There are any number of articles available on the internerd about How To Give A Good Academic Talk, or Ten Tips To Get Your Paper Published. Etcetera. Current Biology has a piece by Mark Ptashne: On speaking, writing and inspiration. It’s not a how-to guide, but a really nice exposition about the elusiveness (both as a listener and a speaker) of the simple, clear species of academic presentation.
Current Biology is a gem this month, with interesting articles on imitation in dogs, female-led infanticide in chimps, and a new look at sexual selection in barn swallows. Like, actual organisms and behaviour in more than one article!
May 15, 2007
Wired has a nice little article on the molecular clock model being used by antiquarians to date prints/books etc. The original paper is here, describing how the properties of copperplate and woodblock degeneration (and the corresponding print quality features) can be used in a clock model to help date manuscrips. Nifty.
Also, via Afarensis (who has a cool picture), Current Biology reports that fring-lipped bats may be using social transmission mechanisms in order to learn a novel foraging behaviour (recognising frog calls as prey cues). Bats = always awesome.
June 21, 2006
Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link]
Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as an end-goal (producing classifications).
If there were believable genealogies of all genes… one could then ask which genes have travelled together for how long in which genomes, without an obligation to marshal these data in the defense of one or another grander phylogenetic scheme for organisms.
Nifty figures, also.
May 3, 2006
Once upon a time I considered becoming an evolutionary bat biologist1. Bats are cool. They’re close to primates on the mammal phylogeny, they have interesting social systems, and some of them have astoundingly sophisticated echolocation systems.
Gareth Jones and Emma Teeling have a paper in TREE: The evolution of echolocation in bats, discussing the phylogenetic history of this trait. It may be quite flexible in the face of ecological constraints and challenges, as there seems to be convergent evolution when different types of calls are mapped onto the molecular phylogenies.
1. Now I just read comics.
February 9, 2006
