Tangled Bank #41

Hi, and welcome to Tangled Bank #41. Tangled Bank is a biweekly collection of science and medicine related blog posts submitted by their authors (in most cases, anyway). It's a smorsgasbord of articles on many different aspects of science and a good way to find blogs that you wouldn't normally come across.

Being a carnival barker is very similar to being a scientist: 18 hour days, crap pay, the only way to survive is to convince credulous marks to part with their money on crapshoots... so it was a no-brainer to volunteer to host TB this fortnight. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Astronomy

Let's start at the beginning - the very beginning - with a post from Bad Astronomy: First Light, about the background light from the very first stars (perhaps).

Biology & Genetics

Skipping forward a few eons, the Hairy Museum of Natural History tells us of Scales From Kyrgystan and the engimatic Longisquama, whose scales have been brought up by some as an example of a transitional structure between scales and feathers. Speaking of feathers, 10,000 Birds has a post about waxwings and why they are so called.

I can't believe that we've been working with mice for so long and yet never realised that they sing to each other (sort of). Science Made Cool has a post about that.

BotanicalGirl, meanwhile, has written about carnivorous plants. I was terrorized as a child by the idea of the Triffids invading my house and eating my family, and this brought back a lot of memories. Thanks BG.

Discovering Biololgy in a Digital World describes a great learning activity for high school students: Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, a hands-on way of discovering that different genes are expressed in different places and at different times.

Here at Flags and Lollipops (what? When you host Tangled Bank you can submit to yourself too) I wrote about how it seems that we humans differ from one another genetically in more ways that we first thought.

Medicine

Are you one of those people who bought Tamilflu from eBay? Been steering clear of pidgeons and south east asian poultry markets recently? If so, buck up! Ruminating Dude asks why are we so bent over bird flu?... pointing out that if we really want something to be worried about, being eaten alive by MRSA while in hospital for a routine operation probably fits the bill.

Thinking for Food, on the other hand, has been hit pretty hard by whooping cough, which sounds pretty nasty - and you thought that you were safe now that you're all grown up.

Cognition

Cognitive Daily has an interesting post about how gut feelings influence memory, describing a recent experiment neatly summed up by the title of the paper written about it: remembering by the seat of your pants (go read the post and see).

The Science of Science

There's a bumper crop of writing about science the subject this Tangled Bank. First of all, Mike the Mad Biologist talks about Trust Versus Belief. Is there an equivalence between the "beliefs" of scientists and the beliefs of those Intelligent Design guys?

Speaking of Intelligent Design, Jakobische Rants mounts a Defense of Reasoned Inquiry and the scientific method, and Adventures in Ethics and Science asks if it a good idea for scientists to give permission to Creation Magazine to reproduce figures and videos for their own purposes. What's more important: sharing your findings with the scientific community or ensuring that your findings aren't misrepresented?

Hsien-Lei over at Genetics and Public Health, meanwhile, has written about the Strong-Inference-Plus experimental paradigm, which sounds particularly interesting to us bioinformaticians (slow moving experiments are sooo last century).

Literary Darwinism

I'd never heard of Literary Darwinism before, and in come two posts discussing it. As a public service to others, then, here's a page about it to get a handle of what on earth is going on.

So, on to the posts, both of which, um, have some problems with evolutionary psychology as applied to human culture. Jerry Monaco has submitted Literature as Experience - A Hope for Literary Darwinism, while over at FrinkTank they wonder why the world's intellectuals accept that the most proximate answer to "why do we do that" can be found in evolution.

Engineering

Here in the UK our reputation for mighty feats of engineering suffered a little when we had to close the Millenium Bridge in London two days after it opened (it was wobbling too much). Political Calculations examines the post-mortem study.

Weird Science

To finish up with, three posts from the fringes of science: the first about the UK again. Apparently British women have the biggest breasts in Europe. The keenest among you may notice that unfortunately the study that "discovered" this doesn't seem to have taken average weight into consideration: the French and Italians are, I'm guessing, just skinnier than us. British men probably have the second biggest breasts in Europe.

Meanwhile, over at Respectful Insolence, Orac knows a lot about the science of tinfoil hats - they're perhaps not such a good defence against alien mind control rays after all.

When I think of an invasive species I tend to think of an insect or a particularly evil microbe. The Japanese seem more worried about giant, frog eating hamsters. The Invasive Species Weblog brings you a relevant pamphlet.

See you next time

That's (almost) all for this fortnight. The next Tangled Bank is at Dogged Blog on the 30th of November - you can send your entries to host@tangledbank.net or to P.Z Myers at pzmyers@pharyngula.org.

But we started at the beginning of the universe so it seems fitting that we finish up with the end of the world. A quirk of cyberspace has allowed the Science Musings blog an inside look at how it's all going down...