Genetic mutation makes those brown eyes blue

Check out this article from MSNBC about the origin of blue eyes.  

Lotusland

To get you excited about the upcoming trip to Lotusland here are two articles about the gardens and their founder, Ganna Walska, Forget About Rubies – She Wanted Cycads from the Christian Science Monitor and What The Diva Wrought, published in the Wall Street Journal. This last article is hosted at the Lotusland website so click the links on the left for further information.

I unfortunately started a false rumor about Nicholas Cage being a cycad collector. This, of course, is a preposterous idea. Brad Pitt and David Bowie however are well-known cycad collectors (according to the first article linked to above).

Don't look now

One of the dangers in biology is to look at some characteristic and assume what forces led to its evolution without ever actually testing that assumption.

Take the chameleon. It's pretty obvious that nifty color changing ability helps camouflage them allowing them to be both protected from predators and to catch more prey. Right? Well, no according to research published this week. Evidence suggests that the color change is for communication not camouflage.

'No one has ever shown that the chameleon's special ability provides camouflage, says Hanlon, who reviewed 100 years of scientific literature on the subject.'

REU

As you may be aware NSF has a program whereby researchers can obtain additional money to involve undergradutes in research (Research Experience for Undergraduates program or REU). Right now is when these are starting to be advertised and people are looking to find bright and motivated students for the coming summer. I have received two e-mails today where people are looking for undergrads - one looking for 8 students to work in Yosemite and the other a more organized program on Catalina. If you are interested in a research position for the coming summer then send me an e-mail and I'll forward on everything I receive to you.

Genetic testing

The field of genetic testing is really being shaken up now that the first companies are offering a more complete DNA analysis (not sequencing yet, but that can only be a matter of time). The company I was thinking of when I mentioned it was 23and me (is it just me or is that a very uncatchy name?). They have a fairly informative website that you might enjoy browsing as long as you remember they are in the business to sell a product. The bottomline, which you'll have to search around to find, is that they read 550,000 single nucelotide polymorphisms that are spread across your entire genome. This is a small fraction of the 10 million SNPs that are estimated to be in the human genome.
The cost is $999, which is far from cheap, but is in the range of pretty standard consumer products such as tv's etc rather than say the cost of a car. Like many products the cost is likely to drop.
Once the cost falls how long before insurance companies offer discounts for customers with the 'good genes'? Which is just a different way of discriminating against people with the bad genes...
Welcome to the future.
If you haven't seen the movie Gattaca, well, you should.

Microbial Genes in the Human Genome

I think I might have sent you this link in an e-mail if you took the Biology colloquium last quarter, but I just realized it is well worth another look for our class because it considers the incorporation of microbial genes into the human genome.

In a bid to demystify the somewhat arcane style of scientific writing, the journal Science has selected a number of scientific articles from that journal and annotated them, illustrating how different parts of each article embody the scientific method. This is part of the 'Keystones of Science project'. The paper also has a nice pop-up glossary if you hold your mouse over any of the green terms.

External testicles

There was an interesting article in New Scientist magazine last year on Evolution's greatest mistakes. The article covers seven areas of human biology, plus an additional 15 in list form, where evolution has made the best of a bad job, and where it would be hard to argue that any 'intelligent' design' has been going on. Unfortunately reading the article requires a subscription to the magazine. From a UCSB computer, or using a proxy server, open a new tab and click the 'off-campus access' link on the main UCSB library website and login. After you've done that you can try clicking here (or right click here now to copy this link location).

If the direct link doesn't work then after you are logged in go to Electronic Journals, search for New Scientist and use the e-links to find the August 11, 2007 issue. The article is on page36.

Oh, and External Testicles are number 10 on the list.

In the interest of academic debate and in the spirit of fair use, I copy an extract below.

A particularly interesting topic for this class, after our lecture on the origin of the eukaryotes, is the discussion of mitochondrial DNA. Bottom line: If you wanted to build humans to last, mitochondria are the last place you'd put DNA.

'Inside every one of our cells are dozens of little sacs called mitochondria, in which sugars are "burned" to produce the energy that powers the cells. The process also produces highly damaging molecules called free radicals, so the interior of a mitochondrion is hardly the safest place for vital DNA - and yet it is home to the genes for 13 crucial mitochondrial proteins.

It's a crazy design: like keeping the repair manual for a steam engine by the furnace, where it inevitably becomes charred and unreadable. The slow loss of function as mutations accumulate in mitochondrial DNA may be the main cause of ageing and, some believe, of many age-related diseases, from diabetes to Alzheimer's.

The DNA is there because of our evolutionary history. Mitochondria are the remnants of a once independent bacterium that formed a symbiotic alliance with our cells around 2 billion years ago. Over time, many of the bacterium's original genes have been lost or jumped to the cell nucleus, but human mitochondria still retain 13 genes.

Anti-ageing research is already exploring ways of moving the remaining genes to the safety of the nucleus. It will not be easy. The 13 genes cannot simply be moved to the nuclear genome, because then the 13 proteins will be made outside the mitochondria where they are needed. A solution might be to get the mRNA recipes for proteins delivered to the mitochondria, so the genes reside in the nucleus but the proteins are still made inside the mitochondria.'

Red Queen Redux

Just when it looked like the red queen hypothesis was gaining the upper hand as an explanation for the prevalence of sex across the animal and plant kingdoms it has started to struggle to explain why species have so much sex. Why not reproduce asexually most of the time to get the benefits of that strategy and throw in a little sexual reproduction here and there for variety (literally)?

There's a nice essay by Matt Ridley on the PBS Evolution website that discusses the issues. The website has some nice resources apart from this.

Here's a BBC report from a paper in 2004 which takes the issue further and asks whether the Red Queen hypothesis can really explain why we have so much sex...

And to bring us up to date here's a link to a report on a paper from 2006 that argues that the Red Queen hypothesis does just fine if we take into account the maternal transmission of parasites.

Pedigree collapse and bicycles as dating technology

If you consider inbreeding between humans it is clear that to avoid it your ancestors would need to be unrelated. But in this case your ancestors simply get more and more numerous the further and further back you go.

'Everybody has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on back through time, with the number of ancestors doubling in each generation. Go back 30 generations and the number of ancestors tops one billion. Eventually we arrive at a time when we have more ancestors than there could have been people in the world. How can this be?'

Fortunately we can trust Cecil Adams to give us the Straight Dope on this subject. Now that you appreciate the issue you can appreciate this table which shows some stunning amounts of pedigree collapse in European Royal families. At some level of course we are ALL inbred - geneticists estimate that everyone on earth is at least a 50th cousin to everyone else. (Although we are all much more closely related to Kevin Bacon....)

There's another interesting article on the subject here.

"In a population of between three and five hundred people, after six generations or so there are only third cousins or closer to marry. During most of human history, people have lived in small, isolated communities of about that size, and have in fact probably been closer to the genetic equivalent of first cousins, because of their multiple consanguinity. In nineteenth-century rural England, for instance, the radius of the average isolate, or pool of potential spouses, was about five miles, which was the distance a man could comfortably walk twice on his day off, when he went courting- his roaming area by daylight. Parish registers bear this out. Then the bicycle extended the radius to twentyfive miles. This was a big shakeup."

I never really thought of the bicycle as a major advancement in dating technology before.

Giardia and you

Hmmm, I just got totally confused and posted this on the blog for my disease class (it is disease related after all) and then was about to post the amusing German rock video here when I realized something was wrong. Anyway, here's the post I meant to put here. I found this report on Giardia risk in the Sierras to be a very sensible approach to what is probably a low risk. As the author points out, basic hygiene, such as hand washing, is probably far more important than water filtering. Now I bet you all want to see the amusing German rock video anyway but you'll just have to head over to the eemb40 disease blog for that.

New Scientist articles

Check out New Scientist's special feature on evolution. 

The article itself is pretty basic, and I think we all already know about what they discuss... but the article also has some neat links and interactives. Check out the "Top Ten" list, "infrequently asked questions," related articles in the archives, and the other articles listed below the menu options. 

There is one new article called "Is information essential for life?" that discusses environmental data storage in organisms and its role in evolution... You can't access the whole article online for free, but it should be in the UC online research catalog in a couple weeks.

There are TONS of cool related articles at the bottom of the page and a lot of them look like interesting topics to look into for our assignment...

Fertilizing the oceans

I was looking for a good link for the ocean fertilization experiments that wasn't just the Wikipedia article. This isn't easy because the Wikipedia article is pretty good! So as usual, I'd have to say this is a great starting place plus the 'Debate' link at the bottom led me to the 'Iron Fertilization news' (recently changed from 'Carbon Sequestration News). This blog has some good links and information on the whole topic. Check out this post in particular, and the previous post and Science paper it links to.

This just in....

'Tree Of Life' Has Lost A Branch, According To Largest Genetic Comparison Of Higher Life Forms Ever.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2008)

To get a good grip on eukarotic diversity try to work out how this arrangement differs from the one I presented in class and the one in your text. It actually looks like the 5 groups in Purves 8th were closer to this new study than some other texts. As I mentioned today Purves already has the Alveolates (apicomplexans, Dinoflagellates and cilliates) and the Stramenopiles (brown algae, diatoms and oomcycetes) grouped into the Chromalveolates. This latest study suggests that the Rhizaria (forameniferans and radiolarians) should also join that group. (If the group called Unikonts doesn't sound familiar it is because we ran out of time to discuss this group - but that's fine because we'll be returning to this group several times since it contains both the fungi and the animals.)

I'd dispute whether the tree of life has 'lost a branch' though or whether one branch joins the tree higher up than we previously thought.

Listen!

Listen! A frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond!

Spring Days,
Matsuo Basho 1686



I already hyped National Geographic once so this time I'll just promote their website. Apart from the always excellent photographs their news section contains a lot of items of relevance to this class. Currently, for example, they have Parasite Makes Ants Look Like Berries, Starfish Taking Over Waters in Indonesia and, best of all, One-Ton Rodent Discovered in Uruguay.

The photograph and haiku above is from the magazine article on Japan's haiku master Matsuo Basho, also available on the website.

Earthquakes and microbes

We are finding more and more microbes living deep within the earth's crust. Some of them have been found several kilometers down. A new paper is Astrobiology suggests that earthquakes might be important in supplying the nutrient rich rocks that sustain the bacteria and calculations suggest that seismic events happen regularly enough to sustain microbial life in this way for billions of years.

Nudibranch

There are not only great low tides over the weekend but they are at civilized times of the day! Hopefully you can all get out there sometime. Let us know what you find. There's a really nice tide pool website at Santa Barbara City College with a great many of the beautiful pictures taken right by UCSB campus so these are the plants and animals you will see. Check out the 'Treasures' page. These are some of the organisms you might catch sight of with such a low tide. Assuming you live close to campus then Campus Point and Devereux Point (Coal Oil Point) are both great locations.

Good opportunity for viewing diversity in the intertidal

There are great low tides over the next few days. Though we haven't worked our way up to the easily visible taxa in class yet, we'll get there, and if you haven't observed the diversity of organisms in tide pools it's a treat. Here are the low tides today through Wednesday:

Sat 1/19 1:58pm -1.2 (this means 1.2 ft below mean lower low tide)
Sun 1/20 2:42pm -1.5
Mon 1/21 3:23pm -1.6
Tues 1/22 4:01pm -1.4
Wed 1/23 4:37pm -1.1

See the following website for interesting info on tides, etc: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov

Purple earth and snowball earth

Links to read more on topics from todays lecture.

The appropriately named 'Snowball Earth' website is the go-to place for all your snowball earth information needs. But you should be aware that it is the work of a 'pro-snowball' scientist. The wikipedia article on snowball earth has a good discussion of both the evidence for and against the theory. Here's the news report from, earlier last year that I was thinking of when I said there was some recent evidence against this theory. There are a bunch more links to related stories, half way down on the right. As you can see this is quite a hot topic (no pun intended).

There's a nice article on the purple earth hypothesis here, also from 2007. Here's a similar article that focuses more on the implications for finding life on other planets.

"When we look at these faraway planets, we're not going to be able to spatially resolve them. We won't be able to see continents and oceans. Everything we must learn about that planet will be in a single dot of light."

Finally, the giant sulphur bacteria I briefly mentioned was only discovered in 1999! Here's the original research report from Science and a nice editorial news summary.

Thirteen-year old girls storming the Bastille.

This blog functions as a place I can put links to items I barely have time to mention in lecture. Here is a great example, a fascinating article from the New Yorker on changes in human height, subtitled 'Why Europeans are getting taller and taller—and Americans aren’t.' There is some great writing here and some wonderful images which I confess I shamelessly stole for class.

"Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. “They didn’t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,” the economist Robert Fogel told me. “They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.”

You will be relieved to hear that news, just last week, suggests the Dutch have stopped growing.

Tiktaalik

Paleontology hit the headlines a couple of years ago when paleontologists discovered a fossil fish, Tiktaalik roseae, that showed the beginnings of digits, wrists, elbows and shoulders, as well as a skull, neck and ribs that resemble those of tetrapods like today's familiar four-legged land animals. Paleontologists suggest that it was an intermediate form between fish which lived about 385 million years ago, and early tetrapods which lived about 365 million years ago. Its mixture of fish and tetrapod characteristics led one of its discoverers, Neil Shubin, to characterize Tiktaalik as a "fishapod". Like any self-respecting fossil Tiktaalik has its own homepage.

The story raised some interesting debate about what is meant by the term 'missing link' - a term that sees more use in the mainstream media than the scientific literature. A better term would be 'transitional form'. The Wikipedia article on Transitional Forms has a nice set of figures showing the number of Hominin species known to science in 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2002 - illustrating how our knowledge has steadily increased and although there are still 'gaps' in the record these gaps become smaller and smaller through time.

A popular term to designate transitional forms with is 'the missing link'. The term is especially used in the regular media, but is inaccurate and confusing. This is partly because it implies that there was a single link missing to complete the picture, which now has been discovered. In reality, the continuing discovery of more and more transitional fossils is further adding to our knowledge of evolutionary transitions.

The Spandrels of San Marco

http://www.jstor.org/view/00804649/ap000320/00a00110/0

Figured it had to do with a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, or at least stuff we will talk about. Even if I'm wrong its a good read (and you can download the full pdf, its easier than reading from the jstor website).

Flatwormorama

Wikipedia has a rather dismissive section on the flatworm memory transmission experiments. Even The Straight Dope has taken a shot at this one. A search on flatworm and memory will throw up a lot more info but it looks like the Wikipedia summary is fairly accurate.
The fact that the story appears on both the Straight Dope website and Snopes (here and here) suggests that despite dubious scientific evidence it is being passed around more in the form of an urban myth. You might like to think of experiments you could do to work out exactly what mechanisms are at play here (observer bias, 'trails' left in the equipment, worms on 'smart drugs' etc.)

Resources

You can find Erasmus Darwin's work at the Internet Archive Open-Access Text Archive - a wonderful resource with over 200,000 items, most of them out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain.

Here are links to the Temple of Nature, and Zoonomia. Select the format you want to download from the panel on the left.

You can also find Erasmus at Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books. They have Zoonomia and the Botanic Garden. They also have most of Charles Darwin's books, including the more obscure ones.

Whilst I'm pointing out resources I should also mention Librivox, which provides free audiobooks of books that are in the public domain. This includes a nice reading of Darwin's Origin of Species. (Full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.)

Web sight

A short report in Science in 2006 described an 'Early Cretaceous Spider Web with Its Prey'. This was the worlds oldest preserved spider web. Preserved in a large blob of amber the web and the insects caught in it have now been dated to the early Cretaceous - about 110 million years ago.

Although the web is not complete enough for scientists to reconstruct it, enough remains to suggest this was not just a collection of strands and was probably in one plane like an orb web.

As you can imagine finding fossilized spider webs is unusual. We do know that fossilized spiders have had spinnerets for producing silk for closer to 400 million years.

Read widely

One of the best pieces of advice to a young scientist is to read, and read widely. The internet has made this whole lot easier and there are numerous sites out there that will direct you to papers worth reading in whatever areas your interest takes you. Over the next few weeks we will be covering a number of topics in evolution. Two blogs that are worth checking out for some clear writing and interesting links on these topics are:

PZ Meyers Pharyngula blog - self-described as 'Evolution, development and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal'. That seems to describe it fairly well. PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota (and the pharyngula period is a stage in the embryonic development of vertebrates).

Speaking of the godless, and I mean that quite genuinely, Richard Dawkins has two websites/blogs that are well worth checking out. The official Richard Dawkins website self-described as 'A Clear-Thinking Oasis' and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (another Clear-Thinking Oasis'). Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He came to prominence through his 'Selfish Gene' book in 1976, a book that all Biology undergraduates at my University were recommended to read a decade after its publication - a recommendation I am happy to pass on thirty years after its publication (that makes me 43 if you are curious, I know I look much younger....). Lately Richard Dawkins has been rather prominently involved in the debate between creationism and evolution and is often described, usually by others, as an 'outspoken atheist'. His latest book, 'The God Delusion', combines his work on evolutionary biology and his passionate atheism to ask why, if there is no god, a belief in one so widespread and prominent as to be almost universal? In the hands of an evolutionary biologist this turns out to be quite an interesting question.

Gut parasites came from the deep

A good way to get entertained and keep up with news in the sciences is to read New Scientist magazine. Although it is British, there really isn't an American equivalent and the magazine has become much more international over the last few years. It really isn't that expensive to subscribe especially since it is a weekly magazine but you can also read many of the articles on their website (or in the library copy of course). Although they do have a few longer articles each week, much of the magazine consists of brief news reports on recent research.

Here's a brief news report from last year that ties in to the first two classes.

Gut parasites came from the deep: A genetic comparison finds links between bacteria from deep-sea vents and those from the human body. 7 July 2007.

‘Is there anybody on the stage that does not believe in evolution?’

Earlier last year John McCain was asked in a primary debate whether he believed in evolution. After a pause, McCain said, “Yes.” The moderator then asked the rest of the ten republican candidates on stage “I’m curious, is there anybody on the stage that does not agree — believe in evolution?” Three raised their hand: Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo. This proportion (3/10) is actually not that out of line, and probably lower than, the proportion of Americans as a whole who reject evolution - see numerous opinion polls, the National Center for Science Education collects several together here. I'm posting this now because I saw this posting on a blog a couple of days ago that summarizes the position of all the presidential candidates on evolution. Agree with it or not you have to love the response by Mike Gravel when asked if he thought creationism should be taught in public schools
"Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial....My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they've got a mental problem. We can't afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I'm concerned."
Apparently not being a front runner gives you more freedom to say what you really think!

Interactive Tree of Life

I've never had enough time to investigate it fully but the Interactive Tree of Life looks like an amazing tool that provides a whole suite of ways to represent, manipulate, and display phylogenetic trees. One of my interests is in the graphical representation of data (see Edward Tufte's forum/blog for some superb discussions on this) and the Interactive Tree of Life website combines both this and biology. Presenting such complex data in a way that people can understand is not easy so it's great to be able to see a whole bunch of different attempts at this - you can scroll through several on the right hand side of the webpage. A related way of presenting the complexity of a tree of life is the hyperbolic tree approach at the Deep Green website. Notice how you can pick up nodes and move through the tree.

Clouded Leopards of Borneo get their own species name

Hey everyone, I came across this article in the October 2007 National Geographic today and thought that it was a great match to todays lecture on systematics! The clouded leopards of Borneo now have their own species name Neofelis diardi!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6452555.stm

Mimivirus

The mimivirus debate is another chunky debate to get your teeth into. There are several hypotheses for where mimiviruses fit in the tree of life and including them as a fourth domain is only one suggestion. The wikipedia article is a good place to start and there's another good Discover article on the story but for something a little meatier try this PNAS paper with the title: 'Three RNA cells for ribosomal lineages and three DNA viruses to replicate their genomes: A hypothesis for the origin of cellular domain.'

Phylocode

“This would be very similar to a set of politicians who decided to bypass the Constitution to create a whole new set of laws.”

There is a great article about the phylocode proposal and controversy in Discover magazine. I recommend you all read it. It would be interesting to read your thoughts so add a comment to this post if you are so inspired. The actual Phylocode website has both their principles and rules.

Protobionts

Okay, we are off to a great start here, almost half the class has signed up already and the posting has begun.
Here is a link to a really nice website at Cornell for an Introductory Biology class. On the linked page there is a nice description of protobionts and coacervates, and, on the left, some useful links to further origin of life information. Coacervates are one type of protobiont.

Definition of Life?

http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/9a.html. 

This is an excerpt from a 2002 issue of Science, from an article written by molecular biologist Daniel E. Koshland Jr. He must have had a nasty headache after he was asked to write an essay that would attempt to define life. It expands upon the seven characteristics of life we discussed today in class. It also touches on the Red Queen theory.

Try "google"ing "definition of life," and it is pretty amusing the number of sites that just defend the reason why they cannot, if fact, define life. Most wander down philosophical trains of thought and eventually get... well, nowhere.

This is my first CS class and I must say, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the year.

(Plus, this morning was the first time I have gone to class and sat in a nicely padded chair that swiveled... swiveled!)

The first mammal to wear pants

I mentioned today one of the problems with discussing evolution is that although scientists tend to use evolution in a very specific sense (a change in gene frequencies from generation to generation as we'll see shortly) the public and press tend to wrap three concepts together:

• Evolution as change, in the true biological sense.
• Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as a mechanism explaining how and why that change occurs.
  
• Abiogenesis, the theory explaining the first appearance of life on earth
  

Well, just to make it worse, people sometimes include a fourth concept - evolution as improvement. I always thought that was what Todd McFarlane and Pearl Jam had in mind when they did the video for 'Do the Evolution' - or at least an ironic comment on this concept. Comments at the Sony Music website would suggest a less noble motive.

Evolution may lead to absolute improvement - cheetah probably run faster than their ancestors - without leading to any relative improvement - cheetah don't catch any extra food because their prey is running faster too. Hey, there's the red queen again. Evolution has very little to say about human society and its improvement, or otherwise, despite the fact that at various times people have proposed a 'science' called social darwinism. You should probably be aware of some of the history in this field and the social philosophy of eugenics that it led to. If you haven't thought about this much then the Wikipedia articles I have linked to are a great starting place and are impressively neutral for such an emotional subject. I won't be talking about this in class but as a biologist it is likely that one day you will meet someone who thinks that because you believe in evolution you believe in some form of eugenics (or maybe I just meet all the crazy people).

extra reading

Salutations to anyone needing a greeting. I realize that this isn't necessarily new material on the origins of life but David Koerner and Simon LeVay's Here Be Dragons: The scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life is worth looking at. As implied by the title the main point of the text is to explore the possibility of life in other planets. However the main means by which this is done is by looking at life here on earth and all the different environments it can occur in. There's mention of the hydrothermal vent communities, microbes living inside rocks in Antarctica, halpophiles in dried up salt beds in Death Valley, even Miller and Yuri's experiment. Sadly I cant give a full book review since I didn't quite finish it [not because of lack of interest, but ratherlack of free time]. If you'd like to get your hands on it, I know the Davidson Library on campus had it. Thought I'd let people know.

Mica

Okay, I finally get around to eating my lunch so I open this week's edition of 93106 - the weekly faculty and staff newspaper for UCSB - and what is right there on the front page?

'Mica Layers may have hosted life's first cells says new theory'

Research on the origin of life going on right here on campus.

Chicxulub

Possibly breaking my own rule of having posts be relevent to the current or past class I will stretch a point by saying that today I did mention the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (aka the one that killed the dinosaurs). I have the Wikipedia main page as my home page and when I logged on today I found today's featured article was on the Chicxulub crater underneath the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. This is the impact crater made by the impacting asteroid that current scientific opinion thinks plays a big role in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions. It's a nice article giving you some idea of the scale of this impact. The animation (click the picture above) helps understand the formation of the crater. The story of the craters discovery, before the asteroid impact theory, is interesting too.

Evolution is Easy!

Okay I confess I took this from a previous blog posting but I couldn't resist.....

Thanks to the wonderful folks at BoingBoing (a directory of wonderful things) for directing my attention to this fabulous cultural artifact: a Red Queen Barbie doll! Part of a new line of Alice in Wonderland Barbie toys. Buy this one and all your other Barbie dolls will have to run twice as fast just to keep up.

The only disappointment is how, well, static, the Red Queen looks. Perhaps she should come with a catapult launcher.....

Although Barbie is well known for her difficulty with math she has already revealed a fondness for evolution: witness the Paleontologist Barbie. There is a 'Dinosaur Quiz' on the back of the box- 'if you get five or more right you should consider a career in paleontology too!'