Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Nimravid at Nimravid's Weblog puts up a post on nimravids (yes, seriously). What are they? Well, "definitely not cats", he says. (They're sabre-tooths.) (Aren't sabre-tooths cats?) (Read the post!)
  


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy explains why we have leap years. "It takes roughly 365 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun once. If it were exactly 365 days, we’d be all set! Our calendars would be the same every year, and there’d be no worries. But that’s not the way things are."


• Greg at Greg Laden's Blog talks about the origin of the chicken and whether Darwin was right or wrong. "You will read in press reports that "Darwin got it wrong" when it comes to chickens. Let's have a look at what he said and see how wrong he was. ... Darwin uses chickens in a big way in developing his ideas about evolution. Chickens were perhaps as important as pigeons for examining breed characteristics. Therefore, he wrote quite a bit about chickens."
  


• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at that depression pill study from a linguist's point of view. "But this being Language Log, not Journalism Log, nor for that matter Psychiatry Log, what drew my professional attention to this case was the variable use of linguistic devices to present -- or misrepresent -- the original paper. Journalists are faced with the need to talk about the comparison of sampled distributions -- or worse, a model of sampled distributions of comparisons of sampled distributions -- while being unable to talk about models and distributions, instead being limited to generic propositions with a few standard quantifiers and modals."


• John Conway at Cosmic Variance tackles the question what is dark matter and does a pretty good job. "There really is something out there, bending the light from distant galaxies. Galaxies, and galaxy clusters, appear to be surrounded by clouds of something invisible which interacts gravitationally. It apparently also causes the rotation of galaxies to deviate from the simple prediction of Newton’s laws assuming that only the visible matter in galaxies is present." Read the comments, too.

Enjoy!