Offered without comment

Res ipsa loquitur.  Via.

Impact of Western culture on the arctic

"Hudson Bay Company store covered with furs, Churchill, Manitoba, c.1906-09."

Image cropped for emphasis from the original posted at a gallery in The Guardian.   Photo credit Geraldine Moodie.

Worse than ISIS?

A real company that is probably getting a lot of grief about its name nowadays.  Via.

Airplane oxygen masks explained

Excerpts from an article in the Travel section of The Telegraph:

“Up front, the pilots will don their own masks and commence a rapid descent to an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet,” he continues. “If the emergency descent feels perilously fast, this isn’t because the plane is crashing: it’s because the crew is doing what’s it’s supposed to do.”..

According to Airbus, if a plane loses pressure at 40,000 feet, those on board have as little as 18 seconds of “useful consciousness” without supplemental oxygen...

...what you’re supplied isn’t exactly oxygen – nor is it not compressed air in the scuba diving sense. Oxygen tanks are heavy and bulky so aircraft use a more complicated system. The panel above each seat actually contains a cocktail of chemicals that, when burned, release oxygen. They might include barium peroxide, a fine white powder used in fireworks, sodium chlorate, more commonly used as a weedkiller, and potassium chlorate, a staple of school science lab experiments (it reacts violently with sugar).

Tug the mask, like you’re told in the demonstration, and the chemical process starts. Once it starts, it cannot be stopped until everything’s burned up (around 12-15 minutes...).

This is important:

Do not expect the bag to inflate. Passengers have reportedly suffered hypoxia after believing their mask was broken because the bag wasn’t inflating, prompting them to remove it. Hence the warning given during every safety briefing.

“Oxygen is supplied in a constant flow,” explained a BA spokesman. “The bag does not inflate like a respirator bag used in a medical theatre. How full it gets depends on an individual's rate of breathing. If the rate of breathing is very quick, air is inhaled at a faster rate and so the bag will inflate less. If all the air isn't inhaled, some will remain in the bag, partially inflating it.”

The oxygen generator can also get extremely hot – so don’t touch it – and passengers may even notice a burning smell (so don’t be alarmed).

I don't know if the standard passenger mask is a "partial rebreather," capturing exhaled air, which even if "once-used" still has usable oxygen available, or a "non-rebreather."

More information at the FAA.

The CIA has a Flickr account

You can explore their photos, including a large number of recently-declassified maps (such as the one above showing world traffic in ivory) at their Flickr page.

Jurassic lacewing vs. modern butterfly

"A study out today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: B that features IU paleobotanist David Dilcher as a co-author identifies a Jurassic-age insect whose behavior and appearance closely mimic a butterfly — but whose emergence on Earth predates the butterfly by about 40 million years.

Dilcher — who made international headlines last year for his role in discovering the mythical “first flower” — said these proverbial “first butterflies” survived in a similar manner as their modern sister insects by visiting plants with “flower-like” reproductive organs producing nectar and pollen."

"The butterfly-like insects, which went on to evolve into a different form of insect from the modern butterfly, is an extinct “lacewing” of the genus kalligrammatid called Oregramma illecebrosa. Another genus of this insect — of the order Neuroptera — survives into our modern era, and are commonly known as fishflies, owlflies or snakeflies...

... another evolutionary innovation found in the ancient lacewing fossils’ wings remained remarkably unchanged over the course of millennia: so-called “eye spots.”

This unique pattern on the wings, arising over 200 million years ago, is nearly identical to markings on the modern owl butterfly. To this day, owl butterflies use these circular marks as a defense mechanism against predators, which mistake the spots as the eyes of a larger, more threatening animal."

Text and images from Indiana University, via Vice's Motherboard.

Reposted from 2016 in recognition of Darwin Day.

Butterflies can change their spots

Every aspect of a butterfly has been shaped by evolutionary processes over the millenia to render the butterfly as perfectly adapted as possible to its favored environment.  The shape of the wings, the wing pattern, the color of the eggs - all are the result of billions of tiny changes.

Some butterfly wing patterns incorporate "eyespots" such as those seen in my photo of an Eyed Brown above.  It has been well understood that one of the purposes these spots serve is to confuse a predator, as shown by the wings of this Common Buckeye I found with multiple beak-shaped defects in the area of the eyespots:

The process is demonstrated in this video by researchers at Oregon State University.  Mantids are shown attacking the head/thorax of butterflies without prominent eyespots, but the wing margins of those with eyespots:

YouTube link.

What is most interesting is that the butterflies are the same genus and species, differing only in seasonal appearance.  (data and discussion published here).  The implications are explained at The Scientist:

Prudic and her collaborator found that the dramatic eyespots on the wings of Bicyclus anynana individuals in the wet season were more effective at fooling mantid insects, the butterflies’ main predators during rainy times, than the more diffuse wing spots of the dry season forms, which are preyed upon mostly by birds. The researchers even found that pasting wet-season spots onto dry-season butterflies had the same effect. Conversly, dry-season patterns [less-prominent eyespots] served to conceal the butterflies better from birds in its eastern African woodland habitats. “Having the right type of eyespot in the right season allowed the butterflies to live long enough to lay eggs and have more offspring in the next generation,” Prudic said. “With the wrong eyespot at the wrong time, they were quickly annihilated by the mantids.”

Fascinating.

Reposted from 2015 in recognition of Darwin Day.

My "elfin ear" is actually a "Darwin's point"

Darwin’s point is found in the majority of mammals, and humans are no exception. It is most likely used to help focus sounds in animals, but it no longer has a function in humans. Only 10.4% of the human population still has this visible left-over mark of our past, but it is possible that a much larger number of people carry the gene that produces it as it does not always cause the ear tubercle to appear. The point is a small thick nodule at the junction of the upper and middle sections of the ear.

Since the "plica semilunaris" is vestigial structure and therefore a sign of evolution, I'm delighted to display it. Darwin described it as a "surviving symbol of the stirring times and dangerous days of man's animal youth."

As a child I wasn't aware that I had it until I first went to school and some children began to tease me about my pointy ear. My mom advised me to tell them it was my "extra brain power" (which I'm sure failed to impress first-graders). For children nowadays such a rationale would not be necessary; indeed an "elfin ear" would be a mark of prestige - one which some body-modifying teens (?Goths) try to attain by plastic surgery.

Link found at The Presurfer; thanks Gerard.

Reposted from 2009 to add this rather impressive example of a vestigial structure:

A teenager with a 20cm "tail" growing at the bottom of his spine has undergone surgery to have it removed. It started to appear on the 18-year-old's back just after his 14th birthday...

"It was cosmetically and psychologically disturbing for him." Although surgically removing a tail isn't a very complicated procedure, it must be carried out by a neurosurgeon as the growth of tail involves a part of the spinal cord. 

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Reposted from 2016 in recognition of Darwin Day.

On the Origin of Fantasies

"The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers," shown above, is a little-known illustration on one of the 28 surviving pages of the original manuscript of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

...remember that Darwin and his wife Emma... had a huge family of ten children. Scholars believe that a young Francis Darwin, the naturalist's third oldest son, drew this on the back of Darwin's manuscript for On the Origin of Species.

Personally, I prefer this one, with its fanciful butterfly:

Additional examples, including the scrawling of a toddler, are shown at the article at The Appendix.  A big tip of the hat to reader Andrew for alerting me to the existence of this "quarterly journal of experimental and narrative history."

Image: Cambridge University Library

Reposted from 2014 in recognition of Darwin Day.

Vatican: Evolution is acceptable, doesn't disprove God

On the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, the Vatican is sponsoring a conference of scientists and theologians to discuss the interface of religion and science.

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, saying there was a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

"We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things..."

"The false contraposition between Darwinism and the Church," is how the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, headlined its story on the conference...

Pope John Paul II articulated the church's position most clearly in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, in which he said the theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis."

But the Vatican's position became somewhat confused in recent years, in part because of a 2005 New York Times op-ed piece signed by a close Benedict collaborator, Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn [who] seemed to reject traditional church teaching and backed instead intelligent design...

Vatican officials later made clear they did not believe intelligent design was science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school science classes only created confusion.

Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biological sciences and philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, called intelligent design and creationism "blasphemous" not only to science but to the Christian faith.

Reposted from 2009 in recognition of Darwin Day.

The remarkable "Rainbow Finch"

An endangered bird, of which only about 2,000 are known to exist in the wild (in Australia).

It was discovered by the Ornithologist John Gould who named the finch after his wife rather than himself. First called the Lady Gouldian Finch, the lady part of the name has been largely dropped, possibly because it was something of a mouthful, but most likely because Mrs Gould was no Lady (this is a reflection on her lack of title rather than her personal behavior).

Gould himself is largely forgotten outside of ornithology circles and Australia, where he discovered the Finch in 1840. This is a shame as without him we would not have had the concept of ‘Darwin’s Finches’ from the Galapagos. Darwin himself thought that the specimens he collected were variants of other species (albeit including the finch). It was Gould who classified the twelve distinct new species that formed a new finch group.

Image credit. Via.  

Reposted from 2009 in recognition of Darwin Day.

The inheritance of acquired characteristics

Everyone who is well educated in science understands that adults don't pass on acquired characteristics to their children - a child can't have a scar that resembles daddy's war wound (at least not on a genetic basis).

It turns out that that's not exactly true. Organisms can inherit an acquired trait because not all inheritance is dependent upon DNA. Welcome to "epigenetics:"

A certain laboratory strain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has white eyes. If the surrounding temperature of the embryos, which are normally nurtured at 25 degrees Celsius, is briefly raised to 37 degrees Celsius, the flies later hatch with red eyes. If these flies are again crossed, the following generations are partly red-eyed – without further temperature treatment – even though only white-eyed flies are expected according to the rules of genetics...
Environmental factors, which change the characteristics of an individual and are then passed on to its offspring, do not really fit into Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to his theory, evolution is the result of the population and not the single individual. “Passing on the gained characteristics fits more to Lamarck’s theory of evolution”, says Paro.
However, he still does not believe Darwin’s theory of evolution is put into question by the evidence of epigenetics research. “Darwin was 100 percent right”, Paro emphasises. For him, epigenetics complement Darwin’s theory. In his view, new characteristics are generated and passed on via epigenetics, subject to the same mechanisms of evolution as those with a purely genetic origin.

Reposted from 2009 in recognition of Darwin Day.

Islamic views of evolution

Selected passages from the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

Islamic views on evolution are diverse, ranging from theistic evolution to creationism. Muslims believe in a God as the Creator, as explained in the Qur'an. Throughout history some Muslim thinkers have proposed and accepted elements of the theory of evolution, while believing in the supremacy of God in the process. In modern times, some Muslims have rejected evolution, and teaching it is banned in some countries. The main schism between Islam and evolution is in the Adamic descent of human beings, a concept which modern biological anthropology rejects as mythology...

The Qur'an does not contain a complete chronology of creation. It declares variously that it took "six ayums" to create the "seven heavens [or firmaments] and earth" An 'ayum' is defined as a stage, or a relative quantity of time rather than a 24 hour period...

Certain verses in the Qur'an are claimed by Muslims to be compatible with the expansion of the universe, Big Bang and Big Crunch theories...

The Mu'tazili scientist and philosopher al-Jahiz (c. 776-869) was the first of the Muslim biologists and philosophers to develop an early theory of evolution. He speculated on the influence of the environment on animals, considered the effects of the environment on the likelihood of an animal to survive, and first described the struggle for existence, a precursor to natural selection. Al-Jahiz's ideas on the struggle for existence in the Book of Animals have been summarized as follows:

"Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring."... 

In the 13th century, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi explains how the elements evolved into minerals, then plants, then animals, and then humans. Tusi then goes on to explain how hereditary variability was an important factor for biological evolution of living things:

"The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures. [...] The bodies are changing as a result of the internal and external interactions." ... 

Evolutionary biology is included in the high-school curricula of most Muslim countries. Science foundations of 14 Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt, recently signed a statement by the Interacademy Panel (IAP, a global network of science academies), in support of the teaching of evolution, including human evolution. Little is known about general societal views of evolution in Muslim countries.

A 2007 study of religious patterns found that only 8% of Egyptians, 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks agree that Darwin's theory is probably or most certainly true, and a 2006 survey reported that about 25% of Turkish adults agreed that human beings evolved from earlier animal species. In contrast, the 2007 study found that only 28% of Kazakhs thought that evolution is false. According to Salman Hameed, writing in the journal Science, there exists a contradictory attitude towards evolution in the Muslim world. While Muslims accept science as fully compatible with Islam, and most accept microevolution, very few Muslims accept the macroevolution as held by scientists, especially human evolution.

I find it interesting to see "Darwinian" theories expressed a millennium before Darwin. This post is of necessity a rather perfunctory summary of a complex subject, so feel free to add comments.  And see also "The Qur’an & Space Science" at The Turbid Blog.

Here's a relevant prior post.

Reposted from 2009 in recognition of Darwin Day.

"God has given you one face and you make yourselves another"

Mug shot via the Washington Post.

Title quote from Hamlet, Act III, Scene I.

Recently-discovered photo of a younger Harriet Tubman

"In the photo, Harriet Tubman is still relatively young, perhaps in her early or mid-forties. She would live into her 90s, and many of the photos of her show her as an older woman."

More at Atlas Obscura, via Neatorama.  Photo: Swann Auction Galleries.