Credit: Shelley Batts, University of Michigan
New research this week has revealed that pigeons know precisely what they’re doing when they poop on people’s heads.
Okay, not really. But the intelligence gap between people and non-human animals is getting narrower all the time, and pigeons are the latest species to demonstrate that in a lab.
Edward Wasserman, an experimental psychology professor at the University of Iowa, has been leading research showing that both pigeons and baboons can determine that two or more items are the same or different — a skill the famous, turn-of-the-20th Century psychologist William James called the very backbone of human thinking. If you have two pennies in your left hand and a nickel and a dime in your right hand, for example, you can correctly report that the two coins in your left hand are the same and the two coins in your right hand are different.
Baboons and pigeons can do that sort of thing, too.
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Self portrait by Carl Buell (left), who also creates serious scientific illustrations and Darwin portraits.
Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of his famous book “The Origin of Species,” has riveted the science community. It’s fun to read major publications, like the journal Nature, and realize they’ve been planning their stories for ages. Social networks including Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with the celebration. It’s like an Olympic Games in science writing. It’s a party.
Darwin’s idea was revolutionary, to be sure — and fairly simple. He observed that various animal forms, or species, seemed to have descended from common ancestors and that their success or failure was determined by their fitness, through a biological culling called natural selection that happens on long time scales. In the two intervening decades, fossil evidence has poured in to support Darwin’s ideas and continues to do so, though the puzzle is nowhere near complete. Genetic evidence has revealed that evolution is not as simple as it first appeared: it’s complicated and nuanced. Also throughout the two intervening decades, people who adhere to strict beliefs about religious creation have bristled at evolution and its ever-mounting scientific support. Some people, like fundamentalist Christians in America, are strict deniers. On the other end are scientist-atheists, who seem increasingly annoyed with the religious holdouts. This ongoing culture war is well documented elsewhere.
Personally, I like the middle.
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Motor neurons associated with the mouse interscutularis muscle, which connects the base of the ear to the middle of the skull. Credit: Ju Lu, Harvard University
Mostly, I just wanted to share this image because I think it’s beautiful, especially once you know what it represents. This is the branched network of nerves that communicate with a small muscle in the head of a mouse, connecting the base of the ear to the top of the skull.
Researchers want to diagram neural networks throughout animals’ bodies, but the task is daunting. So far progress has been made in roundworms and earthworms, but the complexity and variability of the nervous system is proving formidable when it comes to making maps in mammalian subjects.
Ju Lu, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard, is lead author a new study that started small, by diagramming a mouse muscle innervated by an average of just 14 nerve fibers. Even that was a lot of work.
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Date posted: February 10, 2009
Written by: Anne Minard
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Comet Lulin, courtesy of Paolo Candy
If you’re in a part of the country where winter’s chill has abated, you might want to indulge a backyard glimpse at the sky in the coming weeks. Comet Lulin, a strange new visitor to the inner planets, has probably been jostled from its home at the outer edges of the solar system, far beyond Pluto and a third of the way to the nearest star.
“It’s one of these comets that has been out there probably for several billion years,” said NASA astronomer Donald Yeomans, who took a few minutes to tell me how to best glimpse Lulin in the coming weeks. He said Lulin was likely “preturbed by either a passing star or gravitational tugs by the galaxy itself,” in order to get pushed close enough to orbit the Sun.
Later this month, Lulin will approach Earth closely enough to be visible with the naked eye where city lights don’t obscure the view. After that, it will buzz the Sun, figuratively speaking, and then travel out to the far-flung reaches of its orbit, not returning for millions of years.
If Lulin is indeed a pristine comet (never before scorched by the Sun), the sublimation of Lulin’s icy head should make for a bright spectacle.
Worth setting the alarm for, I’d say. And Mom, don’t worry about not having that new telescope yet. This one will be easy to spot with binoculars, and possibly even the naked eye.
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Displaying distinct coat color phenotypes, these two wolf pups from Yellowstone National Park's Agate Creek pack were born in the same litter resulting from the pairing of a black female with a gray male. Image courtesy of Daniel Stahler/NPS
At first, last week’s announcement that black coats in wolves come from interbreeding with dogs didn’t interest me that much. I have a long-time fondness for wolves, and I don’t particularly care what color they are. But from a gee-whiz biology perspective, the finding actually is pretty interesting. Also, the news was a chance to take a trip down memory lane, and check in on the very first environmental issue that I truly cared about: wolf reintroduction. It’s nice to learn that wolves are getting along all right in some parts of the country. Still, too many wolves are getting shot.
First, the science.
Tovi Anderson, a genetics graduate student in Stanford University’s School of Medicine, is lead author on the study, published in Science last week. Anderson and her team analyzed DNA from 150 Yellowstone National Park wolves. They found that a novel gene variant from dogs is responsible for black coat color and was transferred to wolves through mating.
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