Tangled Bank 58

Photograph by G. Tingey -- see below.

Dear Reader, welcome to Salto sobrius and the 58th Tangled Bank blog carnival. For first-time visitors, let me mention that Salto sobrius is a blog about archaeology, skepticism and sundry musings kept by an archaeologist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Depending on what direction you're looking from, archaeology is a subject in the humanities or the social sciences, heavily dependent on methods from the natural sciences. But science isn't defined by what you look at, but by the way you look. So I'm proud to have had a number of entries on Tangled Bank over the past six months, and even more proud to host the carnival now. Lots of very good stuff here!

I've ordered the entries thematically and sorted them from the most recent thing to arise in the world on down to the earliest. That's how I'm used to working in the field: first de-turf, then move down through the deposits documenting and classifying stuff until you hit unaltered geology or come out in China. Enjoy!

Medicine

• Trevor Covert at Epigenetics News reports on new research into epigenetic aspects of lung cancer. I mean, really: is smoking worth getting your DNA hypomethylated?
  
• Carl Feagans at Hot Cup of Joe takes apart Kevin Trudeau's latest quackery book.
  
• Chris Lawson at Talking Squid smites, disembowels and defenestrates a paper suggesting that alternative medical therapies should not have to live up to the same standards of scientific evidence as, well, evidence-based medicine.
  
• Tara Smith at Aetiology fills us in on the sad fact that great apes are not just threatened by hunting and habitat destruction: they get hit by Ebola epidemics as well.
  

Culture & Tech

• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life has a crunchy morsel for us on the culinary aspects of insects.
  
• Peter Kua at RadicalHop has found a Dolly the Cloned Sheep lookalike.
  
• Selva Kumar at Scientific Indian muses on the need for a passionate attitude to science and life in general.
  
• Jim Cambias at Science Made Cool discusses the adaptive benefits of being nice.
  
• John Wheaton at Wheat-dogg's World debunks HHO gas as a power source.
• Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math opens the door to linear logic a crack for us.
  
• Here's my own contribution to the carnival, a piece on the archaeology of Stockholm's international airport.
  

Zoology & human physiology

• GrrlScientist adds another post on the taxonomy of birds and the consequences for birders of a new species list.
  
• Jane Shevtsov at Perceiving Wholes discusses a jellyfish population boom off the coast of Namibia. It's been caused by overfishing of non-jellyfish.
  
• Jennifer Forman Orth at Invasive Species has a pretty picture and commentary on the lily leaf beetle.
  
• Jake Young at Pure Pedantry reports on new research into the relative number of neurons in infant vs adult brains.
  
• RPM at Evolgen discusses a recent controversy over the implications -- if any -- for our view of recent human evolution of work on two genes central to the development of the brain.
  
• Orli V at Neurontic pulverises research that suggests that women's slightly lower average brain weight says anything interesting about their intellectual capacity in relation to men.
  
• Carel Brest van Kempen at Rigor Vitae has a post on those cool robber-masked little critters, suricates!
  
• Matt Celeskey at Hairy Museum of Natural History reports on new fossil data on a lard-ass dinosaur.
  

Cellular biology

• Charles Daney at Science and Reason has a long informative discussion about new research into how cells divide.
  

Ecology

• Daniel Collins at Down to Earth muses about the influence of wolves and other predators on erosion and soil degradation.
  

Molecular biology

• Rajagopal Sukumar at Interesting Thing of the Day writes about new uses for DNA fingerprinting. Do you know what subspecies of rice is in the bag under your kitchen counter?
  
• Mike White at Adaptive Complexity discusses new work on how gene expression makes male and female mammals different.
  
• Andre Brown at BioCurious waxes lyrical about fluorescing microtubules.
  
• Nick Anthis the Scientific Activist celebrates Tesla's 150th birthday.
  
• Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock offers a collection of pictures of cloned animals (including Dolly!) along with some thoughtful commentary. "... you do not get an identical copy by cloning. It's not the DNA that matters, it's what cellular machinery is reading that DNA."
  
• A.J. Cann at VirologyBytes Podcast has a summer special answering the question "What is a virus?".
  

Geology

• Yami McMoots at Green Gabbro reports about new work on the birth and childhood of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
  

Chemistry

• Cathy Davies at Lab Cat tells us why water is such a conveniently weird compound.
  

Greg Tingey took the picture of tangled greenery above in his London garden and kindly allowed me to publish it here. Says Greg,

I deliberately try to get a high species count, as it encourages the wildlife, up to and including foxes. And down through the frogs, newts, dragonflies and damselflies to frog-food etc.

The white flowers are a native wild species, Common Stitchwort (Stellaria holostea). The very green leaves coming up are Angelica, grasses various, the leaves of a potted (you can't see the pot) Melaleuca drooping down on the left, and a couple of leaves of Buddliea lindleyana showing. You can also see a dwarfed (I prune it) Betula pendula and a potted/bonsai Carpinus japonica.

The pieces of log are also Silver Birch - deliberately brought from a wood about 20 km away, in the hope that the mycorrizia from various Boletus species will grow - I've spead over-ripe caps there as well, and it all makes a good home for the beetles.

What you can't see is the Pinus taiwanensis over the top, which hosts a fine crop of ladybirds in the first warmer Spring days - nine species (so far) this year.

That's all for this time. The next Tangled Bank will open on 2 August at Science and Reason. Don't miss it!

[More blog entries about science, biology, tangledbank, carnival; vetenskap, biologi.]