Sweating it out for a project idea? Google Scholar allows you to access papers from up to 92 years in the future:

Just steal one, they aren’t even published yet! The best part is, Scholar returns 19,100 articles published in that year range. I’m not sure how they are assigning the year of publication, but something is definitely wrong. Either that or Google knows something we don’t.

If you didn’t feel sorry for the ID crowd before, you will after these videos. These people do a much better job of making fools of themselves than anyone else ever could.

4. Peanut Butter – THE ATHEIST’S NIGHTMARE!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504[/youtube]

“Any theory on the origin of life on this planet…is a fairy tale.”

Nice try, chuckles. That would be abiogenesis not evolution.

3. Kirk Cameron and Bananas (THE ATHEIST’S NIGHTMARE Pt. II)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4[/youtube]

“The banana and the hand are perfectly made for one another!”

Yes, its amazing what thousands of years of selective breeding by humans will do to an organism. This fact was obviously lost on expert evolutionary biologist Kirk Cameron. Wild bananas and hands were, in fact, not made for each other.

2. Four Problems With Evolution

“I’m going to talk about four of the crises facing evolution today.”

1. Wrong.
2. Wrong.
3. Wrong.
4. Wrong.

You’re on a real roll, Chuck.

1. The Science of Evolution

“Watch the evolutionists use the language of speculation in this 6 min clip from the DVD “The Science of Evolution”.

If by evolutionists you mean totally random people off the street, then yes, watch them. As a bonus, you can also watch your brain leak out of your head as you accept total fiction as reality.

As we saw in the last post it sometimes takes the cold, calculating eye of a machine to truly capture the beauty of nature. Such is the case with my current research project at school, where I am looking at the fine-scale social dynamics of our friend the bumble bee. I won’t go into the details, but I will show you some pretty pictures that I’ve generated.

This psychedelic mush is actually the sum of the movement paths of six bumble bees around their colony over a period of twelve hours, where each bee is represented by a different colour. The colony was reared in a plastic box, the floor of which can be seen behind the coloured mass. Jackson Pollock, anyone?

More bumble bee psychedelia. The nectar feeding dish can be seen in the near-top-left portion of this trace. Evidently, these bees weren’t very hungry. Probably just colony collapse disorder.

Here’s a zoomed-out view of group of individual bumble bee movement traces, which are combined together to make the psychedelic-mush-o-grams pictured previously. Each square shows the movement vector of one bumble bee over a period of one hour (so, five hours for five bees in this case).

That’s all the weirdness I have for now. If you are in interested in seeing some more traces like these or actually learning about my research project, please leave a comment!

This is the first in a (weekly!) series of posts about interesting/creepy/crawly/mushy/furry/woody species I come across in my zoological hypertext travels.

As I’m sure you’re aware, spiders are the bad-asses of the Arthropod world. They sit around in their nests and webs and eat insects like they’re going out of style. Of the 40,000 species of spider, Tarantulas (Family Theraphosidae) are probably the most well known and feared. Most people in their right mind will not screw with a Tarantula, but the Species of the Week is not a person. Its a big fucking wasp.

Tarantula Hawk Wasps (Genus Pepsis) enjoy long flights on the beach, wildflowers, shopping for the latest aposematic fashions, and laying eggs in the bodies of paralyzed male Tarantulas. They make short work of unsuspecting Tarantulas by stinging and injecting them with powerful venom:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D56lxph_WlI&mode=related&search=[/youtube]

Tarantula’s aren’t the only thing Pepsis wasps sting. In fact, they have the #2 most painful sting in the world according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Schmidt, on the experience of being stung by a Pepsis wasp:

Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).

Ye-ouch! Anyway, once a Pepsis egg is laid in a paralyzed Tarantula’s body it develops over time into a squirming larva. The larva will slowly eat the (still living!) Tarantula until it has sufficient nutrients with which to pupate, and become an adult.

Now if that isn’t a gross life cycle, I don’t know what is. I’m really quite glad I live nowhere near these things, cool as they are.

Hope you enjoyed Species of the Week #1! Next week: monkey + (cat x raccoon) + bee = ???

Taxonomy, the scientific discipline concerned with the naming and classification of organisms, is quickly becoming a lost art. There is simply too much work and too few new taxonomists. It is ironic that a discipline that should have been super-charged by the Internet and modern molecular techniques has somehow instead begun to stagnate.

Doom-saying aside, in recent years a number of extremely high-quality taxonomic databases have appeared on the Internet. All of these are excellent for casually learning about the evolutionary histories of organisms you know and love (you want to do that, right?). For example, did you know that loons and penguins are very closely related? Thanks to the Internets, now you do!

Online Taxonomy Resources

Tree of Life Web Project

Wikispecies

The Encyclopedia of Life

Animal Diversity Web

Species 2000

Figure 1: The enemy of humanity.

An important and unsolved problem in biology revolves around the idea that “not all genomes are created equally”. For example, liverworts (very simple plants) have genomes almost 16 times larger than humans. This extra DNA grants liverworts many unique powers including the ability to transform into a delicious chocolate cake and the power to direct large meteors into the Earth.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you like it or not, your gut is host to over one-hundred trillion ooey-gooey microbes. That means that for every one cell in your body there are ten microbial cells livin’ large in your intestines.

Luckily, these little guys perform a whole whack of great services for the body, such as the digestion of hard-to-break-down materials. But where exactly do these abdominal amigos come from? A recent article in PLoS Biology discusses research by Palmer et al. that aims to answer that question.

To explore the development of the microbial community found in the human gut, the researchers conducted DNA microarray analyses of fecal samples from babies. This is one of those rare and beautiful occasions where someone gets to take a dump in the lab for the glory of science.

Pooey-diapers aside, the researchers findings were far from fetid. They found striking variation in early microbial community composition between individuals, and suggested that this variation was attributable to differences in chance encounters with microbial species. Other interesting findings included twins (who presumably share the same environment) having similar gut-community profiles, and babies delivered by caesarean section having lower-than usual microbial diversity in their guts (which could be due to them bypassing the rich and fragrant microbial flora the vaginal canal).

For more on pooing in the lab, check out this story over at Everyday Scientist.

A recent article in PLoS Biology about coral reef bleaching caused my thoughts to turn to tiny creatures that live inside corals, the zooxanthellae (zoo-ZAN-thell-ee)! These are the little beasties that give corals their fantastic array of colours, along with being one of the most fun biology terms to scream (“ZOOXANTHELLAE!”).

Zooxanthellae are not actually beasties sensu stricto; they are algae, which are unicellular plants. So what the hell are algae doing living inside coral? Like lichens, coral have formed a symbiotic relationship with algae. By forming this association, the coral (an animal) receives photosynthetic products (sugars) and the zooxanthellic algae (a plant) receives shelter and the carbon dioxide it needs to survive. Also like lichens, the coral/zooxanthellae symbiotic relationship is “obligate”. That is, neither the coral nor the zooxanthellae could survive on their own if they were separated.

Weird under-sea animals aside, obligate symbiosis is by no means an exotic phenomenon in the natural world. For example, the mitochondria and the cells of your body are in an obligate symbiotic relationship. That’s right, mitochondria are in reality totally separate organisms from humans. They even have their own DNA. Like the zooxanthellae of plants, the mitochondria produce a resource (adenosine triphosphate) in exchange for a safe and happy environment in which to live their tiny lives in peace.

Some people would say that dropping Asian elephants into nature reserves in North America is irresponsible. Those people clearly didn’t consider A) the potentially hilarious and heart-warming results (see Operation Dumbo Drop) or B) that those elephants might have the ability to resuscitate ecosystems that disappeared over 13,000 years ago.

Believe it or not, serious conservation biologists have speculated that if living rough approximations of long-dead megafauna were introduced into appropriate North American ecosystems, they might have the ability to revert those ecosystems back to the state they were in 13,000 years ago. But why should we care about restore crazy ancient ecosystems? Well, the extinction of the original megafauna is attributed to over-hunting by ancient humans! Its our own fault that we’re not all living in a prehistoric wonderland!

Humans: driving rare and beautiful animals to extinction since 11,000BC.

Further reading: “The Pleistocene re-wilding gambit” by Tim Caro in the June 2007 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Most of my time this summer will be spent watching bumble bees on a computer screen. Here’s a taste of the sheer exhilaration I experience every day: