Alien biology hype
Rosie Redfield begins to disassemble the NASA-sponsored "alien life forms" story:There's a difference between controls done to genuinely test your hypothesis and those done when you just want to show...
View ArticleArsenate redux
I wrote a short post about the arsenate-bacteria story last weekend; in the meantime the story has developed. Carl Zimmer ran a long story early this week, reflecting many scientists' criticisms of the...
View ArticleMailbag: Diet and isotopes
Re: "Tartar control and Neandertal plant use". In your review of the study on Neadertals and grain in dental calculi, you wrote the following:"The remains of starch grains and phytoliths tell us about...
View ArticleWolves in coyotes' clothing
Razib's post on the genetics of canids ("A map of charismatic canid genomic variation") does a nice summary of a recent paper in Genome Research, by vonHoldt and colleagues [1]. I just want to quickly...
View ArticleA problem of fuzzy mammoths
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study living ones. A study last year in PLoS...
View ArticleOld nests
Matt Walker of BBC Earth News has an article about how gyrfalcons have continuously used the same nests for thousands of years "2,500-year-old bird's nest found". It's carbon dating of nest contents,...
View ArticleCrows hate cavemen
Stephanie Pappas reports on experiments with social learning in crows.To ensure that crows were responding to their faces and not to their clothes, binoculars or some other ornithologist cue, the...
View ArticleRapid adaptation to captivity in salmon
I just want to note this study by Mark Christie and colleagues [1] because it is such a clear demonstration of powerful selection working on standing variants in association with domestication. Rachel...
View ArticlePolar bear mtDNA replacement
Jerry Coyne uses the occasion of polar bear genetics to give a biology lesson I've been trying to teach for 15 years: "A new study of polar bears underlines the dangers of reconstructing evolution...
View ArticleBuilding bigger dolphin brains
Ed Yong reports on a new study demonstrating a history of positive selection on the gene ASPM in cetaceans. Bruce Lahn's group previously showed that this gene has been positively selected in primate...
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Hiding above the dinosaurs
The early bin at PNAS has a cool, short paper by Yongjie Wang and colleagues, which matches a ginkgo tree with its insect mimic [1]. The cool part is that both of them lived during the Jurassic. I'm...
View ArticleCreative anatomy
Mike Taylor from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week shows how anatomists get creative with their measurement instruments: "How to measure necks using Duplo":I find the best way to get the neck...
View ArticleSelection is for the dogs
I was really pleased to see the new paper by Erik Axelsson and colleagues [1] on the pattern of recent selection on domesticated dogs. As we began working on recent selection in humans, we expected...
View ArticleDino size estimation
I know I'm linking a four-year-old post about dinosaurs, but I got this SV-POW post on my feed this morning and it is very relevant to those of us who think about variation among fossil hominins:...
View ArticleCave bear DNA from Sima de los Huesos
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitochondrial genome from a 300,000-year-old cave...
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