I love showing students new research that will ultimately lead to a revision in their textbooks. Hey, something has got to make purchasing a new edition every two to three years seem worthwhile. And it is even more fun when these research headlines come out as we are covering that very topic in class. A [...]
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One of the most interesting sections of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species may be his struggles with perceived perfection in nature. In Chapter 6 Darwin confronts the organ of which William Paley would be most proud – the remarkable eye, and wonders how such a structure could have possibly evolved through his [...] When teaching marine biology I warn my students that if they are there to just learn about sharks and dolphins they will be sorely disappointed, because only microscopic plankton have the biomass to really affect the oceans. Being an ichthyologist this always hurt a bit. A recent paper in Science has restored my faith that all [...] Changing climates have the potential to wreck havoc on living things, which are often adapted to very specific local temperatures. These changes can alter the structure and, therefore, the function of the tens of thousands of proteins that keep cells and their owners alive. Yet, the presence of living things in extreme environments [...] Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science beat me to the punch on this one. You should check out his summary of a new paper by a group of excellent fish eye people on the spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes. Like many mesopelagic fishes that live in these low light conditions, the spookfish has tubular [...] We form our conscious sense of vision using the occipital lobe of our cerebrum, the uppermost portion of the brain that has increased in size during mammalian (and independently in bird) evolution. Other vertebrates rely more heavily on other regions of the brain, especially the midbrain, to process sight. We still use a [...] An iTunes for science PDFs would be fantastic. Luckily it already exists. After trying to organize folder after folder of accumulated journal article PDFs I came across a piece of Mac software about a year ago that manages them for you. It also has powerful search abilities, will download PDFs and import meta data and [...] Actually not easy to do. Those little guys do not normally have elevated cholesterol levels and their arteries stay unclogged. But with a little genetic engineering you can knockout the gene for the protein apolipoprotein E, which plays a role in clearing bad cholesterol – LDL – from the blood. The result is high levels [...] Turns out we have a lot more to find out. This whole DNA/RNA thing was not wrapped up in the 1950s. Two recent articles in the NY Times summarize some of the latest work on these two nucleic acids, and show that they are more impressive than we thought. RNA interference was discovered only about 10 [...]
Dr. Tonia Hsieh from the University of Florida made a video appearance in my vertebrate biology course to discuss her 2004 paper on the biomechanics of running on water. Dr. Hsieh’s research attempts to understand how animals move by integrating engineering and physics with biology. She also considers the evolutionary history of her organisms to [...] |
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