Recent Posts
Check out this really stunning video, everyone:
Be sure to check out UppruniTegundanna's channel on YouTube, from which this awesomeness comes. It's truly amazing. You'll find there some of the most hair-raising, spine-tingling, haunting montages of natural history, cosmology and biology you're ever likely to encounter. Some of the videos are literally enough to bring you to tears. Watching them, I've had feelings that a religious person would surely describe as spiritual and transcendental.
Spread the word, please. His channel is utterly under-viewed.
To anyone who was reading this website, I'm going to post lots of new and great stuff this year.
Watch this space.
I was just thinking the other day about extraterrestrials, and what they might be like. If metazoans (animals) have evolved on other worlds, they will have evolved to adapt to conditions at least somewhat different to those on Earth (though the variety of conditions in which animals can live on our planet is so varied that this by itself might not produce such interesting differences by itself as we at first think. After all, animals here have adapted to all sorts of local conditions, from pressure almost 100 times greater than that of the atmosphere we breathe in, to great extremes of temperature, to no light). I'm willing to bet, if it could ever be confirmed, that aliens won't look weird or 'freaky' so much as ridiculous. Just take a look at some of the animals on Earth. The angler fish, the giraffe, the platypus, and the turkey. In fact, I think that aliens almost necessarily have to appear to be ridiculous to us. Most life on this planet would, to someone who had never seen it before. So it seems to stand to reason that, since we have never seen extraterrestrial animals, a lot of them are going to look comical.
September 25th 2010 14:15
I want everyone reading this to do something. I want you to look at your hand for a moment, and think about the following:
Every atom in your hand was once part of a star. Not only a star, but several stars, which exploded and spilled their enriched innards into space, to be reprocessed in other stars. Stars are the engines of creation, the furnaces that produce new types of atoms. Those atoms became part of a planet, which, through a long and tortuous series of events, became hospitable enough to generate, in some corner of itself, the phenomenon we call life. Those atoms, in your hand: those atoms have seen worlds that predate all our dreams, that extend back in time to unspeakable antiquity. Those atoms, if they could speak, would tell you about worlds where the sky was red, where the oceans, which were green or frozen white, were filled with trillions of denizens of an early form of life, a life that knew no morality or any conception of itself. A world in which reason makers didn't exist, but where reason did: in the imperative to survive and reproduce. This unconscious reason, this archaeo-purpose, as Richard Dawkins has called it, is why the myriad and bountiful garden that inhabits this thin sliver of rock exists, on a planet that has circled around a star for over four and a half million centuries. These atoms would tell you about worlds that were punctuated by cataclysms, and that laid the foundations for new flowerings. They would tell you about the majestic beasts we call dinosaurs, and how their dynasty reigned for six hundred times longer than our own species has roamed on this Earth. For these atoms were themselves part of the dinosaurs, and the wasps, and the fish and the seas and the clouds. Those atoms: they travelled through the body of a mother Allosaurus, through the body of an ancient spider, and later an early hominin who looked up at the night sky and, perhaps, had a fleeting sense that there were other worlds beyond our own. Those atoms would tell you about countless sunsets, some polluted by the debris from a collision with an extraterrestrial object. And they would tell you about the countless beings who came and went, and how they changed
[ Click here to read more ]
Hi people, I'll be back soon. Just finishing up on my thesis 
A living cell has been developed that is run entirely by a synthetic genome. Previously, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute had transplanted the genome from one cell into that of another; now, they are another step closer to developing a truly artificial cell. The latest breakthrough has already stirred controversy, with some critics warning that the technology - which has a wide range of environment, medical and industrial applications - could be used by terrorists to produce bioweapons. There is also a risk that the cells could proliferate out of control and evolve in unanticipated ways.
Read more about this latest news at BBC Science.
You might remember the movie Jurassic Park, where Dilophosaurus was depicted as spitting a poisonous black goo onto its prey. There was no evidence that this genus actually had such a capacity; it was added into the movie as an interesting possibility. Now, it appears that at least one dinosaur did use poison.
Sinornithosaurus, which lived in what is now China, exhibits fang like teeth similar to those of snakes, with grooves in them that might have channelled poison. Researchers also say that Sinornithosaurs had a pocket in the upper jaw that might have housed the poison
[ Click here to read more ]
Avatar is a big budget movie produced with state-of-the-art technology (in fact, Cameron had to wait for several years for the technology to catch up to his vision). Well, the result is stunning. Avatar takes place on Pandora, a moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system (the moon is fictitious, but the star system is real. At about 4.4 light years away, it is the closest system to our own). Pandora is home to many strange animals and plants. What's great about the film, though, is that these organisms are mechanically feasible, in the sense that such creatures could actually exist and could move the way that they are depicted. Apparently, Cameron hired real biologists to act as consultants for the creature designs, and the effect is wonderful. The plants, too, with their bioluminescence and reaction to physical stimuli. Pandora is utterly believable. Thing is, these organisms might well have evolved on Earth if initial starting conditions had been slightly different. It's not only that the Pandoran organisms are filling niches we would recognise of terrestrial organisms, but are rather similar to the organisms we have on our planet. The Thanator, the giant predator in the film, is quite like a lion, say, except much larger of course (it also has six legs, as do the other animals. I suspect that there's nothing particularly special about the quadruped configuration on Earth; it could well represent a "frozen accident" that was subsequently inherited by thousands of species. And insects, you'll note, do have six legs. Why not four? Or eight - which arachnids have. Or more, which is the case with centipedes and millipedes. We need not suppose that every quadraped was selected to have four legs, only that certain features of embryology constrain them to having four legs. My money is on the number of appendages being relatively variable wherever complex multiceullar life has evolved).
The fearsome Thanator, prime predator on Pandora. Image from www.pandorapedia.com
[ Click here to read more ]
Sorry everyone, I've been busy lately. I'll be back soon.
|
|
|
Add Comments
Read More
Comment by LuisC
on Darwin's 200th Anniversary
Biology Issues
I'm currently reading "Scientists confront Intelligent Design and Creationism". My personal favourite would have to be "The Ancestor's Tale".