Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:Blogger: The Greenbelt - Edit Post "Monday Science Links"

• Well, in case you didn't read Four Stone Hearth, Judith at has Part two of her look at Stone Age Venuses - and Hottentots ine Europe: Although Venus buttocks rarely stand at right angles, they are unarguably ample. As these figurines began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they first stunned, then titillated Europeans. That voluptuous body shape was quickly linked to the steatopygia found among some African women and interpreted as evidence of an African influence on the Cro-Magnon (whitish) European cultureZenobia: Empress of the East.


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy explains why meteors don't start fires: In Auckland, New Zealand recently a warehouse was set ablaze. It was quite the inferno, needing a huge effort to quell it. No one knows what started it… but rumors are spreading that it was a meteorite that did the damage. Several people saw a fireball in the sky, and it happened around 10:00, around the time the fire started. Case closed, right? Bzzzzt. Nope. I will almost guarantee a meteorite did not start this fire! Why not?


• Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life blogs about honey-eaters that aren't: Every once in awhile, I will read a scientific paper that astonishes and delights me so much that I can hardly wait to tell you all about it. Such is the situation with a newly published paper about the Hawai'ian Honeyeaters. In short, due to the remarkable power of convergent evolution, Hawai'ian Honeyeaters have thoroughly deceived taxonomists and ornithologists as to their true origin and identity for more than 200 years.


• Mo at Neurophilosophia tells us that they're on the verge making prosthetic hands feel real: Earlier this month, cognitive neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm described the body swap illusion. They first made their participants view a mannequin's body, or that of another person, from the first-person perspective, using video cameras and head-mounted visual displays. When the participants' bodies were stroked with a short rod, in the same way and at the same time as the body of the mannequin or the other person, they reported experiencing the other body as their own. In the current study, a similar phenomenon, called the rubber hand illusion, was used. The study involved 18 participants, all of whom have had one of their arms amputated somewhere between the wrist and elbow. The participants sat with the stump of their amputated arm hidden from view, and with a life-sized rubber hand in full view on the table in front of them. An experimenter then simultaneously touched the stump and the index finger of the rubber hand with soft paintbrushes. .


• At over at Tetrapod Zoology, Darren goes over the Atlas mountains and brings back musings and gorgeous pics of birds, lizards, and fennecs: More musings from the Morocco trip. So, we travelled over the Atlas Mountains and were soon up at the snowline. We joked about seeing lions and bears, but did see a Barbary partridge Alectoris barbara (another first) and a representative of the strikingly blue Blue tit subspecies Cyanistes caeruleus ultramarinus. If you've been keeping up with parid taxonomy you'll know that some workers now regard this blue tit of north-west Africa and the Canaries as a distinct species, the Ultramarine or Afrocanarian tit C. ultramarinus (but note that not all the blue tits of the Canaries belong to this species: another four or five are recognised from the islands... by some authors at least). Black redstart Phoenicurus ochruros and loads of Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax were also present (but no Alpine choughs P. graculus) [adjacent photos by Richard Hing].

Enjoy!