When I hear the words “We are a Microsoft shop” I cringe. And I usually look at the person who just said it funny. Here is one reason why.

is HERE.

There’s no way this is up to number 77 already. I don’t believe that.

Tiny little cameras were attached to albatross as they flew around over the open ocean hunting. This is important because it is really hard to study albatross at open sea, and virtually impossible to follow individuals one might like to track from, say, a nesting grounds out many miles (they fly fast and far). By attaching cameras, temperature and depth gauges to the birds one gets some VERY interesting results.

I’ve written a review of a paper that just came out in PLoS on this topic and posted it at Surprising Science, here. Please have a look.

Pursuant to the recent discussion on the safety of carrying guns, I thought I’d throw this on the table:
Continue reading More guns = Less crime →

Because they won 6 to 5 in the 12th inning, and are thus the American League Central Division Champions.

You read about it here … now you can see the music video version:
Continue reading Preview of the NASA Moon Bombing Experiment →

The Carnival of Muse on Everything is HERE.

The Carnival of the Vanities is HERE.

The Current Blogger Bio Blitz is HERE.

I’ve always had a fondness in my heart for cycads.

Encephalartos princeps

Years ago, while working in the Ituri Forest (in what is now the Congo), I kept hearing of a particular place in the forest, where the Efe Pygmies would occasionally but not often go for various reasons. Over time I asked about this place, and eventually made arrangements to visit. My first trip to what was known as the Kakba was a very long and difficult walk from a camp that was already about a day into the forest from the villages, where our research base camp was located. On approaching the Kakba, it was obvious to me that the habitat we were in … rain forest … was giving way to something else. The trees, for one thing, were more sparsely leafed out. We were in the middle of the “little dry season” and it seemed that as we climbed very subtly in elevation, we encountered areas where there was little or no groundwater, and the underlying granitic basement rock was right on the surface. The rain forest trees were still present, but more spread out and clearly water stressed.
Continue reading Cycad Sex →

The course of the biotic recovery after the impact-related disruption of photosynthesis and mass extinction event at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary has been intensely debated. The resurgence of marine primary production in the aftermath remains poorly constrained because of the paucity of fossil records tracing primary producers that lack skeletons. Here we present a high-resolution record of geochemical variation in the remarkably thick Fiskeler (also known as the Fish Clay) boundary layer at Kulstirenden, Denmark. Converging evidence from the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen and abundances of algal steranes and bacterial hopanes indicates that algal primary productivity was strongly reduced for only a brief period of possibly less than a century after the impact, followed by a rapid resurgence of carbon fixation and ecological reorganization.

Interested? Confused? I’ve written up a more brain-friendly version of this at Surprising Science.
Continue reading Rapid Resurgence of Marine Productivity After the Cretaceous-Paleogene Mass Extinction →

Monty Python’s Flying Circus is 40.

The show, which was written and acted by John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman, first aired on October 5, 1969 and ran for a total of 45 episodes.

I know I know it was yesterday, but I just heard.

Details here.

An important finding was reported last week in the same issue of Science as the new studies of Ardipithecus, and unfortunately, overshadowed by the news of the 4-million-year-old hominid. This finding may turn out to be even more important because it relates not to the evolution of a single species, but to the recovery of life in general on Earth following one of the greatest catastrophes ever….

Read the rest as surprising science.

…male and female cattle (including the many wild versions such as the African Cape Buffalo) and wildebeest (a kind of antelope) have horns, while in most other bovids only the males have horns. Both male and female caribou (a kind of deer) grow antlers each year, while in most other deer only the males do so.

But why? Read this.

Aggressive African bees were accidentally released in Brazil in 1957. As “killer bees” spread northward, David Roubik, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, began a 17-year study that revealed that Africanized bees caused less damage to native bees than changes in the weather and may have increased the availability of their food plants.

Continue reading Interesting Long Term Study of “Killer Bee” Role in South American Ecology →