The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors
I’ll review the book officially next Tuesday, in the same post as the bird quiz. Meanwhile, you may want to look at these posts that have already come out. I’ll up date this list as I get more information.
Several thousand scientists at a handful of different research centers spent a gazillion hours and a huge pile of money searching for the Higgs Boson. But, nobody really cares that much about the Higgs Boson. The important thing is the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is this thing that is everywhere, as these spooky quantum fields tend to be, but that has a strange characteristic that makes it different from other fields; at rest the Higgs field has a non zero energy level. This means that its effect on particles is asymmetric. What that means is that when you write a mathematical formula of what happens to each of various different related and quasi similar particles such that the particles “look” the same way as each other in the formula, but then add in the effect of the Higgs field, the particles no longer “looks” the same. The symmetry of the formula is broken. I short, the Higgs field breaks symmetry. The result of this breaking of symmetry is that certain (most but not all) of the fundamental particles that make up matter act differently than a whole bunch of other thingies that make up the universe and you get … stuff. Without the breaking of symmetry caused by the Higgs Field, there really wouldn’t be much stuff, and if there was any stuff, it would be very different than the stuff we have now. The Higgs Particle itself is the product of extremely rare and hard to reproduce in the lab events, and the specific nature of the Higgs Particle, as measured by ginomrous devices that can’t really detect the particle directly but do so indirectly, should “look” a certain way (have certain products at a certain energy level) if the Higgs Field exists and is what we (and by we I mean they) think it is. Continue reading The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis: Volume 1 – The Physical Climate
The textbook is written for the introductory science student at the undergraduate college level. We describe the discipline of climate change science, and individual climate scientists whose expertise spans Earth history, geology, geography, biology, oceanography, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering and more. We’ve attempted to cover a variety of the empirical evidence for and the effects of Earth’s changing climate.
Significantly (and unique in climate textbooks to my knowledge), there is a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of climate change denial. Students learning climate science will need to put into proper context the myths and attacks on science conducted by those who deny the scientific consensus
People who do a lot of field work end up with interesting stories to tell, especially if the fieldwork is diverse and the conditions are adverse. Often, the sort of thing people want to know about is very different from the repertoire of available stories, but as long as the expectations of the audience is not too rigid, experienced fieldworkers in the various sciences that do field work make the best cocktail party extras.
I never met Jon Kalb, but we have a lot of colleagues in common. I first heard of him as one of the scientists on the same expedition that found the famous fossil “Lucy” (and her various friends and families). The whole Ethiopian foray was interesting as stories go. Research in the Afar region as well as down in the Omo basis was linked to numerous interesting stories worthy of a great deal of lecture time in any reasonable course on human evolution, or several pages of descriptive prose in any book on human evolution. And this is entirely aside from the actual discovery of any actual fossils.
I recalled that Kalb was the guy who was accused of being a CIA agent and thus tossed out of the country (Ethiopia) after doing quite a bit of work there. The person who told me that also assured me that it was not true; he was not a CIA agent. But that particular story goes with a lesson: don’t ever let anyone think you are a CIA agent because they’ll toss you out of the damn country.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because Joh Kalb has written a book, perhaps I can fairly call it a memoir if that term has not been broken into a million little pieces by some other author, of his time in the field. The Ethiopian bit is part of the story, but only a small part, as Jon had done quite a bit of work both before and after. Much of the attraction of books on human evolution and other field sciences is the fieldwork stories, and that’s what Jon’s book is all about. There are stories from North America, South America, Africa, from the driest regions of the world to under the sea. The research is all over the map as Jon was himself, with human origins work being only part of it. (Jon is a geologist so he is not bounded by taxon!)
Hunting Tapir During the Great Flood and Other Tales of Exploration and High Adventure
Kalb is also the author of Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression
Mitochondria are cool, important, and fascinating. You know the basic story. Mitochondria are the result of endosymbiosis. A bacterim or bacteria-like organism insinuated itself into another bacterium or bacteria-like organism. The former was small, the latter large. A relationship started up whereby the smaller one became an organelle in the larger one, and Eukaryotic life was formed. You probably also know that in multi-celled organisms mitochondria may be passed on by one sex (female) so paleogenetic research can sort out female lineages by looking only at the DNA found in the mitochondria (mtDNA). But there are things that perhaps you did not know, like the relationship between the whole mitochondria thing and why sex exists, various diseases including cancer, and aging (of cells and of organisms). Also, mitochondria related to organismic complexity, warm bloodedness, and a range of other basic biological facts of life.
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
I know some teachers who read the book and have found much useful current, integrative material for use in their advanced biology classes. That’s a hint: If you know a life science teacher, this is a great stocking stuffer!
I’ve got kids ranging from zero to 12 years of age to find gifts for this season. I’ve got most of them covered, and science books have figured in this effort in a bigger way than usual this year. I’m impressed with the number of climate change choices that have become available. Know a Republican with offspring? Ha. You know what to do…
But first some other sciencey books that are highly recommended or Continue reading Kids Science Books
I remember finding out about the Tethys Sea and being really excited. I was just beginning my studies of Old World prehistory, Africa, and Human Evolution. What I learned about was the remnant sea separating Africa and Eurasia called Tethys, though it is much more than that (see below). Imagine a Eurasia with no Alps, no Caucasus, and no Arabian Peninsula. Much of southern Europe and huge swaths of North Africa are underwater, and Africa is so far away from Eurasia that all the classic seas of the region don’t exist simply because they are part of the ocean. If you were in the western Mediterranean, you would be able to travel across what is now the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea or the Persian Gulf and into the Indian Ocean, where you would not find India any where near it is today. That was all the Tethys. It allowed the world’s oceans to communicate not too far from the equator across the old world, instead of having the Indian and Atlantic oceans separated by Africa. Virtually everything about the modern climate system depends on tropical or subtropical closure of the major oceans. The fact that the Indian Ocean is on the equator and cut off from the North Atlantic determines and explains almost everything about Northern Hemisphere weather. The rest is explained by the Isthmus of Panama. Had Africa (and India) not moved north to close this sea and create the modern puddles known as the Caspian, Black and Aral seas, and the Persian Gulf, etc. there might well be no Atlantic Hurricanes, England would be rather cold, Canada might look much more like Greenland all year round, and if we add India moving north into Asia into the mix, and the formation of the great mountain ranges of Europe and Central Asia, we also get the present configuration of grasslands in Africa, and in fact, the evolution of grass itself. Prior to the closure of the Tethys, there was an oceanic habitat in Northern Africa and what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in which evolved hippos, manatees, whales, and elephants. Probably. The sea was enormously influential and it’s demise equally so.
You know the story of Renaissance era scholars noticing sea shells made of lime stone high in the alps. Go look at the alps. Well, the geology there is pretty complicate, but the short version is that many of the fossil bearing (and other) sediments that the alps are made of were party of the western extent of the Tethys, during times when the Atlantic Ocean didn’t happen to exist, so if you were in a boat in that part of the Tethys you would not only be near Geneva (which didn’t exist yet) but also near Libya, Spain and Labrador. When the Tethys was finally pinched out the Alps, Caucuses, and other mountain ranges in the region were pushed up and those sediments exposed.
I’ve had close friends and colleagues who worked on a number of paleontological finds, and in some cases, I worked on them as well, that owe their existence to these dynamic changes. The hominoids of Pashalar were buried in sediments caused by landslides caused by uplift as Turkey became a place; The Siwalics, where all those amazing Asian pre-orang fossils were found, were once lowlands just risen from the sea, and later became the mountains of Pakistan. We will not speak of the Sahavi expedition, other than to say what is now among the driest deserts was once a sea in which it is possible, but highly unlikely, that early human ancestors rode on the back of dolphins swimming among hungry sharks. Well, the dolphins were swimming around among the sharks, anyway.
My own musings about this one thing … the sea that separated Africa from Eurasia, then went away as lands rose up and mountains formed, only addressed the latest period of the Tethys Ocean’s life. Like we have, mainly, the Atlantic and the Pacific today, in the very ver old days, even as life was just beginning to get complicated (and I don’t mean as in too many errands to run before Christmas, so much as I mean having more than one cell and organelles and stuff) it was the Tethys Ocean and the Panthalassic Ocean, the former to the east of, the latter to the west of, Pangea and the various daughter continents of Pangea as they formed over hundreds of millions of years.
It was in the Tethys that the Black Shales formed, during several (but many a few during a certain time period) in which a very large percentage of our oil was to be found, in many cases raised to dry land were it was easy (too easy, as it turns out) to get at. So, the Tethys sea gave us whales, and we used those for a while, but it also gave us Arabian Oil (and lots and lots of other oil around the world) which we are just now running out of.
To me, one of the most unsatisfying things one can do is to go to a place with interesting geology, stop in at the visitors center with the cute little museum, and see the same exact thing every time: “This region was once covered by a vast inland sea, bla bla bla” because those interpretive exhibits NEVER tell the most interesting aspects of the story. Like, the nearest shore off in that direction, even though you are currently in Michigan, was Norway and you could see if from here. Or, the rock formed by the reblown sand left behind when the sea receded is the same rock that outcrops at the other national park you visited five years ago and a thousand miles away. Or the wavy lines in this rock are from actual waves at the top of the water that were influenced by a wind that blew down from a mountain ridge that is now a low spot on a different continent, and when that was happening the only life on earth was … well there wasn’t any! (That sort of thing.) Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World
On June 6th, 1944, some 160,000 soldiers aboard about 5,000 boats of diverse design crossed the English Channel and carried out the Invasion of Normandy, one of the more important events in recent history. Many of the soldiers were so sick from choppy seas that leaving the boats and walking or running into German gunfire seemed like a good idea. The invasion was originally planned for the 45h of June, but a very precise weather forecast told the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, to wait until the next day. The forecast for the 6th of June, integrated with the logistical features of the operation, had the landing craft arriving on the German-held beaches just as wave heights were reducing from a level unacceptable for this operation to something that could be managed by most (but not all) vessels.
If you’ve seen “The Longest Day” or any of the other classic semi-documentary dramatizations of D-Day, you may recognize the name Captain James Stagg. Stagg was the meteorologist on Eisenhower’s staff, and as such he was the conduit and translator for the information that came from the meteorology group. That, in turn, was a combination of American and British scientists with very different methods and backgrounds, but both using data and analyses that involves a large number of individuals making observations and crunching numbers, from teams at Scripts Institute in California who developed the primary predictive models in use to British Coast Guard observers making observations at sea several times a day.
The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters
I recommend this book for non-experts who need to know all about ocean related science, who need to better understand the effects and dynamics of storms like Sandy, Tsunamis, and similar events. Parker does not hold back on the science and the detail. This is a very enjoyable way to elevate one’s self to the level of armchair oceanic meteorologist in a few evenings of enjoyable reading!
The Jewel Hunter
The Pittidae is a family of songbirds distributed in the Old World, mainly in Asia and Australia, but with a few species in Africa.
They tend to live in rain forests or at least, denser woodlands and scrub country or swamps or places like that. These are the habitats of legends because so many humans see them as “impenetrable” (having lived in one such habitat for some time I can tell you that they only seem that way!). Nonetheless, there is a rule about animals in rain forests. It is very easy to find them. As long as before you set out to do so, you know exactly where they are in advance, and how to get there. This is the sort of thing that makes Gooddie’s adventure book a bit of a nail biter.
This book is funny, entertaining, engaging, and if you are a true bird watcher or now, you’ll enjoy it.
I’ve often recommended that the true birder read well done and authoritative studies or compendia treating bird families (or some other taxonomic group). I would count The Jewel Hunter
Donna reviews it here as well.
When I was in 5th grade one of my classmates announced that she and her family (they were a family of singing folksingers) planned to take a trip in a boat they had built around the continent. In that class were were all required to give talks on various topics of our choosing, and she gave a talk on that. We were all impressed by many aspects of the planned adventure, but one thing stood out: During this trip the folk singing family would pass dangerously close to Haiti, which was on very bad terms with the US at that time (I believe it was a Soviet Satellite or something along those lines) and storms could blow their boat into Haitian waters and that would be trouble. This was especially impressive to those of us who had transferred into that public school from the Catholic school nearby, because we knew of “Haiti” as a synonym for “Hell.”
The next year she gave the talk again and told the story about how their boat actually did get blown into Haiti, they were picked up by the Haitian authorities, and actually treated quite nicely. Go figure.
I imagine that a lot of maritime stories go that way. There’s a big plan, and a small boat, and a huge ocean, and things don’t necessarily go the way they are supposed to go. But, in May 2009, when a team of scientists, teachers, conservationists, and sailors launched their journey on the good ship Ocean Watch, intending to circumnavigate the entirety of North and South America, their grandiose expectations were destine to be met, for the most part.
This was a voyage designed to make several points, about the ocean, the culture of the littoral, the conservation of the sea, the effects of climate change, and all that. They encountered major storms, cuddly polar bears, ice, and everything. The voyage started out in Seattle and went north, crossing west to east across the Arctic sea. Sea ice might have deterred them but ultimately they would have Nunavet. They rounded the Northern Continent and visited many cites in the US, Puerto Rico and other islands, several South American countries and the Falklands, Mexico, and then worked their way back along the US coast to Seattle. This took 13 months.
And, when they were done, they made an amazing coffee table style picture book called: One Island, One Ocean: The Epic Environmental Journey Around the Americas
The book is nicely printed, 240 pages long, and is a good deal of fun.
Tired of merely watching birds? Ever consider trying to draw them? There’s a method to do so. John Muir Laws is very good at this and he’s written a book that can help you get started, maybe even become good at it yourself:Laws Guide to Drawing Birds 
In case you were wondering, Laws’ name does not connect him genealogically to the famous John Muir; his parents named him that. But apparently, there is a connection between names and what people do, and John Muir Laws is in fact a naturalist.
This book covers all the usual methodology of illustration but with birds. There are a gazillion “chapters” each one or two pages or so in length, divided into sections: Bird Drawing Basics, Mastering Bird Anatomy, Details and Tips for Common Bird, Birds in Flight, Field Sketching, and Materials and Techniques.
In teaching physical anthropology, anatomy, or archaeology, I’ve found it to be very useful to require students to draw things. Even if they don’t become master scientific illustrators (that is a rare bird indeed) they learn about the objects that are central to the study in a more intimate and details way than possible by just looking. I would be willing to bet that the average bird watcher can improve his or her birdwatching skills by taking a bit of time drawing their quarry. In the old days, of course, this was done by first shooting the bird so it stops moving, then drawing it in the studio. This is no longer recommended, but that makes it harder. Instead, Laws recommends “spending time with living bird in natural conditions” which will “help you develop an intuitive feeling for and kinship with the living animal that you cannot get from photographs alone.”
By the way, of you need a source of photographs to help you in your drawing efforts, check out the blog 10,000 Birds, especially the Galleries section.
Laws is also the author of Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada
Happy sketching.
The Hobbit, the movie, opens tomorrow in a theater near you. This is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, which chronicles the adventure of Bilbo Baggins. To many, this constitutes a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which many read (or saw in movie form) before finding out about The Hobbit; this prequel-esque aspect of The Hobbit is reified in the production of the movie following the distribution of the Lord of the Rings movie. Notably, however, The Hobbit was written first, and The Lord of the Rings is a proper sequel. (Interestingly, the Hobbit was revised to accommodate The Lord of the Rings.)
This entire story takes place in Middle Earth, a richly described fantasy universe that has become the interest, sometimes obsession, of many minds since Tolkien. If you find Middle Earth interesting (and you should) then there is a book you absolutely must read about it. I’m talking about Henry Gee’s “The Science of Middle Earth: Explaining the science behind the greatest fantasy epic ever told.” Henry Gee wrote this book a few years back and you may have read it then, perhaps like me you have a dog eared paperback version of it on the shelf next to your copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But Henry has produced a second edition of the book, available for the Kindle, and at present, sold in the Amazon UK store (at the link provided above).
Gee covers what you would expect. Elf magic, Orc reproductive biology, Dragon pyrophysiology, Middle Earth social networking and communications technology (such as seeing-stones) and so on. But Gee takes also takes a broader view of “Science” than one might find in a typical “Science of some book or movie” treatment. For example, he interrogates Tolkien’s linguistics very closely, and carries out what amount to Anthropological and Ethnographic studies of Middle Earth Culture.
Here’s a sampling of some silmarillion science:
Elvish science reached its peak in the First Age with Fëanor, universally regarded as the brightest and most powerful of all the Elves…who created the Silmarils, the great jewels over which the first wars against Morgoth were fought. The … Seeing Stones were givts from the Elves to the Faithful of Numenor, having been made long before in Valinor …. It was Celebrimbor of Holin, a descendant of Fëanor, who forged the Three Rings of Power…
The Lord of the Rings contains many passing references to the relative hardness of materials, but this hardness has a mythic quality in that it directly correlates with technological sophistication of the smiths associated with that substance. For example, the Ents easilyidetroy the country rock that forms the outbuildings and walls of Isengard, but they are unable to ake a dent in Orthanc, a tower built by th elong-vanished Numenoreans, a tower with Gandalf says cannot be destroyed from without… But when Wormtongue tosses the palantir of Orthanc from an upstairs window, it makes a distinct chip in the Numenorean step on wich it falls — a step against which the rage of Treebeard has had no effect at all.
Gee addresses the idea that Tolkien had an anti-science bent, and turns that idea on its head, or at least, its pointy ear, and grounds that discussion in both scientific and literary context. Relating this question to Orc reproductive physiology:
In terms of science, these various grades of Orc-human mixture can be read as a savage critique on evolution itself – or, at least, the view of evolution as ‘progressive’, leading to inexorable improvement in form and function. This is the view of evolution that would have been current in the first half of the 20th century, and most especially between 1900 and the end of the Second World War, encompassing Tolkien’s most productive years as a writer. I have shown elsewhere that this view of life is profoundly antithetical to what we now understand of the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection, and has indeed been exposed as illogical by theorists working from the 1950s onwards…
And here is a sample of Henry’s linguistic and anthropological treatment:
When technical papers on incontinence, authored by a Dr. Splatt and a Dr. Weedon, were drawn to the attention of New Scientist magazine, its readers were invited to send in other examples of what became known as ‘nominative determinism’. This Jungian phenomenon illustrates how satisfying it can be when a name is more than a label, but illustrates some property of the thing named. Nominative determinism is amusing because it points up a distinction we usually take for granted. That is, that the name and the thing named are actually different things; that the effort of connecting the two is greater than we might imagine; and so it is satisfying when a person has a memorable name that records some distinctive property of the thing named, making it more than an arbitrary combination of sounds. Tolkien was as sensitive to this distinction as anyone: even in the first few pages of The Hobbit, Gandalf castigates Bilbo for remembering the name ‘Gandalf’, while forgetting that he, the wizard, ‘belonged’ to it.
There is a branch of science in which correct nomenclature is everything, and on which the whole of natural history is based. That discipline is taxonomy. The job of taxonomists is to provide names for species of living creatures. In ages past, the lack of any standard nomenclature made it hard for scientists to get the measure of the natural world. When the same creatures were known by host of names in different languages, it was impossible to know whether the same creature was being referred to in each case: as Elrond offers several names for Bombadil, Gandalf offers several names for himself, giving the origin of each. Gandalf is his name only among Men of the North, but he is called ‘Incanús’ in the South, ‘Tharkûn’ by the dwarves, ‘Olórin’ in the ancient West, and so on…. We know that all these names refer to the same person only because Gandalf tells us that this is so, not by some external reference. Were we to meet a southerner who mentioned having met Incanús, for example, we should only discover that we were talking of Gandalf by comparison of his attributes: both Gandalf and Incanús would have a staff, bristling eyebrows, a pointy hat and a silver scarf, suggesting (but not proving) that we were talking of one and the same person. But if Gandalf were known by the same name everywhere, this confusion should never arise, preferably by a name that reflected one or other of his attributes. As an aside, Tolkien got the name Gandalf from the Icelandic Völuspá —the same source for all the Dwarf names in The Hobbit. The name Gandalfr, however, seemed to stand apart, as an argument could be made for its meaning ‘Wand-Elf’ —in other words, a Wizard, rather than a Dwarf
This new edition of The Science of Middle Earth is not heavily revised from the first edition, but there are corrections and minor changes throughout. Most notably, it is the eBook edition (there is no eBook form of the earlier edition). Also notably, and thank you Henry for this, it is quite inexpensive.
Henry Gee is a member of the Tolkien Society and editor of it’s journal, Mallorn. He also works for another journal you may have heard of (“Nature”) where among other things he edits the regular science fiction feature “Futures
This is a summary of several of the better books I’ve had the opportunity to review here, organized in general categories. This is written from a North American perspective since most of my readers are North American (though many of you live to the west of the “Eastern Region” … but you probably know that). So, when not specified, a book with a regional focus is likely to be for that area, and the “Outside the US” section is labeled thusly.
Everybody needs a basic field guide. If you need more than one field guide because you are a family of birders, or because you like to keep one in the car and one by the feeder, than make your second (and third?) guides different from your first, because there will be plenty of times you will want to look something up in more than one place. A field guide is a good starting point, but the “How to be a birder” section includes books that you will be very glad you read once you read them, and if you are going to pick one “how to” book for yourself or as a gift, make it the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding. If you know a young person getting interested in birding, the National Geographic Birding Essentials is essential, and if they are in the Eastern US, the Young Birder’s Guide is perfect.
I’ve not covered bird song here, other than the one, rather spectacular iBook.
and related guides by Peterson (depending on your area) is still, in my opinion, the number one essential guide.Also, don’t forget to read ALL of my posts at 10,000 birds! There’s some other good posts there too.
Yesterday I wrote about Chris Stringer’s modified version of human evolution. Today, let’s have a look at Ian Tattersall’s new book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (Macsci)
Chris Stringer’s new book, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth
It is important to mention at this point that a third hypothesis, often classified as a subset of the Mutiregional model, had been proposed by C. Loring Brace. In this model a large continuous ancestral population was transformed regionally. The use of fire, Brace claimed, was invented in East Asia, and this transformed hominds in a certain way, and the use of improved projectile spears was invented in Africa, transforming those individuals in different ways. Specifically, the East Asians got smaller teeth and the Africans got more gracile bodies. These two transformations spread from their centers and overlapped each other and eventually transformed the entire global population.
Stringer’s new model isn’t like Braces in detail, but does account for the evidence better than both the Multiregional and Out of Africa models, assuming that evidence is sufficient to even develop a story for the rise of Modern Humans. Stringer still has a basal Modern Human form coming out of Africa, but then there is considerable interaction with extant non-Modern Human populations during which technologies, other aspects of culture, and genes, are exchanges. The results R us.
As you know, I’ve got my own theories about the origin of Modern Humans. I see the evidence of modern looking technology in Souther Africa quiet a bit before any evidence of symbolic behavior (i.e., the Fauresmith culture as documented by Peter Beaumont and others). A group of us led by Richard Wrangham published the idea that fire was controlled by early Homo and this transformed an asutralopith (roughly) like creature into Homo Erectus. By the time we get to the last interglaical, there is pretty good evidence of a very nearly modern human in Southern Africa and elsewhere on that continent. This, however does not obviate the idea of later spread and interaction with other populations, in accord with recent evidence from the genetics.
I don’t think we are there yet. I think we have a very coarse resolution and we are looking at a fairly fine tuned problem. Having said that, I would recommend Stringer’s book as an excellent window on the current thinking that does not privilege genetics (as is so often done these days in the larger discussion, because of the spectacular genetic finds) and incorporates both old and new evidence from physical and archaeological remains.
It is possible that I could assign this in an upcoming human evolution class. It is a good, easy read yet full of data and stuff. As one would expect form Chris Stringer.