I found the article and videos on Carl Zimmer's blog about how bats fly, land, and run pretty fascinating. It's the work of Brown University biologists Dan Riskin and Sharon Swartz. Check it out.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
22 March 2009
16 October 2008
Carnivorous plant calendar
A Print A Day has a calendar template, beautifully illustrated with carnivorous plants, available for download (via Craft).
Carnivorous plants are those that attract, trap, and digest insects and other small prey. They live in nutrient poor areas and so they utilize the nutrients from their prey, especially nitrogen, to grow.
July features a venus fly trap (Dionaea muscipula) and August has flowers from a bladderwort (Utricularia). September looks like cobra lilies (Darlingtonia californica), October features a dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia, and December are sundews (Drosera).
05 September 2008
Science tattoos, part III
I get a lot of traffic on this blog from people searching for tree of life tattoos, and noticed that my previous posts about science tattoos had broken links.
As it turns out, Carl Zimmer's blog The Loom is now hosted at Discover, and the science tattoos have their own webpage!
There's also a new tree of life tattoo that was added since the last time I checked. Carl summarizes it much better than I could, so I'll direct you to the pic for a description.
27 August 2008
Cows face north-south
You might have heard the saying that moss mainly grows on the north side of trees. That "rule" is generally only true in the northern latitudes and dependent on the area's ambient light and moisture. But here's a new orientation rule in case you get lost, cows and deer tend to face magnetic north or south when grazing and resting.
I'm amazed at how people use Google applications these days, and in the case of this study German and Czech researchers examined over 8000 cows and almost 3000 deer satellite images using Google Earth. Researchers have previously shown that many animals have a magnetic sense, from fruit flies, birds, amphibians and fish. However, this is the first report of large mammals sensing magnetic fields.
For a more in depth summary, check out Scientific American's article here, or if you're not up to reading, they have a 60 second podcast too.
10 August 2008
We Climb
I'm really enjoying the July song over at The Guild of Scientific Troubadours. It's called "We Climb" and it's about Ventastega curonica, a transitional fossil between fish and tetrapods. In case you missed it, check out the song and the article its based on over on Grant's site.
03 June 2008
Why Study Science?
This article and accompanying video (the film is worth watching just to see a very neat "juggling fly") about early science films made when film technology had just been invented (via Boing Boing) reminded me of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of old instructional and classroom films in the public domain.
I love the films you can watch in this archive, especially films about social etiquette told from a 1950s perspective. So I headed over today to see if they have any interesting films about biology and science.
I found this film, entitled "Why Study Science?" made in 1955 (you can either download or stream the film from their site, its 11 minutes long). In it, a father tells his son and daughter (children of the "atomic age") how they might use science in their everyday lives, even Betty the future homemaker. While this film is obviously dated, the father does have one monologue that I think is especially relevant to today, with the upcoming elections. When his son asks why he should study science even if he isn't going to become an astronaut, the dad responds with:
"You're still a citizen with the power to vote. Living in a scientific age we need citizens who know enough about science to make intelligent decisions about what they do. We use science to prolong life, to increase security and happiness. But it can also be used for destruction. Are we going to use it constructively to promote peace and give the world freedom from want? It will be up to you, and you too."
27 May 2008
House plants vs. toxins
Good Magazine has published a chart outlining common sources for 3 household chemical compounds (trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, benzene) and the houseplants that naturally detoxify them from the air.
I'm not sure how each plant species actually accomplishes this detoxification (perhaps I should hunt down their vague sources) but I love the graphic design of this chart. I also think that maybe I should move the Philodendron from my bedroom to my living room that contains several IKEA particle board containing furniture pieces.
(Via Boing Boing)
18 May 2008
Green Porno Online
I blogged previously about Green Porno, a new series of short films, starring Isabella Rossellini, about insects (also a worm, snail) and how they copulate. Sundance now has them all online, go here to check them out. I haven't watched them all yet, but "Earthworm" and "Bee" are pretty fascinating and a little disturbing all at the same time. In other words, they're awesome.
On a rainy Sunday afternoon
Here are two things to check out on this gloomy Sunday courtesy of the Craft Magazine Blog.
Fold away your troubles and make a origami lily, the step by step directions can be found here.
Also take a look at these neat robot animals made from recycled electronic parts. The artist, Ann Smith, has a whole gallery of animals over on her website.
02 May 2008
Banana podcast
I blogged earlier about bananas when they were the topic of a show on Good Eats. And now Scientific American had a very interesting podcast this past week on bananas, as part of their weekly "Science Talk". In just under 25 minutes, you can learn a little about the biology of the banana, the history of bananas (including what the term banana republic really means, besides being an upscale Gap), and take a audio tour of how bananas are grown on plantations. You can listen to it here.
08 April 2008
Seeing Green
Anytime I turn on the TV these days, it seems every other commercial is another company touting how "green" (environmentally friendly) they are. I'm all about taking steps to becoming more green, and think this is an important movement (The Daily Green has this to say on 5 easy steps you can take to become more green). So, here's a mash up of comments on various commericals I've been seeing lately about green products.
I like that the green initiative is gaining awareness, yet at the same time, it seem a little wrong to have companies make green product claims just to change consumers' images of their product(s). Right now Wal-Mart is airing several commercials about how by buying certain products you can become more environmentally friendly. I think the ultimate messages are good ones, like stop buying individual bottled waters and instead just refill containers or that one should buy concentrated laundry detergent to save on packaging waste, but in the long run it's really just about increasing sales (the blog Wake-up Wal-Mart has this to say about the CEO's ultimate motives). Sears is also advertising extensively the peddle energy efficient appliances.
Home and Garden Television (HGTV) has yearly "dream home" giveaways and this year they've changed it to the Green Home Giveaway. Basically, these homes are designed to feature and entice us to buy certain sponsors' products, and that's really all the Green Home is doing too. I went to their website hoping to see what environmentally friendly products they were using and why they are good for the environment. However, this educational aspect requires some hunting to find on their site, but they do have this article addressing the various green aspects of the home, and a page full of videos about creating a green home.
I've been using plant-based, non-toxic Method cleaning products for a couple years now. But even Clorox (the company that advertises that I should put my children's toys into large buckets of bleach - don't get me started on this one) is getting into the act and has developed a line of green cleaning products, called Green Works, that "must come from renewable resources, be biodegradable and free of petrochemicals." What I don't see on the Green Works website is any mention of the packaging, if it is recyclable or made from recycled products. Having just scrubbed my toilet this morning with toxic smelling cleaner, I think buying either Method's or Green Works' new toilet bowl cleaner is definitely in order (while using my reusable shopping bags to carry them home of course). I can also stop having to buy rubber gloves to protect my skin.
31 March 2008
View of the Environmentalist
When I tell people outside of science that I'm in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, one of the most common follow up questions goes something like, "So, does that mean you're into all that green stuff?".
My guess is peoples' view of "environmentalists" are not too far off from the views in this humorous piece by George Motisher over at the Science Creative Quarterly.
26 February 2008
Videophilia, or Why people don't go outside anymore
(If you don't have PNAS access, a free pdf can be downloaded on their webpage, or if you'd rather hear one of the authors give a summary, they have an audio track there too)
Pergams and Zaradic coined the term "videophilia" to contrast with the term "biophilia" coined by E. O. Wilson to describe people's innate affinity for nature and natural areas. Visits to US national parks have been in a decline starting somewhere between 1981-91. In a 2006 paper, Pergams and Zaradic found that 4 variables could describe about 98% of this decline: time spent on the internet, time spent playing video games, time spent watching movies, and increasing oil prices. So videophilia is a term to describe this phenomenon, that as time spent on electronic media increases, visits to natural parks decreases.
Videophilia: The new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media. (from here)This most recent paper expanded the study to look also at natural area use in Japan and Spain, and found that this decline is not just restricted to the United States.
I think this trend is something that many people have noticed, over the past decade in particular. I think that it's great that someone has looked at this correlation in a scientific manner so that it goes beyond just anecdotal theories. As the authors caution on their website "less contact with nature is likely to translate to less support for the environment in future generations".
Why am I still writing this blog entry? I'm going to go play outside.
19 February 2008
Cute as a Button
I hadn't been reading Cute Overload lately, but I checked in again recently to fawn over the adorable animals. This of course led to the question, why do humans think baby animals (especially mammals) are cute?
(photos to the right taken from Cute Overload)
Well, Cute Overload has made a list of what makes animal pictures cute (the Rules of Cuteness), and I think two of their rules in particular pertain to why, as humans, we find them so adorable. Rule #2 is "Look helpless" and rule #6 is "Mimic humans".
It seems that since human babies are helpless when born, humans have been wired to respond to and help things that look infantile (like round faces, forward facing eyes, round ears, and floppy limbs to name a few). There was an interesting article titled The Cute Factor, published in the New York Times in 2006, that had this to say about cute animals:
"The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession....
Madison Avenue may adapt its strategies for maximal tweaking of our inherent baby radar, but babies themselves, evolutionary scientists say, did not really evolve to be cute. Instead, most of their salient qualities stem from the demands of human anatomy and the human brain, and became appealing to a potential caretaker's eye only because infants wouldn't survive otherwise.
Human babies have unusually large heads because humans have unusually large brains. Their heads are round because their brains continue to grow throughout the first months of life, and the plates of the skull stay flexible and unfused to accommodate the development. Baby eyes and ears are situated comparatively far down the face and skull, and only later migrate upward in proportion to the development of bones in the cheek and jaw areas.
Baby eyes are also notably forward-facing, the binocular vision a likely legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestry, and all our favorite Disney characters also sport forward-facing eyes, including the ducks and mice, species that in reality have eyes on the sides of their heads.
The cartilage tissue in an infant's nose is comparatively soft and undeveloped, which is why most babies have button noses. Baby skin sits relatively loose on the body, rather than being taut, the better to stretch for growth spurts to come, said Paul H. Morris, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Portsmouth in England; that lax packaging accentuates the overall roundness of form.
Baby movements are notably clumsy, an amusing combination of jerky and delayed, because learning to coordinate the body's many bilateral sets of large and fine muscle groups requires years of practice. On starting to walk, toddlers struggle continuously to balance themselves between left foot and right, and so the toddler gait consists as much of lateral movement as of any forward momentum."
Advertisers understand our reaction to all things cute. This is especially true in Japan, where the concept of kawaii (cuteness) pervades many things from products to governmental warnings. Any one who has been a girl or is raising girls understands the immense draw of Sanrio characters like Hello Kitty. The oddest example that I have seen of making objects cute is kawaii poo.So, no need to be ashamed at your love of baby animals. It's in our nature to want to cuddle and protect them.
11 February 2008
Tapeworms and Polar Bears
So, I decided to play voyeur yesterday and spent some time looking at how people arrived at this blog via my Sitemeter.
One search caught my attention, and it appears that Cells in Culture ranks number one on Google for the search: tapeworms and polar bears. In honor of this, I made the logo to the right.
So hurray, I have an entry in case the "Number one on Google" meme makes it's way across the internet again. This blog also ranks number one for "liverwort sperm" but that's harder for me to make into a cartoon.
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