Monday Science Links

This week's delicious science, just a little bit late:

• First, Save Your Breath For Running Ponies warns Beware those yellow crazy ants!: Now, I can kind of see where the white-eyes and red crabs are coming from. It’s not like either of them are known for being particularly short-tempered creatures, so if they say the yellow crazy ants – or YELLOW KRAZEE ANTZ, as they prefer to be called – are insufferable, I’m willing to bet they are. Like, a Christmas Island White-eye will be quietly wafting through the forrest one day, feeling kinda hungry, before stumbling on a cluster of plump reddish berries. He’ll skip around them for a bit, sizing them up and being like, “Hey, berries, awesome.” But that brief moment will probably be ruined by a bunch of YELLOW KRAZEE ANTZ who will come marching over all like, “OH HAI! OMG you guys, I can’t believe we ate an entire pie for BREAKFAST!!!!!1!!!” and the Christmas Island White-eye will roll his eyes, all sarcastic, like, “Oh okay… CRAZY…! Now listen, ants. I’m pretty hungry, and I just found these berries, so would you… umm, hey excuse me, you’re kind of in my way, I was just going to peck there and erm…”


• At Starts With A Bang Ethan posts a series on dark matter: Gazing out into the dark abyss of the night sky, stars, galaxies, and clusters shine like tiny islands of light against the blackness of deep space. Trillions upon trillions of protons and neutrons fuse together in stars across the Universe, producing all of this light, and decorating the sky above.But, as we learned in part one of this series, the starlight that we see only accounts for 2% of all the matter that gravity tells us is there. What's more than that, is that we can figure out how much normal matter (i.e., stuff made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, etc.) is around. We explored this in part 2, and found that this brings us up to maybe 15-20% of the total, but no more. So, where do we go from here? Do we invent a new type of matter, and give it some bland, generic name like dark matter, or do we conclude that gravity is lying to us, because we've been using the wrong theory?


• Razib at Gene Expression discusses why ligers are huge: Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to produce viable offspring (in fact, many ligers are fertile as well). Here's the explanation.


• At Cognitive Daily Dave blogs on research that shows we're less likely to cheat if we see our enemies doing it: Clearly this "tradition" of petty theft was something we learned from our classmates -- but what exactly led us to believe that our unethical behavior was "okay"? It could be that since we saw no one getting caught or punished, we decided we wouldn't either. Or perhaps because the behavior was so widespread we never considered that it might be wrong. Or maybe our own sense of morality was modified by what we saw our friends doing. A team led by Francesca Gino devised a clever study to test some of these explanations for unethical behavior by groups. .


• At Why Evolution Is True Jerry tells us about another evolutionary prediction fulfilled: One of the puzzles in the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs appears to have been solved, at least according to this BBC report (I haven’t yet read the paper, which hasn’t been published). The discovery of pre-Cretaceous feathered dinosaurs fulfills a prediction that I — and of course many others — have made about what the fossils should show about the temporal existence of feathered dinos. The transitional “bird-lizard” Archaeopteryx had fully-formed feathers, but all of the feathered dinosaurs found in the last few years have been younger than Archaeopteryx. This leaves a gap, since the oldest transitional form already has well-formed feathers.

Enjoy!