Category: Natural Sciences

“Is this an innovative approach?”

Virginia Gewin provides some pointers for rookie reviewers of papers submitted to technical journals. With career-hungry postdocs doing much of the refereeing, there’s little room for the purported conspiracies that cover up inconvenient research results.

Astronomy journals are generally comfortable with papers being revised several times, says Chris Sneden, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s rare, but a paper can go through five or six review rounds if it starts out as a disaster,” he says. “But the sociology of the field is happy with a lot of back and forth with the author during the process.”

Virginia earthquake 23 August 2011

needed a new clock anywaya little cleanup to doAt home, the quake left a little evidence of its passing. In the basement, some coffee cans of picture framing hardware spilled from the top of a high shelf, and a clock likewise fell.

Upstairs in the back bedroom a lamp tipped over and a lava lamp hit the deck. I am very grateful it fell on carpet and did not smash. Everything else looks just like I left it this morning. The various cracks in the walls, the result of the house’s settling ever since I started loading my belongings into it twenty years ago, are no worse than before.

Some links: 55

  • I was looking for packing material at my cousin’s place and came across a Saturday edition obit for Jerry Ragovoy; otherwise I would have missed it altogether. Ragovoy co-wrote “Piece of My Heart,” which was recorded in a wrenching live performance by Janis Joplin and later, more regrettably, by a country pop singer.
  • Linda Himelstein reports on research that looks at how dyslexics master syllable-based writing systems (and their languages) as opposed to character-based system.
  • Alan Feuer filed a fine report on the natural areas of Jamaica Bay, still the only National Wildlife Refuge that you can get to via subway. Mylan Cannon adds a great photograph of conservationist Don Riepe, an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) on a ground-level nest, and a passenger jet in the background.

    Jamaica Bay’s conservationists — fishermen and firefighters, limousine drivers and owners of small boats — are not your typical tree-hugging types, not “Upper West Side, Park Slope, brownstone Brooklyn people,” as Mr. Riepe put it. They are people like Mr. Lewandowski from the canoe club, a transit official…

Most foul

Via Botany Photo of the Day, Basilio Aristidis Kotsias makes the case that Claudius could indeed have poisoned King Hamlet by instilling henbane into his ear. And yet,

There are other explanations that fit the crime in question….. Finally, there exists the possibility that everything related to the apparition of the ghost on the platform before the castle of Elsinore was a product of Shakespeare’s fantasy, as well as the death of the melancholic prince, wounded by the poisoned sword (with what venom?) that Laertes held. If this were true, our interpretation would result in pure fiction.

Sk8r boi

Rachel Carson explains something that I often see on my infrequent visits to the ocean beaches:

The tidal flotsam abounds, too, in many little empty egg cases in which various sea creatures passed their first days of life…. The black “mermaid’s purses” belong to one of the skates. They are flat, horny rectangles, with two long, curling prongs or tendrils extending from each end. With these the parent skate attaches the packet containing a fertilized egg to seaweeds on some offshore bottom. After the young skate matures and hatches, its discarded cradle is often washed up on the beach.

—The Edge of the Sea, ch. III

No news is good news

Matthew Kaiser reports (in the most recent Friends newsletter) on Resource Manager Dave Lawlor’s July survey of the waters of Dogue Creek, which drains Huntley Meadows Park. Fortunately, no snakehead (Channa sp.) fish were detected, and even more positively, samplers found ten Largemouth Bass. It is believed that the presence of the bass will put pressure on snakeheads that would otherwise move upstream in the Creek. Other species counted in the survey (alas, no scientific names in the report):

  • Yellow Bullhead
  • American Eel
  • White Sucker
  • Satinfin Shiner
  • Creek Chubsucker
  • Tessellated Darter
  • Lamprey
  • Green Sunfish
  • Pumpkinseed
  • Bluegill
  • Creek Chub
  • Eastern Mudminnow

I find it unpleasant to find myself reporting observations of Lamprey as a good thing. Lampreys are the one taxon of the animal kingdom that I could do without, if it’s all the same to you: they’re nasty things.

Less good than harm?

A recent Earthtalk column summarizes research by Aiello et al. that calls into question the practice of adding triclosan as an antibacterial ingredient to consumer products. The literature review, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, asked two questions: (1) Does triclosan, in the typical consumer formulations (0.2-0.3% by weight), do anything more towards preventing infectious disease than ordinary soap? (2) Does triclosan contribute to the emergence of bacteria that can tolerate the chemical, and can this tolerance jump species? The answer to (1), per “Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky?”, is no, while the evidence for (2) is less clear. The research team found evidence from lab-based studies of antibiotic cross-resistance, but field studies did not provide equally strong support for the claim.

It’s worth noting that we’re talking about the concentrations used in over-the-counter soaps and hand sanitizers, not the 1% and more used in surgical scrubs. (Shockingly, how much triclosan can be added to soap is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.) In other words, there’s enough of the stuff in your soap that it may be making staph and strep stronger, but not enough to kill the bugs. Deader than they are, that is, by just washing your hands.

Triclosan seems to be in everything these days. As hard as it is to read a food product label to find out whether it’s got wheat (and is therefore verboten for someone with celiac sprue), it’s equally hard to find out about triclosan in products from the health and beauty aids aisle. Leta found triclosan in a container of shaving gel. Fortunately, some manufacturers, like Method, are now labeling their soaps as triclosan-free.

The least offensive solution

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chuck Underwood describes an audacious plan: in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil cock-up, the agency will translocate several hundred sea turtle nests across the Florida panhandle, with hopes that the hatchlings will find a home in Atlantic Ocean waters.

“We have a lot of partners involved that normally would not all necessarily agree on something,” Underwood says. “But the general consensus is this is at least an opportunity to try to do something in a situation that has been less than ideal for wildlife.”

Easy pickins

Over the holidays, Leta’s family told me about a natural phenomenon more or less peculiar to Mobile Bay. From time to time during the summer months, low oxygen levels in the bay drive the resident fish and shellfish up into the shallows of the eastern shore. The swimmers arrive in such numbers that hungry Alabamans come down to the beach with washtubs to collect a jubilee of easy-to-catch seafood. Harold Loesch and Edwin May have studied the phenomenon and written it up in journal articles. Conditions that seem to promote the (usually pre-dawn) event: winds out of the east and a rising tide.

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The occasion of Nature‘s publication of 15 Evolutionary Gems, synopses of recent research from its pages that deepens our understanding of the process of evolution, prompted some pruning and dusting of my bookmark files. So here let us take note of

The papers summarized in the Nature document examine evidence collected by field observation, at the molecular level in the lab, and from the fossil record. Of particular note to “no transitional forms” deniers is the discussion of newly-described specimens found in China.

In the 1980s, deposits from the early Cretaceous period (about 125 million years ago) in the Liaoning Province in northern China vindicated these speculations in the most dramatic fashion, with discoveries of primitive birds in abundance — alongside dinosaurs with feathers, and feather-like plumage. Starting with the discovery of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx by Pei-ji Chen from China’s Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and his colleagues, a variety of feather-clad forms have been found. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not possibly have flown, showing that feathers first evolved for reasons other than flight, possibly for sexual display or thermal insulation, for instance. In 2008, Fucheng Zhang and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing announced the bizarre creature Epidexipteryx, a small dinosaur clad in downy plumage, and sporting four long plumes from its tail. Palaeontologists are now beginning to think that their speculations weren’t nearly wild enough, and that feathers were indeed quite common in dinosaurs.

The discovery of feathered dinosaurs not only vindicated the idea of transitional forms, but also showed that evolution has a way of coming up with a dazzling variety of solutions when we had no idea that there were even problems. Flight could have been no more than an additional opportunity that presented itself to creatures already clothed in feathers.