Nooooooooo! Harriet is dead. At least she lived a long life, making it to the ripe old age of 176.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Nooooooooo! Harriet is dead. At least she lived a long life, making it to the ripe old age of 176.
Two short articles in this week’s Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.
Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how they trap prey. Deinopoids spin dry fibers that they fluff into threads that adhere electrostatically to small insects; Araneoids secrete glue onto the the strand, which takes less work (no fluffing), and is much more strongly adhesive. The differences are enough to make one question whether there was a single origin of orb weavers, or whether the two groups independently stumbled on the same efficient form of architecture.
Cosmology is almost as interesting as developmental biology, and now you can read a short summary of the origins of the universe at Daily Kos.
Feeling musical this morning? Stephanie Ching sent me links to some lyrics. An old User Friendly cartoon combines Cthulhu, zombies, and brains, and then there’s the unspeakable: this guy has written a song for John Tesh. If anything is going to rouse the sleeping Old Ones that lie in lost R’Lyeh, it’s got to be New Age caterwauling.
Quick! To scrub the thought of New Age Lite muzak out of your brain, Unfogged provides a cure: visualize your scrotum rupturing. Think about epididymitis and Fournier’s gangrene. There, can’t you feel the nightmare ebbing?
I’ve been very, very bad at keeping up with all the carnivals, so here’s a quick roundup.
As usual, talk about whatever you want in the comments (at last, a place where the Coulter defenders can be evasive with permission!)
Official number of attempts to address my challenge of the science in Coulter’s book:
I seem to have drawn in one Coulter fan in the comments who can’t shut up, but he hasn’t got the guts to stand up for anything specific that she has said.
This new strange question is sweeping the scienceblogs: “what kind of scientist is Batman?”
The answer is obvious.
The National Academies or Royal Society web pages make a peep about it. It’s good news if it is confirmed, though!
This is why I should read the other science blogs before posting: Afarensis has the official statement.
While I was out playing all day yesterday, a new Tangled Bank appeared at Centrerion. I’m so late in my announcement that you’ve probably all read it already, but if you haven’t, there’s much science writing to occupy you for a while.
