Did you know that the World Science Festival starts today in New York City? I expect all you eastern city folk to go. Unfortunately, I’m in an airplane flying west today, on my way to Berzerkeley, where we’ll have to celebrate science amongst a band of evolutionary/developmental biologists.
Apparently, NASA has dropped a new probe, Phoenix, on Mars. I’m looking at the first pictures beamed back, and so far, it looks a little too dry for squid, and they’re also promising the existence of ice, which doesn’t sound cephalopod-friendly, either. I’ll keep checking the Bad Astronomer, though — I’m sure that when the first tentacle rises up somewhere on the horizon, he’ll report it.
It’s another transitional form, this time an amphibian from the Permian that shares characteristics of both frogs and salamanders — in life, it would have looked like a short-tailed, wide-headed salamander with frog-like ears, which is why it’s being called a “frogamander”.
We mammals have been beaten again. Shrimp have more sophisticated eyes than we do, with the ability to see things we can’t, and I’m feeling a bit envious.
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is “weird” or “odd” or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — “the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal”. No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as birds are an independent and (directly) unrelated lineage; you can say it is part reptile, but that is because it is a member of a great reptilian clade that includes prototherians, marsupials, birds, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, and us eutherian mammals. We can say with equal justification that we are part reptile, too. What’s interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.
We can see that the journalistic convention of emphasizing the platypus as an odd duck of a composite creature is missing the whole point if we just look at the title of the paper: “Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution.” This is work that is describing the evidence for evolution in a comparative analysis of the genomes of multiple organisms, with emphasis on the newly revealed data from the platypus.
There’s a clumsy little two-step move creationists like to make: first, point to dissent in the scientific community over real and often interesting issues at the edge of knowledge, and second, swap in their dissent over basics, like common descent, and pretend that the scientists are actually sharing in their ignorance-based concern. John Timmer has a good summary of a few genuine scientific arguments, contrasted with the bogus arguments creationists pretend are important.
There are some good and interesting questions out there. The creationists, and I include the phonies at the Discovery Institute among them, never ask them.
One other point Timmer brings up at the end: should the real scientific controversies be part of the public high school curriculum? He thinks not, and I agree — I’d rather the high schools prepared students with a general understanding of the most basic principles, rather than rushing off to pursue details with which the students won’t yet be able to cope, anyway.
I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect.
Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry.
Everything you need is readily available, and surprisingly inexpensive. For not all that much more than the cost of a toy chemistry set, you can buy the equipment and chemicals you need to get started doing real chemistry.
…
DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.
Ooooh, I wish this book had been around 15 or 20 years ago, when I could have infected my kids with it. Maybe I’ll have to wait a few years (many years!) and expose a grandkid to it … which will have an added advantage that the parents will have to deal with the messes and smells.
Odd thing, though: I looked through the table of contents, and there’s not one single solitary thing about chemistry prayers. How can the experiments possibly work?
My last Seed column is online, which reminds me (as if I weren’t uncomfortably aware already) that I have to finish up the next one today, which actually isn’t the next one, which is already done and submitted, but the one after that. These long leading deadlines force one to live a few months in the future…
You know, if you subscribed to the print magazine, you’d be halfway to my future already instead of living in my distant past.
The title gets the principal objection of any creationist out of the way: yes, this population of Podarcis sicula is still made up of lizards, but they’re a different kind of lizard now. Evolution works.
Here’s the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km2, and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km2, which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.
