Monday's Science Links

This week's heaping helping of sciencey goodness:

• Brian at Laelaps posts on Shaking the Cetacean evolutionary bush: Indohyus and the origin of whales (with a beautiful Carl Buell illustration, too!)


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life asks how many giraffe species are there? And the answer might surprise you.


• Stefan and Bee at Backreaction with another graph: indirect detection of gravitation: "One of the predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is the existence of gravitational waves: Two large masses in orbital motion will create small, wavelike distortions in spacetime that propagate like ripples on a pond, and carry away energy. Despite big efforts and huge detectors, no gravitational waves could be measured so far. But direct discovery notwithstanding, physicists are confident that gravitational waves are real, since there is very compelling indirect evidence for their existence, and for their compliance to the rules of General Relativity."


• And another from Stefan and Bee - the very pretty Unitary Triangle, about which they say "My husband and I, we both agreed the Unitary Triangle above is the prettiest plot of contemporary physics. Unfortunately, it turns out neither of us knows very much about the actual experiments that constrain the parameter space, so we'll have to be a bit brief in this regard".


• Jennifer at Cocktail Party Physics on neurotoxins and zombies. "That's why neurotoxins provide such a useful hunting mechanism for creatures like the blue-ringed octopus, Australian paralysis tick, Japanese pufferfish and numerous snake and spider species."