So do I, although I favor more squid, less girl.
(Should be work-safe, since any nudity is tasteful, and human-animal chimeras aren’t that offensive, are they? Besides, you should be at home, loosening your belt and letting that nice feast settle.)
I’ve got to go baste. If you aren’t similarly occupied, you could browse these fine carnivals.
Carnival of the Liberals #52, celebrating AU’s 60th anniversary!
Four Stone Hearth #28 (and they need more hosts)
You aren’t watching football, are you?
As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we’re getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He’s going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad consequentiam: “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade”. Yeah, once again, we’re going to be told that reality is dehumanizing.
One thing that greatly peeves me is the sponsoring organization. This is a parasitic religious organization that sucks leechlike on academia: the MacLaurin Institute. I despise those guys. They were also responsible for bringing Behe to talk on campus — that kind of rot is what they bring to the university.
I do like the honesty of their motto, though. Here comes John West, representative of the ‘secular’ Discovery Institute, under the imprimatur of an organization with the goal of…
Bringing God into the marketplace of ideas by
communicating the Christian worldview
with its transforming potential.
Right. Bringing lies to our students certainly does have transforming potential, only I wouldn’t be proud of it.
I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who’d had a long day on a bus from Madison, Wisconsin; then back to Buffalo to pick up Daughter #1 sans sweetie-pie; then to St Cloud to pick up Son #1; and finally, back home to Morris. For a time there I had my entire genetic output in a small car with me, in the snow, on a freeway (and I think all 47 million traveling Americans were on I94 between Minneapolis and Monticello for a time), and I was thinking that this whole family get-together thing was an opportunity for a major Darwinian catastrophe.
We made it safely back in the wee hours of the morning, fortunately. Now today I spend preparing mass quanitities of protein and carbohydrate to pack into the gaping, peeping maws of the younglings, which does make Darwinian sense, at least.
I hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today, as well.
Some observations on working with zebrafish:
Their vision isn’t as reliable as I thought. They would try like there’s no tomorrow to swim through the Plexiglas wall when there’s a hold only a few inches over. If I want to continue my experiments without having an aneurysm, I’ll have to make a few changes.
1 – The walls will have to be marked up opaque so that the fish don’t keep trying to swim through them.
2 – Since they have trouble navigating the single chamber, I’ll have to use plastic sheets to funnel them toward the door.
3 – I have a new set of tests to run. Is it the food that draws the fish into the food chamber, or is it the pheromones of the “social reward” of other fish that is repulsing the fish away. Once I get back to school after Thanksgiving, looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.
If you’ve been following Lio lately, you know he has a new arthropod friend, rescued from the dinner pot.
Unfortunately, Lio missed the big news.
The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today. The recent discovery of a 46cm long claw (chelicera) of the pterygotid eurypterid (‘sea scorpion’) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, from the Early Devonian Willwerath Lagerstätte of Germany, reveals that this form attained a body length of approximately 2.5m–almost half a metre longer than previous estimates of the group, and the largest arthropod ever to have evolved. Gigantism in Late Palaeozoic arthropods is generally attributed to elevated atmospheric oxygen levels, but while this may be applicable to Carboniferous terrestrial taxa, gigantism among aquatic taxa is much more widespread and may be attributed to other extrinsic factors, including environmental resources, predation and competition. A phylogenetic analysis of the pterygotid clade reveals that Jaekelopterus is sister-taxon to the genus Acutiramus, and is among the most derived members of the pterygotids, in contrast to earlier suggestions.
This isn’t some casual graspy sort of claw, either—it’s a great spiky wicked looking claw, with pointy daggery bits sticking out that make it look like some medieval weapon of terror.
This is a much more Lio-like creature than the dainty little bug in the cartoon. I wouldn’t mind having one of these for a pet myself! It’s too bad they’ve all been dead for 390 million years.
Braddy SJ, Poschmann M, Tetlie OE (2007) Giant claw reveals the largest ever arthropod. Biology Letters doi:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0491.
The newest latest bestest spiffiest edition of the Tangled Bank is now online at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.
A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field.
The problem has always been that cells exist in distinct states. A skin cell, for instance, has one set of genes essential for its specific function activated, and other sets of genes turned off; an egg cell has different patterns of gene activation and inactivation. Just taking the DNA from a skin cell and inserting it into the egg cell isn’t necessarily going to create a functional egg cell, because genes essential for egg cells may be switched off in the skin cell DNA, and we don’t know how to specifically switch them on. The process of somatic cell nuclear transfer has been hit or miss for that reason, with very high failure rates—scientists are basically trying to make the right configuration of genes switch on by giving the nucleus a good hard kick, and hoping that something in the cells will reconfigure the pattern of gene activation into something appropriate.
What the discovery by Takahashi et al. accomplishes is to reveal how to specifically switch on the right pattern of genes for a pluripotent stem cell. They have discovered the reset button for mammalian cells: a simple trigger that puts the cells in the right state to become anything else.
Nice t-shirt.
It might confuse people if I wore it, though, since they wouldn’t be aware of the original cartoon.
It’s a little odd to find myself cited in a Polk County, Florida newspaper as evidence that their pro-ID activities have received “national attention.”
Otherwise, it’s an article that testifies to the inevitability of a conflict. A majority of the school board members in Polk want to insert creationism into the curriculum, and they’ve got a few supporters in the schools.
…an eighth-grade science teacher at Union Academy in Bartow spoke in favor of intelligent design, a belief that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.
“When you talk about laws in nature it shows some order or design,” said Lawrence Hughes, who has taught at the academy for 16 years. “The laws of nature don’t support change from one organism to another organism.”
What utter tripe. What we see in nature is that the boundaries are extremely fuzzy, and that there are no “laws of nature” that block change. Perhaps Mr Hughes would like to state what these laws are, exactly?
A few people are arguing strongly on the side of reason, but one gets the impression that the creationists have made up their minds and are spoiling for a fight.
