Many of my followers are not my students, and might even be actual adults! With the swift privatization of public education, our science department has no money for even the most basic supplies. I have set up a Donor’s Choose account where you can personally donate to specific projects. Please help support public science education! We need scientists!
Pieds d’Oiseaux - The Feet of Birds
You can clearly see the wide range of foot structures found in the Neornithes, and the intended usage of some of them is pretty obvious. When it comes to classifying the foot structure of birds, there are several characteristics that are noted, but the defining factor is the orientation of the digits (toes). Birds generally have four toes.
One term you might not know that’s important is the hallux - this is the innermost (“first”) digit of the foot, homologous to the big toe in humans. In birds, it often points backwards. It’s sometimes very well-developed (such as in perching birds), and sometimes so small it’s almost absent.
Anisodactyly (“unequal digit”) - This configuration is basically the standard. The three toes face forward, with the hallux facing backwards, so as to let the bird perch. This is present in songbirds and perching birds. Hawks, eagles, and falcons also have this configuration.
Syndactyly (“same digit”) - The third and fourth toes (outer and middle) are united for much of their length, and have a broad sole in common. You can see this in the kingfisher and the bee-eaters.
Zygodactyl (“yoke digit”) - The toes are arranged with digits 2 and 3 facing forwards, and digits 1 and 4 facing backwards. You can see this in parrots, woodpeckers, and roadrunners.
Heterodactyl (“different digit”) - Toes 1 and 2 are facing back, with 3 and 4 facing forward. This is only found in trogons.
Pamprodactyl (“Every digit”) - All four digits face forward, only found in swifts - this is a somewhat contested classification, as it’s believed that no birds use this as a primary configuration, even if swifts have been observed using it during their rare landings.
There are other useful terms when classifying birds by their foot structure, that have more to do with the type of bird itself, rather than the configuration of its bones. These classifications can include birds with more than one dactylous configuration.
Raptorial - Feet like the raptors and owls. These are strong, deeply cleft, with sturdy talons, meant for grasping and ripping.
Semipalmate - “Half-webbed” feet, where the anterior toes are only partially webbed. The Semipalmated Plover is a bird with these feet.
Totipalmate - “Fully webbed” feet, with all four toes united by one web - these are found on birds like cormorants.
Palmate - “Webbed” feet. These are your “basic” webbed feet - the three front toes are united, like in gulls and ducks. The fourth digit is not connected to the web.
Lobate - A swimming foot with a series of lobes along the toes. Found in birds like grebes.
Tableau Elementaire de l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux par Georges Cuvier. 1798.
Sequence DNA at home! Did your brother use your toothbrush? Is that your real father? Need to solve a crime or attempt to find rare mutations that could tell you more about your health? Try the MinION! A British company’s $900 miniature, portable, disposable DNA sequencer even has a USB to put that data right onto your computer for analysis.
These neat life-like mummies were made by Italian Giovanni Battista Rini in the early 1800s. Until now, nobody knew how he did it and they were mostly forgotten. Scientists ran them through a CT scan and chemically analyzed the tissues, and found that Rini “petrified” the body parts by bathing them in a cocktail of mercury and other heavy metals. The study on the heads is set to be released next week in the journal Clinical Anatomy. It’s like a 19th century Body World exhibit!
This is Joy Reidenberg. She is a comparative anatomist based out of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. She has done thousands of dissections on everything, and is the star of a new TV show called “Inside Nature’s Giants.” Here, she and veterinary scientist Mark Evans dissect a sperm whale that washed up on a British beach.
Watch the dissection here and see how excited she is! http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/02/06/science/100000001333363/inside-a-sperm-whale.html
A group of five captive dolphins in France have been recorded making whale-like noises while they are sleeping, even though they have only heard whale sounds as recordings during their daytime dolphin shows.
They sleep-talk! I really think it is terrible that we keep them in captivity. About 23,000 dolphins, porpoises and other small whales are killed in Japan every year, making it the largest scale slaughter of cetaceans in the world. Come on, people. Seriously?
Anathomia ossium corporis humani, the oldest surviving anatomical rendering of the human skeleton.
Apparently this caused an uproar in the science world after nearly eight centuries of repression by religious groups that maintained hegemony throughout the dark ages.
Hieronymus Brunschwig, 1497.
I just love these prints. Yesterday, I was standing in my backward watching my homing pigeon forage on the ground for seeds. Out of nowhere, a red tail hawk swooped down, grabbed the pigeon and flew away. R.I.P. Commander Squeaks.
This is Kristina Killgrove. She works at the University of North Carolina and is a biological anthropologist whose research primarily focuses on theorizing migration in antiquity and on understanding urban development and collapse through the analysis of human skeletal remains. She thinks that the best science story of 2011 is the sequencing of the Black Death genome.
Her blog: http://www.poweredbyosteons.org/
What other scientists think are the best stories of 2011: http://www.livescience.com/17668-scientists-studies-2011.html
Pigeons can perform abstract mathematical reasoning just as well as primates. I will add that to my super long list of why I think pigeons are totally amazing.
Read more here:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/science/pigeons-can-learn-higher-math-as-well-as-monkeys-study-suggests.html?_r=1&ref=science
The transition in human ancestry from Australopithecus, the genus that existed for 2 million years before Homo, has been enigmatic. A key fossil from near the time of this transition is Australopithecus sediba, which is represented by several specimens discovered in a cave in South Africa. Here is a video reconstruction of A. sediba skull, provided by Lee. R. Berger.
Read more/see more on A. sebida at :http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/sediba/
Time for bed! The oldest known bedding, sleeping mats made of mosquito-repellant evergreens that are about 77,000 years old, has been discovered in a South African cave. Microscopic analysis of the bedding suggested the inhabitants repeatedly refurbished the mats.
Read more in the Dec. 9th issue of Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1322.1.full
Wasps can recognize faces as well as apes can (out in Science today). The team taught paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus), whose faces sport distinctive brown and creamy markings, to associate certain wasp mugshots with safety and others with danger in an electrified maze. The wasps flew to safety quicker and with fewer errors when a kind face led the way, the team found. They lost that ability to distinguish when they plucked off the antennae. Weird!
This is Rachel Carson. She basically single-handedly jump started the American environmental movement. There are so many neat things about her life, her love of the coast, her mother’s love of the environment, her scriptwriting for radio shows…..She became increasingly alarmed about the use of synthetic chemical pesticides and changed her focus in order to warn the public. Her book Silent Spring (1962), asked the reader to visualize a spring without songbirds. Of course she was totally mocked and scorned by the government and the chemical industry, but she ended up testifying at a Senate meeting, and spurred on legislation that eventually led to ban of DDT and the formation of the EPA. She succumbed to a long fight against breast cancer in 1964.
The cartoon is a tribute to her legacy by Frenda Mann.
About that BPA stuff that we talked about in class today: A study from Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who ate one serving of canned food daily over the course of five days had significantly elevated levels (more than a tenfold increase!) of bisphenol-A. Most of the research on BPA, a so-called endocrine disruptor that can mimic the body’s hormones, has focused on its use in plastic bottles. Maybe what you choose to eat is something you might want to be concerned with?
Read more here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/bpa-lurks-in-canned-soups-and-drinks/?ref=health
And here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/10/toxic-people/duncan-text
