Daphnia

This little guy is a crustacean which has its molting synthesis activated by Halloween genes (as do insects because, gasp!, they share a relatively close lineage). Some of the names of these genes are Spo, Spok, Spookiest, Phantom, Disembodied, Shadow, and Shade.

How we evolve

Seed has an article about How We Evolve. It’s a fantastic read that I won’t try to break down since it’s already written in an enormously friendly manner. I do, however, want to focus on one part.
“Intelligence builds on top of intelligence,” says Lahn. “[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is [...]

World Beard Championship

The competition gets tougher every year.

The Dishonest Firing of an Honest Woman

I try to make it a habit to not use much of anything I find on PZ Myers blog. It’s not because I don’t like his blog – I do, it’s great – but I’d rather not be stealing the man’s ideas or topics (there’s enough science to go around). But he recently made a [...]

Just a little more astronomy

This is a bit much astronomy for a primarily biology blog, I know. Unless something great pops up, this will be the last astronomy post for at least a little while.
Some new research into the tidal forces of stars and their planets has yielded some interesting results.
Planets around small mass stars may only have [...]

Water may be more recent on Mars than previously thought

For anyone wondering, it’s pretty conclusive that Mars once had water on it. Here we have a new sign that ancient Mars was wet more recently.
“This is an exciting discovery because it extends the time range for liquid water on Mars, and the places where it might have supported life,” said CRISM principal investigator Scott [...]

No, science only has a bias toward reality.

Apparently, some people think science can be either conservative or liberal. Well, it can’t. So why do the nuts over at Conservapedia think otherwise? What’s more, why do they think creationists tend to win debates with ‘evolutionists’?

Morris also said regarding the creation scientist Duane Gish (who had over 300 formal debates): “At least in our [...]

Solar System Like Ours Discovered

Evidence found of solar system around nearby star

WASHINGTON — For the first time, astronomers think that they’ve found evidence of an alien solar system around a star close enough to Earth to be visible to the naked eye.
They say that at least one and probably three or more planets are orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, [...]

It still isn’t random

This is apparently some confusion over my post about why natural selection is not random. It’s a fairly elementary issue at hand, but it evidently needs to be addressed. One reader mentions,
Natural selection is a product of selective pressures. Those selective pressures are random in that they do not try to produce anything specific (ie: [...]

The Stink in Your Fart

Apparently, the stink in farts control blood pressure.
A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.
The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, [...]