick ten of your favorite books or series.
2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)
3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

( Some of these are crazy easy, but I'll be surprised if anyone gets number five. )

Okay, on one level, I'm glad that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, but on the other I think it would have been more appropriate to award it to him after closing Guantanamo Bay or clearing things up in Iraq or Afghanistan or mediating some great dispute, as Teddy Roosevelt did. Someone on NPR mentioned that it might be more appropriate if he turned it down and requested that it be awarded to the Iranian democratic protesters.

Still, hey, water on the moon! That could be cool.

Although over a million years older than Lucy, Ardipithecus ramedus is not old enough to be the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. They've found a few hundred samples from at least thirty-six individuals. They lived about 4.4 million years ago. The October 2 issue of Science is going into reprint. Nature actually has a pic of the Sci-cover as its illustration.

The upshot of all this is that because Ardi both walked upright and lived in a forested area rather than a grassland, the idea that pre-human primaetes developed upright walking as a response to being trapped on the savannahs away from trees is looking like it's on its way out.

Remember this post? Well it seems that what's good for the bat is good for the birdie if said birdie happens to be a great tit (Parus major).

According to the New York Times, these birds fly into bat caves and poke around in the crevices to snack on the hapless inhabitants.

The bats in question are about two inches long. Great tits BY WHICH I MEAN THE BIRDS, PEOPLE are about five inches long. I'm not too sure how that's supposed to work.

Holy crud but this documentary is freaking funny: National Geographic Does Snakehead Fish.

Not only is it reasonably accurate, stressing that invasive species are not a problem in their native habitats, etc., but the prophet-of-doom narrations and monster closeups are just cracking me up.

The snakehead fish is an import, probably from China, that has been infesting the American South, outcompeting native species and generally messing up ecosystems. They can breathe air and wiggle across land, which is why they've spread so rapidly. They're also mean as all get-out.

On a personal note, when I mentioned this "problem" to my Chinese coworkers at lunch a few years ago, they all started laughing. The snakehead fish, they assured me, is delicious! So I wrote to the departments of agriculture or whatever of a few Southern states and advised them to hold a cooking contest. Whoever makes snakehead fish palatable to American Southerners would win bragging rights and maybe a small cash prize. Then they should yell, "No limit!" and watch the eco problem disappear as we exercise our natural inclination to hunt tasty animals to local extinction. (Kind of like with those jellyfish last year.)

According to the documentary, people are cooking the fish, but not on any kind of large scale. Also, someone actually made a horror movie about snakeheads. No, really.

Now this is an interesting constellation of interests: history, literature, evolutionary biology and colloquial insults.

The premise of the article is that Aesop may or may not have been a student of bird behavior—one of the crows in his story performs a trick with rudimentary tool use that actual rooks and crows have been spotted pulling in captivity. The article also notes that the word Aesop used for "any of a big group of birds today called 'corvids' " is almost always translated as "crow."

Now, I've just been reading Beedle the Bard so this reminds me of Dumbledore's commentary on "Babbity Rabbity." Dumbledore supposes that a certain "impossible" event in the story was less a result of Beedle taking artistic liberties and more a result of the possibility that he'd only heard about Animagi and was working on incomplete information. So it seems to me that Aesop might not have been stalking around ancient wherever taking notes on animal behavior and more likely that he just happened to see some birds messing around with stones one day.

How much artificial sperm does one scientific community really need?

Three weeks ago a paper in Stem Cells and Development reported that human embryonic stem cells had been coaxed into cells closely resembling sperm progenitor cells; they could divide into pseudo-gametes with haploid chromosomes and sperm-like motility. Applications in infertility treatments were speculated upon. However, the scientific community was shocked to find that two paragraphs in the introduction were lifted verbatim from a separate paper in Biology of Reproduction.

The paragraphs may have been published by accident, SC&D says, a possibility that seems more likely considering that the paper in question was published three days earlier than it was supposed to be, cutting editing time. [Insert joke about releasing sperm too fast here.]

Life imitates art ...if Bones can still be called "art." I swear, this past season read like some of the worst fanfiction— In any case, the title character is a forensic scientist. What she lacks in intuition she makes up in hyper-clear rationality and a masterful command of different logical forms. (Or at least they're presented as logical forms; it's the Fox Network.) Her counterpart, an Army Ranger turned FBI agent, is the hunch man (and also has 92% of their collective people skills).

What I like about the show—and my fellow fans will correct me if I am about to grossly misinterpret canon—is that while Bones does scoff at Booth's hunches as "just guessing," it's more on legal grounds than on the idea that hunches never work.

When someone has a hunch, it's can look or feel like psychic power or supernatural favor, but it's really (probably) that person's subconscious mind putting together visual and auditory clues that the conscious mind hasn't caught up on yet.

Well that's good for more than just ensemble-cast police procedurals with wacky characters and cute dialogue. ( The New York Times shows how hunches help soldiers in Iraq avoid dangerous situations. )

Today, TierneyLab posted a follow-up to an article from last September. The study, out of Bradley and the Universities of Vienna and Tartu asserted that men and women in Western societies have more of a gender gap in personality than people in stricter agrarian societies, ( What it lacked in coherency... )

Having a skank for a mom does not improve childhood outcomes, says Nature magazine. Despite the long-held hypothesis that copulating with multiple male partners allows the female's body to select the fittest, most masculine sperm. Considering that most female bodies don't come with a biometric scanners like in Gattaca, I guess we were all thinking that the sperm would be duking it out amongst themselves with tiny little maces and tridents like in I, Claudius.

Before I do any more pop culture references, let it be known that the study was conducted on beetles. ( BEETLES, people! )

First, Concord is overrun with ravenous beavers, and now Nova Scotia's University of Victoria is hitting the record for most rabbits on campus. According to Dot Earth's Andrew C. Revkin—I am not making this up—there is some concern that this many rabbits, "could attract the cougars."

Fortunately, someone posted a recipe for pesky rabbit, complete with butchering and skinning instructions. It kicked up a lot of controversy on campus. Editors later claimed that the recipe was a modest proposal, but it looks pretty straightforward to me. They're probably just backing out.

The concerns that the rabbits are killed humanely make sense, but other than that, how is killing them and eating them—or donating the meat—worse than killing them and not eating them?

Long ago, there were not as many beavers, but now there are beavers everywhere. There are beavers on the lawn, beavers in the water. There are even beavers hanging out in the open.

( Picture of the beaver rampage. )

Aside from the "I" that should be "me" in the first line, these lyrics are really great. The singing sounds professional, the puppets all look great and while there's lots of craziness, it's all craziness that supports the message rather than distracting from it. It's just really, really balanced.



( The amazing thing about this... )

The only remaining question is what that goopy stuff in the lightbulb section is.

Last fall, Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss was the victim of identity theft. The culprits, still uncaught, weren't after his credit history, however. And Mr. Weiss wasn't alone.

The identities of more than one hundred journalists, scientists and politicians were appropriated for a huge Facebook scam, in which the unidentified perpetrators created fake profiles and then sent Facebook friend invitations to scientists. Most of the invitees were or are engaged in stem cell research.

John Willibanks of Creative Commons comments that sometimes people use fake identities to make it seem as though a certain scientific idea is more accepted than it really is, but these particular impostors' motives remain unknown, perhaps because the scheme was outed before they could take action. Knowing the Internet, this could have been anything from a criminal scheme to a political stunt to a bunch of teenagers messing around.

Security experts call this sort of scheme a Sybil attack, after the protagonist of the eponymous novel. The matter has been brought to Facebook's attention.

read more | discover8 article

And the third exoplanet was just right.

...for maintaining liquid water.

Our ability to find exoplanets--planets outside our own solar system--has finally stretched down to planets small enough and far enough from their own suns for astronomers to point out a little rock here and there that could potentially maintain water in a liquid state. We might not be ready to fire up the terraformers and move in just yet--even the smallest of these planets has a radius about 1.7 times Earth's--but there's suddenly a selection of potential exopads to choose from. Gliese 581e is the fourth such exoplanet to be identified by earthbound astronomy, as detailed in the European Union's Astronomy and Space Science Week at the University of Hertfordshire.

read more | discover8 article

(Yes, I appreciate the irony of using a British journal as a source for U.S. news.)

The National Institutes of Health have spelled out the new state of embryonic stem cell research: Cell lines developed from leftover fertility clinic embryos will be eligible for Federal funding, but stem cell lines created specifically for research will not.

It's much more permissive than President Bush's take, but scientists still have a number of problems with the new guidelines. First, there had been hopes that embryos made from leftover sperm and eggs would be eligible for funding, and they're not. Second, the ban on embryos created specifically for research covers not only traditionally created embryos but also embryos created by somatic cell nuclear transfer--none of which currently exist--and cell lines created via parthenogenesis (an unfertilized egg tweaked into behaving like an embryonic cell). Again, I'm not too clear whether SCNT cells or human parthenotes go through a totipotent state where they could potentially grow into babies, but if they don't then there really ought to be no life argument against their use. (NOTE: These two techniques have nothing to do with induced pluripotent stem cells, which do not appear to be covered by these guidelines.)

The rule that patients must donate the embryos with no inducements seems simple, but it doesn't only mean that people may not sell their embryos. Fertility treatments are expensive and there had been some talk of offering discount services to patients willing to donate leftover embryos. Still, it seems as though the NIH has put this in the guidelines to prevent patient coercion and that's a flat-out good thing.

These rules are not yet final. NIH will officially issue the guidelines next week and the public will have thirty days to comment. NIH expects to issue the final versions by early July.

read more | discover8 article

This article discusses a new gene sequencing technique that dramatically cuts the cost of studying an individual genome, but this is more about what it reminds me of.

Six years ago, the human genome project was a major, major race between separate institutions, primarily NIH and Celera Corporation. God only knows how much they spent. (God and wikipedia; lemme check ...it was something on the order of billions for NIH and hundreds of millions for Celera.) These new techniques are on the way to working that down to $1000 per genome. A few more years and sequencing individual genomes might be something that we do alongisde our vaccinations--rare but routine parts of medical care.

But the kicker in all of this is something rarely far from my mind: iPS. One of the reasons why induced pluripotent stem cells have yet to replace embryonic stem cells in research settings is that they're still so difficult, expensive and time-consuming to make. Now gene sequencing techniques and cell biology/genetic engineering techniques are pretty different, but this is a pattern that I've seen over and over. Makes me wonder where the stem cell issue will be six years from now. Even scientists who do not believe that embryos are human lives have plenty of motivation to work on or even just provide demand for accessible iPS lines. Blah blah blah individualized patient care on the clinical side and solidly known phenotypes on the applied research side. I don't think I can harp on that quite enough.

read more | discover8 article