I just put of copy of “Embrace your inner fish” outside my office door. I want it on a T-shirt now.
(via The Austringer)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I just put of copy of “Embrace your inner fish” outside my office door. I want it on a T-shirt now.
(via The Austringer)
Christian corruption at its finest: here’s a Florida Republican working to give a money-making park a tax exemption.
A biblical theme park in Orlando where guests pay $30 admission to munch on “Goliath” burgers and explore reproductions of 2000-year-old tombs and temples could get a property tax exemption written into state law.
A Senate committee easily passed a bill that would grant theme parks “used to exhibit, illustrate, and interpret biblical manuscripts … ” an exemption from local property taxes, like churches, even though the parks charge money.
My wife thought this story about left-handed snails having a competitive advantage, in that they seem to be better able to escape predation by right-handed crabs, was pretty cool. She also recalled that I’d scribbled up something about snail handedness before, so to jump on the bandwagon, I’ve brought those stories over from the old site.
The handedness of snail shells is a consequence of early spiral cleavages in the blastula. It’s a classic old story in developmental biology—everyone ought to know it!
There was also a story last year about shell chirality in Euhadra. There, it wasn’t a matter of predation, but a potential isolating mechanism, and one where mating compatibility and character displacement could play a role.
Everyone can read up on snails while I’m off at class this morning.
Since Coturnix turned me on to this paper on snail chirality in PLoS (pdf), I had to sit down and learn something new this afternoon.
Chirality is a fascinating aspect of bilaterian morphology. We have characteristic asymmetries—differences between the left and right sides of our bodies—that are prescribed by genetic factors. Snails are particularly interesting examples because snail shells have an obvious handedness, with either a left-(sinistral) or right-handed (dextral) twist, and that handedness derives from the arrangement of cell divisions very early in development.
Developmental biologists are acutely interested in asymmetries in development: they are visible cues to some underlying regional differences. For instance, we’d like to know the molecules and interactions involved in taking a seemingly featureless sphere, the egg, and specifying one side to go on to form a head, and the the opposite side to form a tail. We’d like to understand why our back (or dorsal) side looks different from our belly (or ventral) side. One particularly intriguing distinction, though, is the left-right axis. For the most part, left and right are nearly identical, mirror-images of one another, but there are also key asymmetries. Your heart, for instance, is larger on the left side than the right, your liver lies mostly on the right side of your abdomen while the stomach arcs to the left, and these arrangements are essential for normal function. Left-right asymmetries are more subtle than anterior-posterior or dorsal-ventral differences, and that makes them especially fascinating.
Please, please, please…I want to cast my vote for Al Franken in 2008, and I want him to be my representative in the Senate.
Why don’t our official news media ever dig into the truth as plainly as our comedians?
It’s BC and Johnny Hart, so you know it’s going to be godawful bad. Don’t read the rest unless you’ve got a vomit bag handy.
Paleontologists have uncovered yet another specimen in the lineage leading to modern tetrapods, creating more gaps that will need to be filled. It’s a Sisyphean job, working as an evolutionist.
This creature is called Tiktaalik roseae, and it was discovered in a project that was specifically launched to find a predicted intermediate form between a distinctly fish-like organism, Panderichthys, and the distinctly tetrapod-like organisms, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. From the review article by Ahlberg and Clack, we get this summary of Tiktaalik‘s importance:
First, it demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology. The Nunavut field project had the express aim of finding an intermediate between Panderichthys and tetrapods, by searching in sediments from the most probable environment (rivers) and time (early Late Devonian). Second, Tiktaalik adds enormously to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition because of its position on the tree and the combination of characters it displays.
Brian Alters, of McGill University, had a grant proposal turned down for an unusual reason.
I mentioned that I was getting a curious number of hits for the term “anencephaly” the other day, and was wondering what was prompting it. Readers have been sending me strange and obscure bits of news that might be relevant, such as this account of an unusual birth in Nepal.
The neck-less baby with its head almost totally sunk into the upper part of the body and with extraordinarily large eyeballs literally popping out of the eye-sockets, was born to Nir Bahadur Karki and Suntali Karki at the Gaurishnkar Hospital in Charikot.
The article has pictures (if the description above makes you cringe, don’t look), and also reflects a very different attitude: it looks like people put the dead baby in a tray and had a parade, with crowds of gawkers. They also had a refreshingly pragmatic attitude towards the whole unfortunate event.
Nir Bahadur, the father, says he does not feel any remorse for the newly-born baby’s death. “I am happy that nothing happened to my wife,” he said.
That’s an excellent point of view, I think, much more sensible than that of old Senator Fetus Fondler. Our country could do with a little less embryo worshipping and a little more moving on with the important things in life, too.
And, by the way, I think “Suntali” is a really lovely name.
