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Inspiring Science

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Inspiring Science

Tag Archives: nature

What Drove the Great Dying?

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by sedeer in Evolution

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

biology, evolution, extinction, nature, Popular science, science

Earth (image by NASA)As long ago as forever and as far away as home, life was withering away wherever you looked. At the end of the Permian, around 250 million years ago, the creatures of Earth were devastated by an extinction that outstripped any seen before or since. Marine species suffered the most — 96% of them died out — but even among their terrestrial cousins, seven out of every ten species were lost. For countless generations, life struggled towards recovery, but it took 10 million years to rebuild the lost diversity. The cause of the catastrophe has long puzzled scientists; global warming, massive volcanos, ocean acidification, and widespread oceanic oxygen depletion have all been implicated. In a paper appearing in Science, researchers from the UK, Germany and Austria showed that increased carbon released into the atmosphere eventually acidified the oceans just as the Permian extinction reached its peak; comparing their findings with how quickly our societies release carbon, they reveal an alarming difference together with a sobering insight.

Read the rest at Accumulating Glitches…

Ref
Clarkson MO, Kasemann SA, Wood RA, Lenton TM, Daines SJ, Richoz S, Ohnemueller F, Meixner A, Poulton SW, & Tipper ET (2015). Ocean acidification and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Science (New York, N.Y.), 348 (6231), 229-32 PMID: 25859043

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The forgotten life of plants

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Plants

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

biology, botany, Communication, DNA, epigenetics, Garden, Herbivore, memory, nature, Plant, plants, Popular science, science

Peter Newell's illustraion of The Garden of Live Flowers (Image credit: Wikimedia commons)In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice wanders into a garden with flowers that can talk — the “garden of Live Flowers”.  Of course, all plants are alive, but here the flowers are called “live” because they can talk.  One of the greatest examples of human arrogance might be our attitude towards plants.  We treat plants as objects, as part of the background, as mere things without any agency.  We tend to forget that they’re dynamic, complex living creatures that react and respond to their environment — just in unfamiliar ways and on a different timescale.  Continue reading →

Do species really exist?

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog, Evolution, Science communication

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

biology, Charles Darwin, evolution, nature, science, Science communication, Species

I mentioned a while ago that I’d been invited to write about evolution for Nature’s Scitable blog network.  The network finally relaunched this week and my new group blog, Accumulating Glitches, went live earlier today!  Together with Sarah Jane Alger, I’ll be writing about how evolution works and the amazing world it has created — “exploring the grandeur of evolution”.  We’re planning to post every Monday and I hope you’ll join us there — we’ve got lots of exciting stories to share!  For now, here’s a taste of the inaugural post:

Faced with the rich diversity of living beings around us, humans have proven unable to resist the temptation to try to organize and categorize them. We have a natural tendency to classify things, a habit that’s deeply rooted in our cognition and use of language. Our brain excels at recognizing patterns (and thus finding meaning where it doesn’t exist), an ability that allows us to interact with the world using names — like “chair” — that we might be hard-pressed to properly explain. In fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to define even a seemingly straightforward word like “chair” in a way that would let us recognize everything that should be included (from office chairs and recliners to stools and wheelchairs) but nothing that shouldn’t (like tables, tree stumps, or other things we might decide to sit on).

Despite these difficulties, we’ve been classifying organisms throughout the history of human thought, from Aristotle’s division between plants and animals to modern scientific nomenclature. The modern classification system is based on grouping organisms into units called ‘species’; species, in turn, group together into a larger units called genus, family, order, and so on through the nested hierarchy of life. What make a species, though? Why should a particular group of organisms be thought of as a unit and given a distinct name? How do we decide which organisms make up a species?

Read the rest over at Accumulating Glitches…

The wasp and the cockroach: a zombie story

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by sedeer in Arthropods, Hymenoptera, Insects

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Ampulex, behaviour, biology, Emerald cockroach wasp, manipulation, nature, parasite, Parasitism, Parasitoid, Parasitoid wasp, Popular science, science

Ampulex compressa, commonly called Emerald Cockroach Wasp. Pictured in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The world of parasites is full of incredible tales of manipulation and mind-control as these creatures twist their hosts to their needs.  Ever since I first heard of parasitoid wasps, I’ve been drawn to them by a delicious mixture of schadenfreude and intellectual fascination.  (Technically, parasitoids are slightly different from parasites, but that’s not important right now.)  Some of the examples of manipulation by parasitoid wasps are just wonderfully, horribly macabre.  I briefly mentioned the emerald cockroach wasp in a previous post; this time I’ll give a few other examples and explain the emerald wasp more thoroughly.  Hopefully I’ll manage to share some of my excitement about these amazing creatures, which made Darwin once write: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a group of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or the cat should play with mice.”
Continue reading →

Words of science: crepuscular

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by sedeer in Language, Words of Science

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

crepuscular, dawn, dusk, etymology, nature, Popular science, science, twilight, Words of Science

Spider at twilight. (Photo credit: Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk)Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules.  Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.  In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors.  Today’s word is crepuscular.  [Previous words of science were petrichor, alluvium, and nychthemeron]
Continue reading →

Words of science: alluvium

19 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by sedeer in Language, Words of Science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alluvial fan, Alluvium, deposit, environment, etymology, flood, nature, Popular science, science, Words of Science

Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules.  Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.  In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped (or should escape!) the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors.  Today’s word is alluvium.  [Previous words: petrichor]
Continue reading →

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All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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