Old Weblog - March 2005

Analysis of the diminutive cranium of Homo floresiensis—a tiny hobbit-like human that lived in Indonesia just 13,000 years ago—confirms it as a unique species and reveals remarkably advanced features for such a small brain…

Dean Falk, an expert on brain evolution at Florida State University, US, who has analysed the skull of H. floresiensis says it has some remarkably advanced morphological features, including ones associated with complex brain processes in living humans… This adds weight to the theory that H. floresiensis may have possessed an intelligence and tool-building ability traditionally associated with much larger-brained humans.

The lava lizard's tale (Guardian: 05-Mar-05)
In the last of three essays written on a recent visit to the Galápagos, Richard Dawkins reveals how the minutes of history are marked in the volcanic landscape that is this creature's unique habitat.

Scientists say they believe they have discovered one of the oldest skeletons of an early human ancestor.

US and Ethiopian scientists working in north-eastern Ethiopia say the remains of the hominid, or primitive human, date back four million years.

The skeleton is said to be that of the world's oldest animal walking on two feet, or biped.

If you exclude certain dinosaurs and birds, that is! Still, it sounds like a fascinating find.
Monkeys see competitors' point of view (New Scientist: 07-Mar-05)
Monkeys are more likely to steal food from a "competitor" that is turned away from them, showing that they may understand what others can see, new research suggests. Following the gaze of others is an important skill that many animals are capable of—if one animal in a group sees a predator the others will look round to see what it is looking at, thus alerting them. But there has been much debate as to whether monkeys are able to go one step further and consider the perceptions of others based on where they are looking.
The Iberian lynx, found only in Spain and Portugal, could become the first big cat since the sabre-toothed tiger to die out, a WWF report claims.
Pigs were domesticated independently at least seven times around the globe, a new study has found. The discovery was made by linking the DNA of tame porkers with their wild relatives, Science magazine reports. Researchers found farmed pigs in several locations were closely related to wild boar in the same region, suggesting local domestication.
The vital statistics (Guardian: 12-Mar-05)
Evolution, not sexism, puts women at a disadvantage in the sciences, says Helena Cronin.
Pinch of salt time.
Remembering Francis Crick (NY Review of Books: 24-Mar-05)
Oliver Sacks: I read the famous "double helix" letter by James Watson and Francis Crick in Nature when it was published in 1953—I was an undergraduate at Oxford then, reading physiology and biochemistry. I would like to say that I immediately saw its tremendous significance, but this was not the case for me or, indeed, for most people at the time…
A UK-wide survey is being launched to track an alien ladybird that threatens the existence of native species. The harlequin (Harmonia axyridis) was first spotted in Britain in September last year and is largely confined to the South East. But the invader is a voracious predator that easily out-competes home bugs for food and is likely to spread north. Scientists want gardeners and wildlife enthusiasts to report sightings of the pest to www.harlequin-survey.org.
Howard Gruber (Guardian: 15-Mar-05)
In the mid-1950s, a Ford Foundation fellowship brought the pioneering American cognitive psychologist Howard Gruber, who has died aged 82, to Europe. It was a visit with lifelong consequences, since it was then that he first looked in detail at Charles Darwin's unpublished notebooks and the material on The Voyage Of The Beagle. This led him to pursue the in-depth analysis of how Darwin's ideas developed, using the notebook material as data. In 1974, Gruber's groundbreaking study of Darwin's creativity, Darwin On Man, was named by American Scientist as one of the most important scientific books of the 20th century. This work was both a case study of the nature of creativity—a permanent interest of Gruber's—and a contribution to the history of science.
The complete sequence of the human X chromosome was published in Nature this week. The work, led by Mark Ross at the Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, UK, shows that large segments of it match parts of normal chromosomes in birds, confirming the X chromosome's "non-sex" origins. Despite the fact that X is much larger than the tiny Y, it seems that both evolved from a pair of conventional chromosomes in early mammals sometime in the past 300 million years - an idea first proposed in 1967.
Genes may help determine how religious a person is, suggests a new study of US twins. And the effects of a religious upbringing may fade with time.
But, as always: (a) beware twin studies!, and (b) do not assume that a correlation implies a causation. Religious inclinations might be a byproduct of some other feature of the brain that happens to be affected by these genes.
Horse Evolution Followed Twisty Trail, Study Says (National Geographic: 17-Mar-05)
Writing this week in the journal Science, paleontologist Bruce J. MacFadden said the evolution of horses involved many more twists and turns than previously imagined. Modern steeds did not follow a relatively smooth transition from the diminutive, foxlike forest browsers that were their earliest ancestors to those impressive, open-plains athletes we know today. Rather, horses fluctuated considerably in form and size over time.
Australia's only frog hospital is closing down due to lack of money. For the last six-and-a-half years it has treated hundreds of amphibians struck down by illness and injury. Researchers have said public apathy towards the plight of Australia's frog population has been an important factor in the hospital's demise.
There is a beetle that, instead of fleeing like most other animals when confronted with fire, spreads its wings and flies in droves straight towards the inferno. In fact, the jewel beetle, or black fire beetle as it's known in Canada, needs a blazing forest fire to breed. Anecdotal reports suggest the beetles will travel many kilometres to reach a forest fire. When they arrive, they are guaranteed sex and a safe place to lay their eggs with a great supply of food laid on for the next generation.
When government microbiologist Dale Griffin revs up his quarter-scale, remote-controlled Piper Cub aircraft and lofts it 1,000 feet above Largo next month, it won't be as a model airplane hobbyist. Each week for months, he'll check the skies above the Tampa Bay area for bacteria, viruses and chemicals hitching intercontinental rides on specks of African dust.
Darwin was fascinated by airborne African dust, some of which fell onto HMS Beagle.
Several Imax cinemas in the US have refused to show films referring to the theory of evolution for fear of a religious backlash, it is reported. Viewers at a US test screening judged films which contradicted religious descriptions of man's origins as "blasphemous", the New York Times said. As a result science films were denied screenings in approximately 12 large-screen Imax cinemas.
Elephants learn some of their calls through imitation, scientists report in this week's Nature magazine. They are the only land mammal, other than primates, that can undeniably copy sounds, the researchers claim.
Time Travel at the Cambridge Science Festival (i-Newswire.com Press Release: 23-Mar-05)
People of all ages from around the county had the opportunity to travel through time and learn about Einstein's relationship to chocolate and ice-cream and contemplate the end of the universe and what that might look like… Darwin Correspondence Project Exhibit, a small exhibit about the Darwin Correspondence Project, publishing the letters to and from Charles Darwin.
I have just (today) taken delivery of Vol.14 of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. I hope to live long enough to collect and read the whole, as yet incomplete, series.
If you are using your limbs to disguise yourself, how do you flee danger without giving yourself away? The answer, when you have eight arms, is to use six arms for disguise and to walk across on the seafloor on the other two. That is the extraordinary behaviour observed for the first time in two species of octopus by Christine Huffard's team from the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Blood vessels recovered from T. rex bone (New Scientist: 24-Mar-05)
Palaeontologists have extracted soft, flexible structures that appear to be blood vessels from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They also have found small red microstructures that resemble red blood cells. The discovery suggests biological information can be recovered from a wider range of fossil material than realised, which would greatly help the tracing of evolutionary relationships.

If this story turns out to be true, Holy Crap!

See also: T. rex fossil has 'soft tissues' (BBC)

In a discovery that has flabbergasted geneticists, researchers have shown that plants can overwrite the genetic code they inherit from their parents, and revert to that of their grandparents. The finding challenges textbook rules of inheritance, which state that children simply receive combinations of the genes carried by their parents. The principle was famously established by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in his nineteenth-century studies on pea plants. The study, published this week in Nature, shows that not all genes are so well behaved. It suggests that plants, and perhaps other organisms including humans, might possess a back-up mechanism that can bypass unhealthy sequences from their parents and revert to the healthier genetic code possessed by their grandparents or great-grandparents.
See also: Rogue weeds defy rules of genetics (New Scientist)
Down on a lonely island off the southern tip of New Zealand, three new kakapo have just been born. These new chicks bring the total number of one of the world's rarest birds to 86.
A nature reserve in western China is cooking up plans to find new food and feeding sites for hungry pandas because swathes of the bears' favorite snack, bamboo, are on the verge of flowering and withering away, the China Daily said on Monday. The Baishuijiang State Nature Reserve in northwest Gansu Province planned to bring food to the at least 22 bears in the park facing starvation or push the endangered animals to migrate to areas where bamboo was healthy, the newspaper said.
Environmental disaster is looming in the Galapagos Islands, the Pacific archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Already under pressure from a rapidly growing population and mass tourism, the waters around the Galapagos face being devastated by one of the world's most wildlife-damaging fishing methods.