Science online, no layovers edition

The latest word on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, as of the time at which I set the timer for this post to publish (circa 2230, 27 May), seems to be: that BP's "top kill" maneuver, which would have plugged the gushing wellhead with mud, is not quite working as it ought. Meanwhile, the spill is now officially the worst in U.S. history, and poised to get even messier if it's not contained by the start of what is projected to be a busier than usual hurricane season. Ugh. In non-oil-related science news:

Migrating bar-tailed godwits can fly 7,100 miles without a break. Photo by jvverde.

• The small and squeaky shall inherit the Earth. Fossil evidence from a more gradual episode of warming 12,000 years ago suggests that some rodents, like deer mice, will become more abundant as the globe warms. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
• Got it made in the shade. Coffee farms practicing shade-growing techniques host more bee species, which may mean better pollination of the crop. (Coffee and Conservation)
• ... and boy are my wings tired! The advent of lightweight GPS and more sophisticated tracking methods has allowed ornithologists to directly monitor migrating birds—revealing nonstop flights of thousands of miles. (NY Times)
• One more reason not to stand right behind a mammoth. A new study tracks ancient levels of atmospheric methane, and suggests that human overhunting of North America's methane-farting megafauna caused the last ice age. (io9)
• I know what you're thinking, punk—only one of those critters is a true bug. Bombardier beetles, cabbage aphids, and velvet worms all employ explosive chemical weaponry as defenses, making them the "ballistics experts of the bug world." (Ecotone)
• No evidence of fossilized tartar sauce. Paleontologists have discovered a fossil frog with a fossil fish in its stomach. (Laelaps)

And finally, there's a new version of the totally creepy Big Dog walking robot—it's now cat-sized, and somehow more adorable than creepy. Until a pack of them show up to take me away as a slave to our new robot overlords, anyway. (via Anthony Hecht at Slog, who declares it "still creepy")

Further shameless self-promotion: Interview at A Blog Around the Clock

As part of the early promotion for next year's ScienceOnline conference, science superblogger and chronobiologist Bora Zivkovic asked me to answer a few questions over at A Blog Around the Clock, concerning me, my research, why I write here at D&T, and what a great time I had at ScienceOnline2010. I think this is my first appearance at a blog other than D&T—thanks for having me, Bora!

Shameless self-promotion: 3QD Prize in Science

It's come to my attention that the polymath blog 3quarksdaily has announced its second annual prize in science blogging, which will be judged this year by none other than Richard Dawkins. Prizes include fame, glory, and actual cash money, apparently. I've already self-nominated "Dethroning the Red Queen?", but other parties who enjoy D&T are (ahem) free to nominate additional posts. Following Nerdy Christie's lead, allow me to suggest a few other posts with which I'm well pleased:

• "First step to mutualism doesn't look so friendly", posted 12 October 2009
• "How to synchronize flowering without really trying", posted 26 October 2009
• "For yucca moths, does (flower) size matter?", posted 2 December 2009
• "Evolving from plant pathogen to symbiont", posted 19 January 2010

Or you're free to nominate anything posted since 23 May, 2009. Any given person can only make one nomination, though, so choose carefully.

The "Big Four," part III: Genetic drift

This post is the third in a special series about four fundamental forces in evolution: natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and migration.

Have a coin handy? Flip it.

If your coin is fair, I can guess that it's come up heads and have a fifty percent chance, or probability equal to 0.5, that I've guessed correctly. Now, flip the coin ten times in a row. How many times did heads come up? Again, the best guess is that it came up five times—but it's not all that unlikely that it came up six times, or four, or even as many as eight.

God may not play dice, but evolution does. Photo by jcotherals.

Now, if you flipped the coin an infinite number of times, then exactly fifty percent of the total flips would be heads. But who has time for that? Similarly, populations of living organisms are not infinite—often far from it—and this means that the frequency of genes in those finite populations can change as a result of the same phenomenon at work on your coin. Biologists call this genetic drift.

A month-long oil spill

Now that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is more than a month old, Dr. M. of Deep Sea News rounds up the bad news and discusses long-term consequences.

Toxins from the oil spill will likely integrate into the food chain and eventually arrive to the deep in the form of food. Flux of material from the ocean surface is also likely to transport oil and toxins to the deep ocean. Shading by the oil slick might also inhibit phytoplankton production and reduce carbon flux to the deep sea meaning less food for seafloor organisms. An overall reduction of biodiversity both in terms of species and genetic diversity is expected.

A team with the International Bird Rescue Research Center cleans an oil-soaked brown pelican. Photo by IBRCC.

It's nice to have a feeder right outside the living room window

Male Calliope hummingbird. Photo by jby.

Science online, colorful results edition

My favorite is Adaptationist Green. Photo by Patrick Powers.

• Good science doesn't match the sofa. People tend to prefer colors they associate with things they like. Therefore, natural selection is primarily responsible for humans' color preferences. Wait, what? (Neurotopia)
• I'm pretty sure that's what "generalist" means. Invasive plants are no better defended than natives against a generalist native herbivore. (Conservation Maven)
• Did you mean gesundheit? Google's method of monitoring flu outbreaks by tracking search terms is almost as accurate as the CDC's more expensive monitoring program. (Scientific American, but see Virology Blog)
• From the folks who brought you octopodes wearing coconut shells: Solving a mystery that puzzled scientists since Aristotle, biologists have shown that the female argonaut octopus uses her paper-thin shell to trap air bubbles and control her buoyancy. (Not Exactly Rocket Science, Wired)
• Insert "1up" joke here. Can playing video games improve cognitive skills? Dave Munger weighs the evidence. (SEEDMAGAZINE.com)
• There are more than you think. This week's Radiolab epdisode, "Famous Tumors," is awesome with a side of neat evolutionary biology. (Radiolab)
• No lightning involved whatsoever. A team led by Craig "first draft human genome" Venter built a genome from scratch, then inserted it into a bacterial cell and brought it to life. (NPR, NY Times, Wired, Oscillator)

And, in this week's video, evidence that even something as bad-tempered and grungy as sloths are adorable when they're young and properly groomed.

Do I look "illegal?" Continued.

Responding to my earlier post, Eunice Levis of EKG Films forwarded this PSA.



As I said before, I'm sure the good folks at the ACLU would appreciate any support you can give for their opposition to Arizona SB1070.

Edit: Same day, 2034 hours: And, should you happen to have business in Arizona, maybe you should dress appropriately.

Two four six oh-oooone!

Courtesy the comment thread for the AV Club's recap of the last episode of "Glee," which episode hit at least three of my fanboy sweet spots.*


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*Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris, and Les Misérables, in that order.

The "Big Four," part II: Mutation

This post is the second in a special series about four fundamental forces in evolution: natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and migration.

In order for populations to change over time, to descend with modification, as Darwin originally put it, something has to create the modifications. That something is mutation.

A mutation of large effect? Photo by Cayusa.

A mutation is any change to an individual's genetic code, whether caused by an external factor like radiation, or an error in the DNA copying that takes place every time an individual cell divides. However, not all mutations are created equal.

Science online, binge-drinking tree shrews edition

Style over ecological substance? Maybe. But how can you say "no" to that face? Photo by rockabillyboy72.

• Much like nectar-feeding bats, pentailed tree shrews drink alcoholic nectar from their favorite food plant, and get enough (by weight) to intoxicate a human. (Endless Forms)
• “Due to its well-known song, the field cricket is a comparatively popular insect species.” Choosing a "flagship species" to promote conservation awareness involves thinking about image as well as ecology. (Conservation Maven)
• Who knew that sharks like to climb? Undersea mountains are hotspots of biodiversity. (deep type flow)
• Sadly, no mention of the fact that they ate Joshua tree fruit. Reconstructions of extinct giant ground sloths' muzzles suggest a diversity of foraging habits. (Laelaps)
• ArchaeopteryX-rayed. A new scanning technique applied to fossils of the feathered dinosaur reveals new detail. (Dinosaur Tracking)

And finally, via Observations of a Nerd, here's none other than Douglas Adams discussing evolution and endangered species. (Be advised: It's an hour and a half long. Worth every moment, though.)

The "Big Four," part I: Natural selection

This post is the first in a special series about four fundamental forces in evolution: natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and migration.

Among non-biologists, the best-known of the Big Four forces of evolution is almost certainly natural selection. We've all heard the catchphrase "survival of the fittest," and that's a pretty good, if reductive, summing up of the principle. In more precise terms, here's how natural selection works:

• Natural populations of living things vary. Deer vary in how fast they can run, plants vary in how much drought they can tolerate, birds vary in their ability to catch prey or collect seeds—no two critters of the same species are exactly alike.
• Some of those variable traits determine how many offspring living things have. How well you avoid predators, fight off disease, and collect food all determine how many babies you can make.
• Many of those variable traits are heritable, passed on from parents to offspring. Faster deer usually have faster fauns; drought-tolerant plants make drought-tolerant seeds.

With these three conditions in place, natural selection occurs: heritable traits that help make more babies become more common. That is, if you have a trait that lets you support more offspring than your neighbor, you'll have more children than your neighbor, and they'll have more children than your neighbor's children, and so on.

In which I provide something like an explanation

Now that D&T has its own domain, Google hosting allows me a few dedicated pages apart from the blog itself. So I've written up an about the blog page with more information than you probably require. I've revised the "About me" blurb in the sidebar to reflect this.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.

"At ze ski slopes, I find him almost immediately."

Werner Herzog (probably not really Werner Herzog) on Where's Waldo.



Via Slog. Herzog or whoever also does Curious George and Madeline.

Science online, cephalopod sensitivity edition

This one is for PZ. Photo by Joachim S. Müller.

I spent my week readying another (!) manuscript for submission and doing large volumes of PCR. And, yes, surfing the web between thermal cycler loads. But! I read about science, so that's mostly OK.

• What we have here is a failure to communicate. With their complex nervous systems and surprising intelligence, octopuses ought to be as sensitive to pain as mammals—but there's surprisingly little evidence to address that question. (NeuroDojo)
• Where are all the men? Analysis of DNA from thousand-year-old "moa graveyards" in New Zealand finds female skeletons overwhelmingly outnumbering males. (Laelaps via @nerdychristie)
• You can only preserve what you can get. Land protection efforts by NGOs fall short of established habitat protection goals, a case study in Maine finds. (Conservation Maven)
• How long we have left is in-DEET-terminate. Laboratory selection experiments demonstrate that mosquitoes may be evolving resistance to the insect über-repellent. (Wired Science)
• It only took 41 years longer than we needed to put a man on the moon. A Florida horticulture professor has bred what could be the first good-tasting mass-producible tomato. (The Washington Post)
• We're all Neanderthals now. Analysis of the first complete Neanderthal genome suggests that they interbred with modern humans. (Special feature in Science, NPR, John Hawks Weblog)

And for those of you who didn't recognize the three-letter acronym in my introductory paragraph, this is what PCR does:

Four-part sheet music is a challenging read

Via Kottke: Craig Fehrman has posted the complete text of a "lost" 1996 profile of David Foster Wallace written for Details magazine by David Streitfeld. It's quite short, but it includes a couple of details about Wallace's relationship with Christianity I hadn't heard before, including one that really shouldn't be surprising given how much of his life he spent in the Midwest:

Recently he found a Mennonite house of worship, which he finds sympathetic even if the hymns are impossible to sing.

Back to basics: The "Big Four"

The nice thing about a field season away from all regular internet access is that it gives you a real sabbatical of a sort—a chance to reassess plans and set new goals. One of the new goals I set myself this last field season was to introduce a new kind of topic here at Denim and Tweed.

Most of my writing about science at D&T focuses on recently published discoveries in evolution and ecology. It's fun writing, and it coincides neatly with my regular journal reading, and I intend to keep doing it. But I've discovered that when I want to put new work in context, I often need to discuss fundamental concepts of evolutionary biology that aren't necessarily common knowledge, such as genetic drift or sexual selection. However, I rarely have room to explain these concepts in depth within a blog post devoted to something else.

Do I look "illegal"?

Here's a great American, fretting about immigrants:

Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from [their nation of origin] .... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only [the other]. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the [non-English] business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.

If I didn't tip my hand with the use of the word "great," it may surprise you to learn that the American doing that fretting is not a current member of the Republican Party, but Benjamin Franklin; and the immigrants occasioning that fretting are not Latinos but Germans. The above passage is a quote from one of Franklin's letters, dated 9 May 1753, which I found in H.W. Brands' excellent biography The First American.

These were my people Franklin was fretting about. Most of the time it's easy to forget that I have an ethnicity, much less one that was once at odds with an English-speaking colonial culture. That's my privilege as a white man in the twenty-first century U.S. Many folks don't enjoy such a privilege—particularly not in Arizona, where a widely-discussed law will soon allow police to ask for proof of legal residence based on only a "reasonable suspicion" that someone is in the country illegally. It's an invitation to racial profiling, aimed squarely at people of the current fret-worthy ethnicity, Hispanics.

Fortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union (among other organizations, including the federal government) will contest the law. In another 250 years, maybe this law will seem as quaint as Benjamin Franklin complaining about street signs in German—but before then, I'm sure the ACLU would appreciate your support.