Todd Oakley, writer of the wonderful OstraBlog series at Evolutionary Novelties, put up a post in which he invited all of us to "Tawk amongst yah-selves." He offered up two topics for discussion, one for for the bar scene, the other more appropriate for all other social environments – Why has bioluminescence evolved SO many times in the marine environment, but almost never in freshwater environments? Be sure to head over and join in the Tawk.
After leaving a quick comment I decided I could spare 10 minutes or so for some a quick journal search (is that really possible?) I found a couple of interesting abstracts, but one of the most intriguing paper is....not available through my institution. If anyone has access to the following paper please let me know at eric.heupel at gmail or at eric.heupel at uconn dot edu...
Seliger, H.H. (2008) The Origin of Bioluminescence. Photochemistry and Photobiology 21, 355-361(1975). DOI:10.1111/j.1751-1097.1975.tb06684.x
Praxis, the blog carnival about "scientific life", has landed here at The Other 95%. Welcome and make sure you look around at the work of my spineless co-blogger Eric and myself. The last edition was held at Life v. 3.0. Make sure you submit to Praxis #4 to be held at The Lay Scientist. Go ahead and host one yourself as well! Now on to the carnival.
Difficulties of Being a Scientist KH at Lecturer Notes ponders junior faculty naivete. Head over there to remind KH that making mistakes is part of the learning process!
The Rock Doctor at Life v. 3.0 has a post up describing her thoughts on being different from her friends. Science often takes people down an interesting path that neither social circumstances, religion or personaly/family history can control. You either succumb to the mold or let the journey carry you onward.
Bill at Open Reading Frame reminds everyone that no goes into science to get rich by plotting monthly salary versus experience. The results? Go there and see his analysis!
Searching for a job is no easy task. We all have our ideals. A nice salary, maybe able to purchase that first home, live in a nice area with plenty of weekend adventure opportunities and culture. But the job we want isn't always there or isn't always yours. That is why Physioprof over at Drugmonkey reminds us to cast a wide net when job hunting!
Is Biology Chemistry? Bora from A Blog Around the Clock waxes poetic on Green Fluorescence Protein winning the Nobel prize in Chemistry. For some reason he seems to think the "nobel" jellyfish isn't deserving of the prize. Oh, I guess some people got the prize not the jelly. My bad. But he has several comments on what discerns Medicine/Physiology from Chemistry. The line is often blurred in the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. The don't join the bandwagon rant resonates with me for sure!
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata also weighs on the GFP Nobel issue and concludes that "funding agencies [need] to support a broad range of chemical and biological research". Find out why at Terra Sigillata!
Revolutionizing Peer Review Cameron Neylon at Science in the Open offers up a few ideas about bringing peer review into the 21st century. This includes taking into account online articles (such as blog posts), wiki-style reviewing, open reviewing, aggregation after review, and much much more. Be sure to follow the excellent comment thread. Cameron also offers up his personal view of open science. If you are not a "believer" in open access and open science after this post (the 1st in a series), then there is no hope for you or you must work for "that one". Superbly done.
Bjorn Brembs also puts out an excellent post about transparent peer review, but has a different take on it from Cameron. It starts with a discussion forum, ends with a journal publication. But it is what happens between those two stages that is important.
Do it for the Children? Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science supports the progress of women in science but asks a very important question of a german initiative. Should women with kids get special treatment for scholarships? There are lots of underlying assumptions with this, be sure to read through the comment thread as well. Zuska also weighs in with her thoughts.
Fight the Power! Sick of Thomson-ISI or just want an open source alternative to EndNote? After hearing about Thomson Reuter's bogus lawsuit against George Mason University, where the open source referencing software Zotero was made by Dr. Daniel Cohen, for violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base (i.e. reverse engineering the .ens file format), I decided to give Zotero a whirl. It rocks and it integrates well with NeoOffice, the open source word editting software made for the Mac platform. Kevin Smith from Scholarly Communications@Duke distills down the copyright issues associated with the lawsuit. He has many excellent points and concerns, such as:
"In general, open source software is a gift that many universities like George Mason give to the academic community as a whole, and the value of that gift is increased if it is possible for scholars who have been using a costly commercial product to move their research resources from the latter into the former. That increased value (an “externality” in economic jargon) could be weighed against Thomson’s loss (which they allege is around $10 million per year) in reaching a reasonable decision about contract enforcement."
Somewhat on the topic of Thomson, at least the use of their metric, John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts mentions the joint response of many journals from the History of Science, Technology and Medicine fields to the stupidity of index metrics.
"We now confront a situation in which our own research work is being subjected to putatively precise accountancy by arbitrary and unaccountable agencies."
Larry Moran at the Sandwalk kindly reminds us that scientists, too, can be activists. The picture of Haldane raising his fist, passionately lecturing a large crowd of the "United Front" is priceless. What scientists are standing up with the people and demanding answers to pertenant issues of our day?
College or Bust Are too many people trying to get a B.A. degree? Should colleges be more selective, admit less students or be tougher to cater to the portion of society with higher IQs? Razib addresses this question with data and discusses why college is still the best bet.
We're hosting Praxis October 15th and have very few submissions so far!! Surely you all have something to say about how science? Such as:
"... all aspects of life as an academic, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole, academic life as a minority, working with colleagues and students, dealing with the peer-review process, publishing, grants, science 2.0, amusing anecdotes, conference experiences, philosophical musings, public engagement, or even historical articles about what life was like in the good (or bad) old days."
So leave your submissions in the comments here or email them to me (address in the sidebar)! You have till midnight October 14th!
CEPHALOPODS HAVE TAKEN CONTROL of this month's Carnival of the Blue!!! There is much fine tentacled offerings over at the Cephalopodcast. Jason lays it out real nicely and offers entertaining commentary. Lots of great links so be sure to drop by for a visit and check the place out! Deep Sea News will be hosting the next edition of the Carnival of the Blue in November, so be sure to write some great posts on anything related to the oceans and let them know!
When I think of spiders I typically think of either the orb weaver spiders with their beautiful webs or tarantulas and trapdoor spiders that line burrows with layers of silk. Comparatively the cellar spider's web is a downright mess, lines going every which way, no order, random chaotic (hmmm...a bit like my desk!).
The time of year has come in New England for the cellar spiders of the family Pholcidae to show up in the house. A family with some 1000 species and a truly worldwide distribution these spiders are often referred to as "daddy long legs" which Christopher explains is an absolutely useless name since it is applied to many diverse groups of animals including our friends the harvestmen, which Christopher explains is . The one above is the Longbodied Cellar Spider (Pholcus phalangioides). This one was drunkenly admiring the art, but when the paparazzi attacked it decided to take a break from visual arts and engage in some culinary arts hiding behind the recipe books in the kitchen.
I say "drunkenly" since when these spiders walk about on the floor they often bob and weave as if they are one of the late night drunks headed past my house on a Saturday night. Their walk is not the only interesting motion of theirs. If disturbed in their webs they will begin vibrating wildly, seeming to dance. It does make them at times hard to track so I can see where this would work as a defensive maneuver.
Another great Linnaeus’ Legacy is up over at PodBlack Cat with killer entries that generated keywords in my filter of ants, sex, PhyloCode, ants, komodos, genebank hell, ants, fishmongers, genebank hell and your ass.
Ok, it a stretch, but this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, for their "discovery, expression and development" of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, providing scientists with a high resolution molecular level marker to track both inter and intra cellular processes. GFP has revolutionized scientist's ability to track cell division, gene expression, protein interactions, chromosome replication, transport pathways, organelle inheritance and more. GFP has also been used to create sensors which can be read from within living cells, reporting pH values and ion concentrations. All this coming from a sweet little protein first observed in a jellyfish.
You may ask "What's so special about GFP that makes it different from other fluorescent compounds?" What's really cool, and what makes GFP so useful as a marker is that it needs no other compounds or structures to cause its fluorescence. The chromophore is formed spontaneously from the structure of the protein and it only requires oxygen fluoresce. This means that the protein by itself can be placed into any organism and it will maintain it's fluorescent properties when it is expressed. The protein is also non-toxic and has been expressed in many organisms with no or minor physiological effects on the organism. The gene for GFP can also be combined with genes for proteins scientists want to study. This doesn't change the study protein's normal activity, yet the GFP remains fluorescent so the protein can be tracked by its fluorescence signature (400nm excitation peak -> sharp peak 505nm emission).
While the original GFP comes from the jellies, GFP-like proteins have been found in other cnidarians, primarily in the corals (anthozoa), allowing GFP monitoring with a range of spectral signatures to be used like with the red glowing cat below!
As a note one of the recipients, Osamu Shimomura, worked extensively on Cypridinaostracods, one of several bioluminescent ostracods. However they are not molluscs, contrary to what is in the Nobel Prize report (pdf).
If you haven't been following the Deep Sea News trio since the big move to the Discovery Channel, you have some catching up to do on some great posts. Kevin has kept the invertebrates in the spotlight there too, with posts such as the Deep Sea Quiz featuring a baby shrimp.
For the rest of the month the guys are featuring a daily series featuring the best deep-sea species. The series is off to a spectacularly spineless start with brachiopods of the deep and exotic shores. An immediate follow up with the Pig Butt Worm (Chaetopterus pugaporcinus) a post with great images of the Big Butt and a revealing admission by Miriam of the Oyster's Garter. They have completed an invert triple play with creeping crinoids including some great video!
I can't wait to see what is served up next in the series, there are still many great deep sea inverts to feature!
Welcome to the 24th edition of the Boneyard. The blog carnival for everything old. Zach gave a good carnival last month, but there was something missing. Something obviously out of place. After pondering about it all month I realize this blog, The Other 95%, was the only blog that submitted a palaeo-invertebrate entry out of 15 total links. 1 out of 15, that's 6.7%, meaning that the amount of vertebrate entries were 93.3%. I was shocked, flabbergasted! While this edition will also be laden with vertebrate-centric scriblings, I'll will even out the score and ensure that at least 93.3% of the links, images and video for this edition more accurately reflect the diversity of animal life. Enjoy!
Brokeback Invertebrate: a tale of two spineless palaeontologists out in the desert searching for fossil ammonites... alone.
Bond, Peter Bond that is, presents his palaeo-art for all the world to critique. There is also an interesting discussion on how a fossil skeleton that is 95% complete can have widely varying artistic renderings.
Zach over at When Pigs Fly Returns gets a slight invert bent discussing the weirdest dinosaur I've seen in recent memory. Check out its arms and learn what MYRMECOPHAGY means and what that (unfortunately) means for some poor invertebrate. Also, be sure to check out his virtual palaeo-art show!
In more recent historical news, Carl Zimmer wrote an excellent piece on the allure of big antlers. The extremely productive (despite what he might say of himself, his blog record speaks for itself) Brian Switek writes on horsies and shares a fascinating entry on "Professor Paleozoic" from the 19th century.
On the topic of palaeontological history, Over at Cryology and Co. there is a wonderful post on an extraordinary geologist, William Smith, the from 18th century. Smith wandered the hills and mapped out the geology and described such wonderful fossils as these below.
Traumador the Tyrannosaur gives an expose on Albertosaurus (or is it?) and a provides an interesting narrative on Joeseph Tyrrell.
Blastoids from Belgium!!! Where invertebrate palaeontology meets rockstardom.
Will Baird discusses the caste ecology of carboniferous times. In a very well-written essay taking a whole ecosystem approach, instead of focusing on a particular organism, and has some fascinating drawings of a land much foreign to our current time. Though hints of some of these amazing trees can still be found in strange areas such as southern Africa, Madagascar and other exotic locales.
Of course, saving the best for last. Todd Oakley gets the inverts major props for having an enormous phossilized phallus. Of course, he was naturally drawn to its large "eyes". Sure Todd ;)
There was also some good food for thought in the last edition of Linnaeus' Legacy, hosted here by Eric. Be sure to stay tuned for the 25th edition of the Boneyard at The Big Dinosaur Lie next month and remember to worship thy trilobite!
Kevin works at the Duke Marine Lab as a researcher at the Marine Conservation Molecular Facility studying the population genetics of vent fauna. He has an M.Sc. in Biology from Penn State where his research focused on marine invertebrate systematics and the community structure of chemoautotrophic foundation fauna at hydrothermal vents. Visit Kevin's personal website, where his CV lives, and follow him on Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, YouTube, Nature Network, Amazon, Research Blogging and Facebook.
Blogger With No Backbone
Eric worked in Satellite communications, computers and design for many years, but returned to school to pursue his early love of marine sciences. He is curently working on his Masters in Biological Oceanography at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point Campus. Eric also photo-blogs at Larval Images, has a personal site at Eclectic Echoes and his images are available on Flickr.
CEPHALOPODS HAVE TAKEN CONTROL of 
Life Photo Meme
