Category: Science & Space

This link, stolen from Pharyngula, displays the evolutionary timeline on one webpage. If you printed it out, it would be 135′ long.

Clicking to the right over and over again gives you a feeling on just how long 3.5 billion years is.

The NY Times today had an article entitled Wingless Gliders May Reveal the Origins of Insect Flight. I usually peruse these types of articles just to find out what’s going on that is newsworthy.

I think the author (Elizabeth Svoboda) had a lot of fun writing this. To summarize, Dr. Stephen Yanoviak of the University of Florida, Dr. Robert Dudley of the University of California, and Dr. Michael Kaspari of the University of Florida have been studying the gliding (flight) characteristics of a wingless ant in hopes of demonstrating what pressures drove wingless insects to evolve into winged ones.

Here are some of the quotes from the article:

When Stephen Yanoviak visited the jungles of Panama in 1998 to study how ants forage, he found himself with some unexpected downtime. “Out of boredom, I started flicking some ants off of a tree,” he said.

and

The scientists’ hunch that the ants’ movements, not their body shapes, chiefly dictated their gliding paths was confirmed when they started chopping off appendages to see if the insects could still soar.

The ants showed remarkable resilience. They coasted to controlled landings after multiple leg amputations and even after removal of their abdomens, which ordinarily comprise 30 percent of their body weight. When the researchers covered the insects’ eyes with dots of white nail polish, however, they sank to the forest floor like stones.

It really sounds like these guys had fun doing this research!

The results will be published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

In this month’s Scientific American, they have a short blurb at the front speaking about lateralization of animals, which in humans manifests as right or left handedness. Here’s the link. I have no idea how long it will work, so good luck.

The studies that it was covering were trying to determine why animals developed lateralization in the first place (not only humans, but chimps and fish are right- or left-sided), from an evolutionary standpoint.

The main theory says that better cooperation leads to better group survival, i.e. all of the fish swimming to the left in reaction to a predator.

Of course the main theory on why lefties exist is that group lateralization might increase survival through cooperation but it also increases competition. Therefore lefties make better predators.

So, next time all you lefties are bumping elbows with someone at the table, just lean over and bite them and explain that it’s your survival instinct.

January 26th, 2006 is the 20th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster. Seven astronauts lost their lives. Today, we remember them.

My family and I had lived in Satellite Beach, Florida for nine years until the summer of 1985. We saw the first Space Shuttle launch, Voyager I and II, and everything in between. We moved to New Hampshire 6 months before Challenger blew up. I’m very lucky because I did not have to personally watch it explode overhead, and I would have been watching the launch.

In a few days, we will remember Columbia from just three years ago. Once again, I lucked out because I had planned to waken in time to watch the shuttle go overhead during its reentry. Thankfully, I slept through it as NASA believes the main breakup occurred almost directly over the city I was living in at the time, Lubbock, TX.

Hopefully, I will no longer need to be thankful for any close brushes with aerospace disaster. NASA needs to develop a more dependable crew module for ascent and descent; one which is intelligently conceived and prosecuted, unlike the space shuttle program. A program with a lot more bang for our buck.