Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• At Afarensis he blogs on research studying cooperation among spotted hyenas: PhysOrg.Com has an interesting item on problem solving and cooperation in spotted hyenas. The item concerns recent research published in Animal Behavior. From PhysOrg.Com: Drea’s research, published online in the October issue of Animal Behavior, shows that social carnivores like spotted hyenas that hunt in packs may be good models for investigating cooperative problem solving and the evolution of social intelligence. She performed these experiments in the mid-1990s but struggled to find a journal that was interested in non-primate social cognition.


• At The Loom Carl Zimmer tells us about a very early hominid: Meet Ardipithecus. This introduction has been a long time coming. Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the fossils they had unearthed. “Later,” it turned out, meant 15 years. I’ve mentioned before how unfashionable this slow-cooked style of science can be. But sometimes, it’s the only way to do things right.


• At Skulls in the Stars is a post on a 1902 paper on invisibility: When discussing the history of invisibility physics, I typically cite Ehrenfest’s 1910 paper on radiationless motions as the first publication dedicated to the subject. Ehrenfest’s paper, which attempts to explain how electrons could oscillate in a classical atom without radiating, is a direct precursor to the long history of nonradiating sources and nonscattering scatterers that I’ve been chronicling on this blog. However, it turns out that Ehrenfest was not the first author to discuss some form of invisibility! I recently stumbled across an article in an early issue of the Physical Review: “The invisibility of transparent objects,” by R.W. Wood, 1902. It is not an earth-shattering paper, but it presents some intriguing ideas and suggests that visions of invisibility may go even further back in the sciences...


• At Uncertain Principles Chad blogs on breakfast cereal and volume packing: Cereal-wise, I tend to alternate between Cheerios (which we also buy for SteelyKid) and Raisin Bran-- my parents never bought sugary breakfast cereal, so I never developed a taste for any of those things. Being the ridiculous geek that I am, I've noticed something about the relative amounts of milk and cereal I use for the two different brands.


• And at Why Evolution Is True Matthew posts on what breeders thought they were doing before genetics: There was indeed artificial selection for general dog shape/behaviour, presumably going back even before the 17th century. However, the point being made in the article (and in my post) is that contained in the final part of David’s comment. Pedigree breeds, with strict control of breeding, and the development of so many more kinds of dog breed, beyond the key hunting types, with a few pets thrown in (like the King Charles Spaniel), is indeed extremely recent. Most of the examples of coat variation described in the article have accumulated in less than 200 years. The second, and more intriguing point, relates to what on earth all those dog breeders thought they were doing prior to the 19th century. For evolution by natural selection to occur, you need three conditions: characters need to be variable between individuals, some element of that variability needs to be inherited, and the variability must affect fitness (ultimately expressed in terms of the number of copies of the genes underlying the character that are present in the next generation).