Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness - super-sized for your enjoyment!

• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology gives us a week's worth by himself - of sea monsters (start here and read the whole series):Welcome to sea monster week. Yes, a whole week devoted to the discussion and evaluation of photos purportedly showing marine cryptids, or carcasses of them. Why do this? I'm not entirely sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We begin with a fantastic image that - hopefully - you've seen here and there yet may know little about (again, to those who know the cryptozoological literature, I apologise for insulting your intelligence). Judging from comments I've seen on the internet, people nowadays assume that this image is a photoshop job unique to the digital age, whereas in fact it's a classic, much-reproduced image, widely discussed in the cryptozoological literature, and first appearing in print in March 1965 (together with others). It's Robert Le Serrec's photo of a huge, tadpole-like creature encountered in Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, Queensland...


• Chris at Mixing Memory posts on how we adapt to accents: I have this friend from New York who, most of the time, speaks in a normal (that is to say, southern) accent that she's acquired as a result of being surrounded for so long by people who speak the King's English ('cause Elvis was a southerner). Occasionally, though, usually after she's been talking to someone back home, she slips into her old Jamaica Queens accent, and when she does, I spend the first thirty seconds or so just trying to figure out whether she's speaking English, and I don't even bother trying to understand the meaning of those strangely accented words she's uttering. After that period of complete incomprehension, though, I seem to get used to her relapsed accent, and suddenly I can understand her perfectly well.


• Carl Zimmer at The Loom writes about flatfish: Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder. Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees. All vertebrates, ourselves included, use hair cells in the inner ear to keep ourselves balanced. In most flatfish species, the hairs have rotated so that swimming sideways feels normal to them. Many flatfish can camouflage the upward-facing side of their body. The underside is pale, and in many species the fin is tiny. And then, of course, there are the eyes.


• Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life tells us about learning the color of fossil feathers which is way cool: When looking at paintings and reconstructions of fossil birds and dinosaurs, people often ask "how do you know what color they were?" Well, we didn't. However, a new paper was just published in Biology Letters that explores the possibility of deciphering the actual color of fossilized plumage and makes a startling discovery: scientists can identify at least some of the original colors in ancient feathers. In sharp contrast to mammals, whose colorations are really very boring, birds are colorful -- many species are stunningly so. But colors are expensive and wasteful to produce if they can't be used to communicate a particular message that can be seen by the intended recipient. In fact, birds evolved colors to send signals to other birds. They also evolved the visual structures in their eyes necessary to perceive those colors and they developed behaviors designed to draw attention to their plumage coloration. Which leads one to ask; what colors were ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs?


• Stefan and Bee over at Back Reaction tackle the question how did the LHC get confused with the Big Bang, anyhow?: With the start of the Large Hadron Collider coming closer, the topic is present in the media more than ever. A commonly used motivation is the alleged recreation of the Big Bang. Peter Woit recently mentioned that Martinus Veltman, winner of the '99 Nobelprize in physics, “described claims that the LHC will 'recreate the Big Bang' as 'idiotic', and as 'crap'. He said that this is 'not science', but 'blather', and that the field would come to regret this, arguing that if you start selling the LHC with pseudo-science, you will end up paying for it.” I am totally with Veltman. But what is behind the story? What does the LHC have to do with the Big Bang?

Enjoy!