Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of science - Now with EXTRA SCIENCE!

• John Hawks (finally) posts on sequencing the Neandertal genome: Paleoanthropology is a science that generates huge public interest. But it gives very few chances for public participation. Those of us who are close to paleoanthropology know how much our science is driven by good ideas from many other fields. The pathways by which those insights enter our science tend to be highly constrained -- radiocarbon dating, scanning electron microscopy, isotopic analysis of enamel, and now genetics have all been brought into paleoanthropology by extremely skilled scientists from outside the field. I think that the Neandertal genome has the potential of breaking new ground. One year from now, there will be high school students working with sequences from the Neandertal genome. Who knows what they will discover? I just think that is tremendously exciting. For the first time, the primary data of paleoanthropology will be available to everyone.


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology posts on kiwi weirdness: Why post a picture of a kiwi neck? Because it's so frikkin' weird, that's why. The neck vertebrae of kiwi look very broad and robust for a bird, and I was hoping that these characteristics might have fooled you into thinking that you were looking at a baby apatosaur neck or something... Mivart (1877) provided a very good description of ratite vertebral anatomy and described how Apteryx 'differs from all [other ratites] in the greater relative stoutness of the neck and production of its processes'.
  
• ps - he follows this up 200 years of kiwis
  


• At Space Weather is a page on Comet Lulin: "I observed comet Lulin before dawn this morning, Feb. 17th, and I found it in an instant using 10x50 binoculars," says Martin Mc Kenna of Maghera, N. Ireland. "The comet was very bright and large with a coma 20 arcminutes in diameter. Despite the glare of the last quarter Moon, I was very impressed to see the comet easily with the naked eye with even a hint of green colour. From a dark country site, Lulin should be an easy naked-eye object, a view which can only get better at close approach to Earth."


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy asks what a lunar eclipse looks like on the moon: A lunar eclipse is when the Earth passes between the Sun and Moon, casting a shadow on the lunar surface. From the Earth, we see a circular bite taken out of the Moon, a dark arc slowly growing, mimicking the crescent Moon shape. But what does it look like from the Moon? Well, if you were standing there, looking around, you’d see it grow darker, the landscape around you enshrouded in shadow. But if you looked up… you might see this: (tres cool picture, you must go and see).
  
• (and follow that up with video from Kaguya)
  


• At Playing Chess with Pigeons, Troy takes on Answers in Genesis's objection to saying birds and dinosaurs are related: We find still more creationist ignorance about basic zoological facts, this time from Dr. David Menton of Answers in Genesis. AiG recently republished on their website a Menton piece from last year attacking the evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds. Often my first instinct when I run across these things is to launch onto a point by point refutation but I am going to restrain myself this time and simply highlight one rather obvious error in Dr. Menton’s article that in my opinion should cast doubt on anything else he has to say on the subject (especially since he claims to be an anatomist).
  

Enjoy!