Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science:

• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life shows us a new species of bird, with photo: This small greenish bird that has been playing hide-and-seek with ornithologists on a remote Indonesian island since 1996, but was declared a newly discovered species on March 14, 2008 and promptly recommended for endangered lists.


• PZ at Pharyngula tells us more than we may have wanted to know about dicyemid mesozoa, but the good news is it's a cephalopod parasite. (Well, not according to Cuttle!) You know how people can be going along, minding their own business, and then they see some cute big-eyed puppy and they go "Awwwww," and their hearts melt, and then it's all a big sloppy mushfest? I felt that way the other day, as I was meandering down some obscure byways of the developmental biology literature, and discovered the dicyemid mesozoa … an obscure phylum which I vaguely recall hearing about before, but had never seriously examined. After reading a few papers, I have to say that these creatures are much more lovable then mere puppy dogs.


• Edmund Blair Bolles at Babel's Dawn writes about a paper by Bordeaux-based archaeologist Francisco D’Errico that claims Neanderthals had language: This claim totally discards the older Big Bang theory that said language arose only very recently (40 to 75 thousand years ago), and also challenges the Out-of-Africa theory that proposes Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the rest of the world, carrying language and culture with them, beginning about 60 thousand years ago. A new history will have to be written.


• Stefan at Back Reaction explains the phantom traffic jam: If ever you have been driving on a crowded highway, chances are high that you have taken part in a similar "experiment", just that no one has captured it on film and put it on YouTube. This happened to me last Monday on my way to work: First, I got stuck in a traffic jam at the merging of three lanes into two - no wonder in rush-hour traffic. But then there was a second full stop, a few kilometres down the road, and for no obvious reason at all - no construction site, no junction, no accident... it was the classical phantom traffic jam.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East takes a break to post on the origins of cats: Domestic cats around the world can trace their origins back to the Near East's Fertile Crescent -- the belt of land stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf -- and from there, ex oriente lux: cats were transported around the world by humans. Long identified as the 'cradle of civilisation' for our 2-legged species, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have concluded that ancestral roads for all 600 million modern day pussy cats also lead back to the same locale.

Enjoy!