Reviews
Dinosaur detective stories
“Being a paleontologist is like being a coroner except all the witnesses are dead and all the evidence has been left out in the rain for 65 million years” Mike Brett-Surman, 1994 I am very much for palaeontology and the enthusiasm for the science today but there was a time when even the mighty dinosaurs were […]
The not so black and white story of why the zebra got its stripes
Why are zebra black and white? I would hazard a guess your answer is camouflage, and you would be right… well, mostly. I would then bet you got the beast from which the zebra is hiding wrong. While the black and white stripes might disrupt outline of a zebra in the eyes of an ambushing lion […]
All the better to see you with
A recent discovery of a large eye found by a beachcomber in Florida initiated a flurry of internet speculation of its mysterious owner. The contenders for ownership included colossal squid, thresher sharks and a range of mysterious sea creatures both real and imagined. While the owner of the tennis ball sized eye has recently been attributed to a swordfish, it […]
The tree on the web
Visualising the tree of life is a challenge for even the most artistically attuned in the scientific community. The problem is the sheer number of species that we need to represent, literally millions. But I think the latest attempt meets the challenge. The developers of OneZoom, the name of the new approach, argue that we […]
What did what to what? Finding causality in chaos.
A new paper has been published in Science by George Sugihara and colleagues, which is an immediate contender for the most insightful paper I’ve ever read. In the paper they outline a new method, which they dub ‘Convergent Cross Mapping’ (CCM), for detecting causality between variables using time series data. Not only does CCM allow […]
“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect”
I spoke before of how to use mathematics to convey an idea in biology. Here, I’ll take a different tack and discuss a paper in which the author makes his argument with naked English. The author in question is Nicholas Humphrey who in his famous paper ‘The social function of the intellect’ draws a wonderful […]
Thunder lizards + methane = climate change
Mathematics is the language of science and when it comes to biology this is no exception. It’s only when you start researching for yourself that you realise how useful a skill it is. Consider, for example, the mathematical approach that Graeme Ruxton and collaborators bring to their research in ecology and evolution. Ruxton has addressed […]
Hot heads lead to hot flashes: the evolution of menopause
A new study has been published online in Ecology Letters by Mirkka Lahdenperä and colleagues, which suggests that competition between grandmothers and their daughters-in-law may explain the evolution of menopause. The study used a 200-year dataset of births, deaths and residency patterns in pre-industrial Finland to show that competition between unrelated females of different generations […]