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August 25, 2006

It Works, Bitches

Some science-y links for the kids:

  1. Carl Zimmer on evidence of recent evolution in egg-flys.
    But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host dies, Wolbachia dies as well.

    [...]

    Male-killing is not the only weapon Wolbachia uses on its hosts. When some strains infect wasps, they alter the females so that their eggs start spontaneously turning into embryos without any need of sperm. All of these sperm-free embryos become females, which can also produce female offspring without the help of males. In other species, Wolbachia allow males to be born but alters their hormones to feminize them and make them produce eggs. And in other cases, Wolbachia decides which males and females may mate with one another.

    The article goes on to talk about evidence for changes in some species of insect to protect the males. Which is my kind of evolution.

  2. The Disgruntled Chemist taking down some anti-science Republican. Worthwhile just for the astonishingly vacuous claims encountered. Gems such as:
    Be that as it may, the whole [blogospheric debate over Intelligent Design] got me thinking, and today ii occured to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science - what will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong.
    You know, I was sitting around the other day, and I got to thinking. Some people are fucking ridiculous. Has that ever occured to anyone before? How monumentally absurd some people can be? It's really just astounding. Think about it sometime.

  3. A post about dark matter at Cosmic Variance which has been open in my browser for a week now. Need to finish that.

  4. I did this. I am very excited.

Posted by todd at August 25, 2006 7:37 PM

Comments

What did you get from FotF?

Posted by: tony at August 26, 2006 10:54 AM

I forget, exactly. But I'm going to do some sort of review (of, at the very least, the two-DVD set) once it comes.

Meanwhile, I finally finished Carroll's dark matter post. My favorite part was, "So these observations don’t tell us anything directly about the nature of the 70% of the universe that is purportedly in this ultra-exotic component." Meanwhile, the selection of restaurants along the MassPike is 90% ultra-exotic fast food resaurants.

Posted by: todd. at August 27, 2006 4:45 PM

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