Monday Science Links

This week's science links:

• Phil at Bad Astronomy tells us Ten Things We Didn't Know about the Milky Way: So you’ve lived here all your life — in fact, everyone has — but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it’s a spiral, and it’s 100,000 light years across. And of course, BABloggees are smarter, more well-read, and better looking than the average population, but be honest: do you know all ten of these things? Really?


• John at John Hawks Anthropology Website looks at the new movie 10,000 BC:The movie, 10,000 B.C., blew away the competition last weekend, with an estimated $35.7 million in US box office receipts. I think it is a disaster movie of epic scale -- at least, from the point of view of anthropology! .... But for a little bit lighter view of the movie's reception, we can turn to the movie's IMDB forum. Or, maybe it makes for an even more depressing picture; I guess it depends on your point of view.


• Jen at Mind the Gap laments the passing of a way of life: I always knew our days were numbered: what a luxury, to send and receive that simple Jiffy-padded envelope full of vials of living fruit flies or nematodes, antibodies or plasmids or cell lines, dispatched from far-flung labs with nothing more complicated than the standard marker-pen scribbled mantra: ‘biological samples, non-hazardous’. Such was the collegial nature of such transactions that it would have been a breach of etiquette for the sender to even hint at the possibility of postal recompense, although I once liberated a vial with a cheerful note twisted around it that said “Buy me a beer the next time you see me at Keystone”. To share materials without complication; to desire and request a strain and to have it show up a few days later, no muss or fuss – such opulence. I always knew, in short, that we were somehow operating under the wire, and that if the powers-that-be ever suspected, we’d be in big trouble.


• Wow! The eponymous Mr Verb and Heidi Harley both on a demonstrated link between North American and Siberian languages. This is huge. The Na-Dene languages, most of which are/were spoken in northwestern North America, and the Yeniseic languages of Siberia have been demonstrated to be related. Work by Ed Vajda (Western Washington University) on the endangered Siberian language Ket, and work by Jeff Leer, Michael Krauss, and James Kari (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) on Na-Dene languages, including the recently-extinct Eyak, showed enough parallels to satisfy some heavy-hitting historical linguists of their common descent -- and, as Mr. Verb notes, they're a tough bunch to satisfy. (See a Linguist List posting here, too.)


• And to round it off, Darren at Tetrapod Zoology gives us an overview of one of the wackier notions out there: initial bipedalism: Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you've all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features to a marine phase. While it still seems conceivable that at least some fossil hominins foraged on shores and in mangroves, all of the evidence so far put forward to document our aquatic heritage is demonstrably incorrect and fails to fit the evidence as well as the idea that we originated in woodlands and grasslands. Anyway, while the AAH might be well known, have you heard about its most radical variation: the theory of initial bipedalism? According to this little known school of thought, not only do humans owe their anatomy to a direct aquatic ancestry, so do ALL mammals and all other tetrapods. In fact, all vertebrates evolved from aquatic bipedal human-like ancestors.

Enjoy!