Brandon Keim › Comments

(via Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Fish. What’s The Solution? : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR) - Brandon Keim

“Humans cultivate more than food, producing clothing, construction materials, fuel, drugs, and ornaments. A population of male spotted bowerbirds Ptilonorhynchus (Chlamydera) maculata uses fruits of Solanum ellipticum (Figure 1A), not as food but as important components of their sexual display [2,3]. Here, we show that males indirectly cultivate plants bearing these fruit — the first example of cultivation of a non-food item by a species other than humans.” - Current Biology - Male spotted bowerbirds propagate fruit for use in their sexual display - Brandon Keim

““I Wanted to Predict Elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper” — A Balanced Survey on Election Prediction using Twitter Data” - [1204.6441] - Brandon Keim

(via Gerren Lamson · Multi-discipline Designer · lllustrator · Austin, TX) - Brandon Keim

“Males of the spider Pisaura mirabilis offer prey items as nuptial gifts to females… Field data reveal that gift-carrying males are frequent in nature (40% of captured males), and that all gifts contain fresh arthropod prey. Gift mass was positively correlated with the longest diameter of the gift. Thus, males do not appear to ‘cheat’ by inflating their gifts with inedible items, air or loosely wrapped silk.” - ScienceDirect.com - Animal Behaviour - Gift carrying in the spider Pisaura mirabilis: nuptial gift contents in nature and effects on male running speed and fighting success - Brandon Keim

“Any politician—Christian or otherwise—who uses the Christian scriptures to justify wanton neglect of natural resources needs to read the book they use as a weapon to defend their short-sighted policies.”” - Santorum Obliquely Suggests Obama Worships Earth, Not God - The Daily Beast - Brandon Keim

(via Picture of the Day: The East Coast at Night with the Aurora Borealis in the Distance - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic) - Brandon Keim

http://www.floridawildlifecorridor.org/blog... - Brandon Keim

Even free-ranging sharks have friends (or at least a social network.) via ScienceDirect - Animal Behaviour : Evidence of social communities in a spatially structured network of a free-ranging shark species - Brandon Keim

“Experiment shows that art students prefer abstract art to monkey art in about two-third of the cases. Since the number is above 50%, some argue that abstract art is different and better than animal art. I compare this result with figure skating competitions, where on average 73% of judges prefer gold medalist to silver medalist. This means that the difference between abstract artists and animal artists is less than the difference between gold and silver medalists.” - [1112.1669] Monkeys get a silver in Abstract Art Olympics - Brandon Keim

(via World’s first night-flowering orchid discovered) - Brandon Keim

“They found that 4 hours of exposure to a mixture composed largely of primary pollutants (nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and 55 hydrocarbons) at environmentally relevant concentrations changed the expression of 19 genes, compared with 709 altered genes following similar exposure to a mixture of primary and secondary pollutants (including ozone, formaldehyde, and peroxyacetyl nitrate).” - Environmental Health Perspectives: Photochemical Finish: Assessing the Genomic Impact of Secondary Air Pollutants - Brandon Keim

(via The Associated Press: Whales off Calif. coast draw crowds, warning) - Brandon Keim

“Facial composites made by combining individual faces are judged to be attractive, and more attractive than the majority of individual faces. The composites possess both symmetry and averageness of features. Facial averageness may reflect high individual protein heterozygosity and thus an array of proteins to which parasites must adapt.” - Human facial beauty: Averageness, symmetry, and parasite resistance - Brandon Keim

(via Yukon Delta, Alaska : Image of the Day) - Brandon Keim

(via Nova Scotia Archives / Flickr - Photo Sharing!) - Brandon Keim

Racial Disparities In Databanking of DNA Profiles : This paper, after outlining the legal growth and transformation of DNA databanks, examines how various steps in our criminal justice system create and magnify racial disparities, and how the law makes it nearly impossible to effectively address the problem. - Brandon Keim

Władysław Podkowiński, “Frenzy of Exultations” (nixed photo accompaniment for story on female orgasm.) - Brandon Keim

“A number of reproductive characteristics of termites differ substantially from those of other insects. Polyandry appears to be mostly absent in termites and lifetime pair formation is achieved early in life, after an initial dispersal flight. The consequent absence of postcopulatory sexual selection coincides with the loss of a number of reproductive traits, such as elaborate male and female genitalia, flagellated sperm and seminal fluid-producing male accessory glands. The absence of sexually selected, female-harming male traits suggests that the interests of males and females are well aligned in most termites, fostering the evolution of kings, males with life expectancies comparable to those of queens and the ability to supply sperm continuously. Comparative work on mating system evolution between the diplodiploid termites and the haplodiploid hymenopteran social insects can be used to explain the influence of kin selection.” - Animal Behaviour : The mating biology of termites: a... - Brandon Keim

A random, tiny gem from “Natural History Note: A Novel Terrestrial Fish Habitat inside Emergent Logs.” Reports of new habitats for a major group of organisms are rare. Fishes display diverse adaptations for temporary (amphib- ious) existence on land, but to our knowledge, none have ever been reported regularly living inside emergent logs. Here, we show that the mangrove killifish, Kryptolebias marmoratus, a species previously known to emerse (leave the water) regularly, is now known to emerse and aggregate in large numbers inside decaying mangrove logs that have been “galleried” by terrestrial insects. This behavior has now been documented in both Belize, Central America, and Florida, U.S.A., populations and represents the first known case of fishes entering terrestrial woody material. - Brandon Keim

Twin reduction abortions: Why do they trouble pro-choicers - Brandon Keim

“And the more I think about it, the more I think utopianist future-hucksters like Ray Kurzweil are part of the problem; the more I feel that Singularitarianism (much like some other emerging cults of the atemporal and altermodern End Times) is a refuge for privileged intellectuals who can’t face the future without believing they get some sort of personal get-out-of-Apocalypse-free card; the more I think that science fiction and other speculative forms of communication (design fiction, essays, mixed media, whatever) have great potential to help us understand where we’re going, but that the potential is wasted by that same desperate search for a personal escape hatch with the phrase “I’m all right, Jack” stencilled on it by some notoriously anonymous marginal celebrity street artist…” - The future of Futurismic | Blog | Futurismic - Brandon Keim

“So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba’s plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.” - Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent - Brandon Keim

Re: “When people are starving, genetically modified food starts to look better…” Not to support a misguided “Death Before GMOs!” line, or give cover to public health flat-earthers, but I think — at least generally, perhaps in this case — more attention should be paid to the nuances of GE concerns, and what specific strains are under discussion. Are some people in Kenya resisting purely because they have primitive, irrational fears about its safety? Might they also have concerns related to food security and agricultural self-reliance, and be afraid of becoming dependent on foreign seed monopolies? Who made the corn that will be sent to Kenya and what are the traits? Will local corn varieties be modified, or — as in Haiti — are western companies sending western varieties with little thought for local conditions? And as a corrupt governmental sell-off of corn reserves rather than poor yields seems to be the major problem here, might some people have a vested interest in using anti-GMO... - Brandon Keim

Females - Brandon Keim

“Precopulatory mate guarding (PCMG) is generally assumed to be costly for both sexes. However, males may gain by displaying long-lasting mate guarding under strong male-male competition. Surprisingly, the potential for females to benefit from being held by males has been largely overlooked in previous studies. In Gammarus pulex, an amphipod crustacean, PCMG lasts several weeks, yet females are described as bearing only cost from such male mating strategy.” - Does foreplay matter? Gammarus pulex females may benefit from long-lasting precopulatory mate guarding. - Brandon Keim

"Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling" by @maggiekb1 - Brandon Keim

“In contrast to the classical view of development as a preprogrammed and deterministic process, recent studies have demonstrated that stochastic perturbations of highly non-linear systems may underlie the emergence and stability of biological patterns.” - PLoS ONE: Floral Morphogenesis: Stochastic Explorations of a Gene Network Epigenetic Landscape - Brandon Keim

Thoughts on the new search engine/memory study, as commented on by Jonah Lehrer: I think the researchers involved in this are overly sanguine. Not in a way that compromises the research — it’s sound work — but whether and how “online transactive” memory compares to “social transactive” memory is entirely speculative. No head-to-head comparisons have been run, and even social transactive memory is a poorly quantified phenomenon based on a handful of couples studies. Moreover, it would be appropriate to speculate that, even if online and social transactive memory are equivalent in quality, quantity could still matter: I.e., what happens if social transactive almost entirely replaces internal? And then there’s the question of how social and online transactive memory translate into other cognitive processes not measured by so-far-preliminary investigations: How do they affect, for better or worse, insight and creativity and other forms of learning? The latter question is especially... - Brandon Keim

“If you really want to know how hot it is, head to Michael Rausch’s farm outside of Wichita, where for the first time in his 57 years, he is wearing shorts as he walks his fields and milks his cows.” - Summertime, and the Livin’ Isn’t Easy, Especially in Kansas - NYTimes.com - Brandon Keim