iBiome

rock on

i have a particular fondness for covers that exceed their originals, and this one is the best of the best. David Byrne is a genius.

warmer and warmer and warmer

frogs in a heating pot, according to NASA:

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

Bill Gates is better than Batman

via frugal dad

Source: frugaldad.com

 

Richard Dawkins celebrates a victory over creationists

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are "evidence-based views or theories" that run "contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations".

The British Humanist Association (BHA), which has led a campaign against creationism – the movement that denies Darwinian evolution and claims that the Earth and all its life was created by God – described the move as "highly significant" and predicted that it would have implications for other faith groups looking to run schools.

via www.guardian.co.uk

BioImplement: New Series on Complexity and Evolution

So into the breach, I add my voice with some new arguments, after this small bit of throat-clearing. I will try to avoid being derivative as I come armed with my own capacity for inquiry, insight, and argument. My examples will show how ID concepts force the gerrymandering of human design history, and surround it with mystical borders to make their claims. The individual steps in human design are small, slow and absolutely require the intellectual imprinting of lessons by trial and error. Students who are led to think falsely about human design, or any complexity as having mystical origins are harmed by the diminishment of their own aspirations of creativity. We all need to understand how small steps and tools lead to human creativity and any object of complexity. I will reveal these small steps and show, where I can, the failures that led to success.

via bioimplement.blogspot.com

Chris Hogue has re-entered the blogosphere with a riff on how we can be informed by incrementalism in human design and evolutionary process, and understand the path to complexity. I'm looking forward to the next post. Hopefully soon.

Five Predictions For Biotech And Medicine In 2012 - Forbes

2. New genetic technologies will brave the valley of death. DNA sequencing is getting cheaper and making its way into hospitals. Some cancer patients (notably Christopher Hitchens and Steve Jobs) have used genetic tests to try and pick the right drugs for their tumors. But right now using DNA sequencing on patients is not making much money for companies that make DNA sequencers, such as market leader Illumina, and big funders like the National Institutes of Health are tightening their belts. The result is that the two publicly traded genomics upstarts, Pacific Biosciences of California and Complete Genomics, are trading below or near the value of the cash they have on hand.

The beneficiary so far has been Ion Torrent, the new sequencer maker bought by lab giant Life Technologies in 2010. It has been able to build a user base with its sequencing technology, an it could use this bulwark to launch a bigger attack on Illumina. The science will continue to advance. Whether its these DNA sequencer companies or next generation efforts like Foundation Medicine, the Google Ventures-backed cancer sequencing startup, is anybody’s guess.

via www.forbes.com

Study Examines How Diving Marine Mammals Manage Decompression

"Until recently the dogma was that marine mammals have anatomical and physiological and behavioral adaptations to make the bends not a problem," said MMC Director Michael Moore. "There is no evidence that marine mammals get the bends routinely, but a look at the most recent studies suggest that they are actively avoiding rather than simply not having issues with decompression."

Researchers began to question the conventional wisdom after examining beaked whales that had stranded on the Canary Islands in 2002. A necropsy of those animals turned up evidence of damage from gas bubbles. The animals had stranded after exposure to sonar from nearby naval exercises. This led scientists to think that diving marine mammals might deal with the presence of nitrogen bubbles more frequently than previously thought, and that the animals' response strategies might involve physiological trade-offs depending on situational variables. In other words, the animals likely manage their nitrogen load and probably have greater variation in their blood nitrogen levels than previously believed.

Because the animals spend so much time below the ocean's surface, understanding the behavior of diving marine mammals is quite challenging. The use of innovative technology is helping to advance the science. At WHOI, scientists have used a CT scanner to examine marine mammal cadavers at different pressures to better understand the behavior of gases in the lungs and "get some idea at what depth the anatomy is shut off from further pressure-kinetics issues," Moore said. For other studies, Moore and his colleagues were able to acquire a portable veterinary ultrasound unit to look at the presence or absence of gas in live, stranded dolphins.

There's still a lot to be learned, including whether live animals have circulating bubbles in their systems that they are managing. If they do, says Moore, noise impacts and other stressors that push the animal from a normal management situation to an abnormal situation become more of a concern. "When a human diver has some bubble issues, what will they do? They will either climb into a recompression chamber so that they can recompress and then come back more slowly, or they'll just grab another tank and go back down for a while and . . . and just let things sort themselves out. What does a dolphin do normally when it's surfaced? The next things to do is to dive, and the one place you can't do that is in shallow water or most particularly if you are beached."

via www.sciencenewsline.com

"If I were a presidential candidate... " David Frum

9. Iraq: Knowing everything you know now, if you had been in Congress in 2002, would you have voted to authorize force against Saddam Hussein, yes or no?

No. For an Iraqi, there was no price too high to pay to rid the country of Saddam Hussein. For Americans, the issue was not Saddam's badness, but his nuclear weapons program. Knowing that the nuclear program was not a real threat, the invasion was too large a commitment. The world is a better place without Saddam, but as with everything, the question is one of costs and benefits. The costs to the U.S. were too high, the benefits to the U.S. too few.

via theweek.com

I respect David Frum's honesty and candor and, I think, genuine desire to make things right.  I like to think Christopher Hitchens would have gotten there.

A new theory emerges for where some fish became 4-limbed creatures

"These transitional fossils were not associated with drying ponds or deserts, but consistently were found with humid woodland soils," he said. "Remains of drying ponds and desert soils also are known and are littered with fossil fish, but none of our distant ancestors. Judging from where their fossils were found, transitional forms between fish and amphibians lived in wooded floodplains. Our distant ancestors were not so much foolhardy, as opportunistic, taking advantage of floodplains and lakes choked with roots and logs for the first time in geological history."

Limbs proved handy for negotiating woody obstacles, and flexible necks allowed for feeding in shallow water, Retallack said. By this new woodland hypothesis, the limbs and necks, which distinguish salamanders from fish, did not arise from reckless adventure in deserts, but rather were nurtured by a newly evolved habitat of humid, wooded floodplains.

The findings, he said, dampen both the desert hypothesis of Romer and a newer inter-tidal theory put forth by Grzegorz Niedbwiedzki and colleagues at the University of Warsaw. In 2010, they published their discovery of eight-foot-long, 395-million-year-old tetrapods in ancient lagoonal mud in southeastern Poland, where Retallack also has been studying fossil soils with Polish colleague Marek Narkeiwicz.

via www.eurekalert.org

This evolutionary pathway can be imagined when you consider floodplains such as Tonle Sap, where during the monsoon the river reverses flow and the fish breed and thrive among a submerged forest.