Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Brian at Laelaps talks about how much evolutionary paleontology has changed in recent years, asking what will be discovered next?: For over 120 years, the origin of whales vexed paleontologists. They were among the strangest of all mammals, creatures completely adapted to the sea with more in common with us than any fish (although at the beginning of the 19th century "common sense" said otherwise), and it was difficult to imagine how they evolved. If Charles Darwin was right and all life had evolved, different evolutionary paths diverging through time, then whales must have had some sort of traceable ancestry. (and be sure to read "yesterday"'s post, too)
  


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science talks about giant honeybees and their "shimmering" to ward off wasps, complete with a cool video: The forests of east Asia are home to giant honeybees. Each one is about an inch in length and together, they can build nests that measure a few metres across. The bees have an aggressive temperament and a reputation for being among the most dangerous of stinging insects. Within mere seconds, they can mobilise a swarm of aggressive defenders to repel marauding birds or mammals. But against wasps, they use a subtler and altogether more surprising defence - they do a Mexican wave.


• Piled Higher and Deeper goes on the road... to CERN. It's a five-part cartoon, so it's not practical to post an excerpt. Just go read it.


• At Greg Laden's Blog we learn why Flee Ike or face certain death isn't just hyperbole: Having said that, I want to make a few notes on what is true and not true about hurricanes, as we are already seeing stupid reporting and stupid government officials clogging our airwaves. For example, an elected official (a Republican) in Texas just now on MSNBC said "This storm is a different kind of storm. For this storm, we are worried about the storm flood." Well ... du .. fucking ...uh, lady. The number one and two problems in all hurricanes are the storm surge coming in and the rainfall related floods that occur during and for hours or days after the storm. That. Is. What. Hurricanes. Do. The third biggest problem may be the tornadoes, depending on the storm, and of course, the 90 mile an hour winds for an hour or two are a bad thing too. But the storm surge is what makes people say, with more reason than it might sound, "Flee now or you will all die!" (He gets the politics out of his system in a couple of paragraphs - after that it's solid Hurricane 101.)



• David at The World's Fair has photos of a stingray migration off Yucatan: these images of a mass migration of stingrays. To quote the note I got, they look "like giant leaves floating in the sea." I first thought it was some kind of quilt, a checkered pattern on a blanket.
  


• And for a special treat, the first chapter of Chad's book is up at Uncertain Principles, Quantum Physics for Dogs: "Anyway, why are we talking about this?" "Well, you need to know a few things about waves in order to understand quantum physics." "Yeah, but this just sounds like math. I don't like math. When are we going to talk about physics?" "We are talking about physics. The whole point of physics is to use math to describe the universe." "I don't want to describe the universe, I want to catch squirrels."