Monday Science Links

This week's science links:

• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology tells us about snakes that can bite with their mouths closed: It goes without saying that most predatory animals need to open their mouths when they want to stab or bite potential prey items. But, get this, there's a group of snakes that can erect their teeth and stab prey with a closed mouth. And that's not all that's interesting about these snakes. Yes, time for more weird snakes.


• Darren then complains about sunbirds' dumb names, and he's got a point. Consider Cinnyris chloropygius: an African species with bright yellow pectoral tufts, a scarlet chest, blue throat, and metallic green head and tail coverts. Metallic green sunbird? Blue-throated sunbird? Yellow-tufted sunbird? No, it was named for its dullest, most easily overlooked, least remarkable bit of anatomy: its olive belly. Olive? What the hell kind of colour is olive? Is 'olive' even a colour? I admit that I'm challenged when it comes to colours - to me, 'olive' is just some sort of nondescript greeny/browny colour. Anyway, C. chloropygius is, yes, the Olive-bellied sunbird.


• Stefan at Backreaction posts on why bumblebees can so fly (should've been Bee, no?): Bumblebees are quite impressive insects: They make a nice humming sound, they cause a small stir when flying over patches of dusty ground, and with a mass of nearly a gram, they are heavy enough to bend clover flowers under their weight when landing to feed nectar. And, of course, bumblebees cannot fly according to the laws of aerodynamics, or so goes the myth. This story, often invoked by people wanting to dismiss results of scientific reasoning, seems to go back to the 1930s, to students of Ludwig Prandtl, a pioneer of aerodynamics at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
  


• Troy at Playing Chess with Pigeons takes on a Answer's in Genesis's "attack" on horse evolution (long but well worth it): On the site is a page titled “Horse Evolution - Fact or Horse Manure?” written by creationist Arthur Biele, who, judging by a Google search on his name, has been pestering people with nonsense in various internet discussion forums for years. His article here attacking the evidence for horse evolution is a barely readable hodgepodge of unsupported assertions, factual errors and standard quotes from “The Creationist Joke Book™”.


• Athena at Centauri Dreams has a lovely essay called Astrobiology: Finding a Place Like Ours: Nonetheless, in whatever time frame, it’s coming. Billing’s essay considers the staggering possibilities of analyzing distant points of light, the planetary specks revealed by future space observatories that can block out the light from a central star to reveal the system around it. Recent work by Darren Williams (Penn State, Erie) and Peter McCullough (Space Telescope Science Institute) suggests that patterns of reflected light might reveal planetary seas and the continents that interrupt their signature. Sara Seager (MIT) and Eric Ford (University of Florida) are working on the analysis of color, studying fluctuations in brightness as indicators of days and seasons.
  

Enjoy!