Over the past several weeks I’ve accumulated links and information from several of our members. If you have information you want to share with us, just email it to Neece or leave a comment below. I’ll do a regular roundup of links and information in the future. If it’s about science, critical thinking, books or other media, or religion and atheism, share it with us whenever you come across it.
You may have noticed the tab under the banner that says Library. That lists all the books and media we each recommend. Feel free to contribute to it. In that list you’ll find that Tim recommended a book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett. Brent found an interview on Groks Science Radio Show with the author.
Daniel has three stories to share:
The first is from RadioLab. Here’s the description from the page:
Parasites: What’s gotten into you? In this hour we explore nature’s moochers – the good, the bad, and the hideous. We have stories of lethargic farmers, zombie cockroaches, and even mind-controlled humans (kinda, maybe). Could parasites be the shadowy hands that pull the strings of life?
Carl Zimmer plays defense lawyer, trying to exonerate parasites for their wrongs, while Jad and Robert argue in defense of the victims. Our producer Lulu Miller comes in to moderate a lightning round of: “Parasites: are they evil, or are they awesome?” The parasites in question are the zombie wasp, the nematode, and the lovey-dovey blood fluke.
From NPR he sends a story about throwing out the Primordial Soup theory:
Is the “primordial soup” theory — the idea that life emerged from a prebiotic broth — past its expiration date?
Biochemist Nick Lane thinks so. The University College London writer and his colleagues argue that the 81-year-old notion just doesn’t hold water.
Lane tells NPR’s Guy Raz there’s another possible explanation for the emergence of life. But before we get to that, why toss out the soup theory?
Lane says the idea of a primordial soup goes back to 1929, and great biologists like J.B.S. Haldane.
And he shares another story from NPR about “mystical” baboons:
I’m not saying something magical happened. I can’t. Because I’m not a baboon.
And neither is Barbara Smuts, though she spent years in the field in East Africa studying baboons.
What Smuts saw one day in Africa while watching a troop of some 30 baboons is one of the more mysterious baboon tales ever. Her account was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies a few years ago, and when I told the story to my co-host Jad Abumrad, on NPR and WNYC’s Radiolab, he was leery. He couldn’t explain what the baboons did, but when I proposed an explanation, he found it ridiculous.
The next two are from me (Neece):
How about an iron-plated snail? This little hydrothermal-vent-living creature was discovered in 1999. Scientists at MIT have been studying it. Here is the paper that they published. They write, “the shell is “unlike any other known natural or synthetic engineered armor.” It’s amazing
Life isn’t easy for the “scaly-foot gastropod”. This humble snail lives in hydrothermal vent fields two miles deep in the Indian ocean, and is surrounded by vicious predators. For example, there’s the “cone snail”, which stabs at its victims with a harpoon-style tooth as a precursor to injecting them with paralyzing venom. Then there’s the Brachyuran crab, which has been known to squeeze its prey for three days in an attempt to kill it. Yowsa.
Ah, but the scaly-foot gastropod has its own tricks. To fight back, it long ago evolved a particularly cool defense structure: It takes the grains of iron sulfide floating in the water around it and incorporates it into the outer layer of its shell. It it thus an “iron-plated snail”.
The other day Brent and I shared podcasts and radio shows with you. Well, I just found a new one! From Skepchick.org comes a new podcast called Curiosity Aroused. There’s one episode up now which is about calorie restriction for long life. It’s very interesting.
Here is a great movie about critical thinking called “Here Be Dragons”.
http://herebedragonsmovie.com/
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Another podcast that I haven’t listened to yet, but seems interesting is MonsterTalk. It is all about cryptozoology: bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, etc. It takes a skeptical look at these things and is sponsored by skeptic magazine.
http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/monstertalk/
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Neece Reply:
February 25th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
I’ll add it to the list, Gerald, thanks.
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