The first sea turtle eggs rescued from the Gulf have hatched! From the Associated Press:
About 700 sea turtle nests — each containing about 100 eggs — are being trucked from oiled shores along the Gulf to Cape Canaveral, where they're kept at a climate-controlled facility. The turtles are being released into the Atlantic as they hatch. Scientists feared that a generation of the imperiled species would die if they hatched and swam into the oil.
One small step toward restoration. One giant leap for the oil spill's tiniest refugees. They face a tough road ahead. Godspeed and good luck little dudes!
(Photo: The Ocean Conservancy)

There may be no game simpler than tag. To play, you need nothing but a few friends and some energy. In fact, tag is so easy to play that it reaches other primate species: Gorillas like to play, too.

Marina Davila Ross and colleagues spent three years watching and filming gorilla colonies at Germany and Swiss zoos for a study now out in Biology Letters. They shot footage of 21 different young gorillas goofing around in a game that resembles human children playing tag.

Like human tag, one gorilla runs up to another and taps, hits, or outright punches the second. The hitter then usually runs away, attempting to avoid being hit back. Davila Ross and her colleagues also noticed that, like kids, the gorillas would reverse roles, so sometimes the first hitter would be the tagger, and vice versa. All African great apes appear to play tag, and younger apes play it much more often than their elders. Tree-dwelling orangutans likely also play a similar game, but not on the ground, according to Davila Ross [Discovery News].

Gorillas games, like their analogues in human kids’ games, would seem to play a role in social development and learning to play nice with each other. Gorillas strike each other pretty hard during play, Davila Ross says, but they’re careful not to strike too hard.

The game is thought to prepare gorillas for conflicts that might arise over food or mates. “This kind of playful behaviour lets them test their group members and learn what the borders are,” she added. “How far you can go with an individual is important for social interactions later in life” [The Guardian].

Davila Ross argues that gorilla tag is even more revealing than that. Those who are lower on the social ladder tend to be the instigators of the game, trying to get a leg up or an ego boost from besting a gorilla with more social status. Thus, she argues, the gorillas are aware of social inequities, and the competition of playing tag teaches them how to deal with unfair situations by seizing a competitive advantage, like smacking your friend and then running away.

“It remains unknown to what extent unequal play itself gives animals a more competitive edge,” the scientists write. But while further research will attack that question, one thing is clear: Humans probably wouldn’t fare well in an inter-species game of tag, as we wouldn’t describe the force with which they strike one another as “playful.”

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Video: Davila Ross et. al.

Once again, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured pictures of humanity’s presence on the Moon! This time, it’s the Apollo 16 landing site:

What an awesome picture! It was taken at local noon, so the Sun is shining almost straight down on the surface. That means there are no shadows, which de-emphasizes topology of the surface (changes in height like craters, hills, and dips) but provides brilliant contrast in brightness features.

For example, the metal and white man-made lander and rover are so bright they are saturated in the picture. However, wherever the astronauts walked they stirred up the lunar dust, creating dark spots. The more often they walked in one spot, the darker that area. So the region around the lander itself (LM) and the rover (LRV) are almost black from bootprints. You can also see lines of bootprints radiating away from the lander and other spots. Amazing!

Also marked are the locations of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) and the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) used to power it. These were a series of scientific experiments designed to learn more about the surface, interior, and environment of the Moon. The geophone line was a seismograph used to measure moonquakes generated by the astronauts themselves using — seriously — mortar shells. You might think astronauts would be nervous carrying small bombs to the Moon, but given they rode at the top of a Saturn V rocket which carried about 3 million kilograms (6 million pounds) of fuel, I can’t think a mortar or two bugged them very much.

Someday we’ll head back to this spot. When we do, we’ll learn about how our artifacts have aged, and hopefully with a few decades of advances — as well as trained scientists to poke around in situ — we’ll learn even more about our nearest neighbor in space.

There was a pretty disturbing story in the Los Angeles Times recently about how much trouble some government scientists are having in the Obama administration--which has not formally issued its promised scientific integrity rules yet. Now, organizations whose work I trust, like Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Union of Concerned Scientists, are going on record saying that there are some serious cases of science being suppressed or interfered with in various government agencies. I have not independently investigated any of the cases here, but you have got to take these kinds of charges seriously. Let's go through some claims from the Times article, to list and also to comment:
In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.
In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.
In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land. These sound like very serious charges, and should be officially looked into, if that is not occurring already. Let's continue:
In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under ...

Billy Hudson, a mathematician, writes, “I was in a introductory Number Theory class when Professor David Ferguson told me that e^(ipi) + 1 = 0. Of course, Euler’s equation had the same affect on me as it has on many undergraduate mathematicians, i.e. I was hooked. I had the equation tattooed on my arm in May of 1998, thinking that if nothing else it would be unique. I’ve still yet to meet anyone else with the tattoo, but as your site shows, there are others (although I still think I may have been the first .”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it seems that Golding and many of his admirers who are “close readers” judge The Inheritors as his finest novel.

The general outline of the plot is easy enough to find on Wikipedia, it is one of those stories about the transition from a “bushy” hominin tree of life to the dominance of H. sapiens sapiens. Neandertals are finally expiring as a species in the face of the advance of modern humans, who marginalize and extirpate all those who came before. But I get the impression that the execution of Golding’s attempt is very different from Clan of the Cave Bear. Not having read the book yet I do not know if William Golding’s depiction is up to snuff with the latest scholarship on the Neandertals (granted, I am not up to date on the latest scholarship on Neandertals!), though he did guess correctly in all likelihood as to their pigmentation. But, in light of the highly probable non-trivial Neandertal ancestry in over 80% of humans, I feel like revisiting Golding’s vision in the near future, as we carry within our genomes the shadows of both the inheritors and the dispossessed.

One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animal.” It was asked in 2004 and 2008, and its response is dichotomous between true and false. The favorable age trend I was aware of, but almost randomly I decided to control for some demographic variables, and I stumbled onto something which surprised me a bit, but in hindsight shouldn’t have: much of the greater acceptance of evolution among the youth has to do with a closing of the sex gap between men and women. Traditionally women have been more religious and Creationist in their inclinations, but far less so in Gen Y. Chart below of EVOLVED.

The convergence between men and women here seems to mirror what is occurring with religion more generally. Young men aren’t getting that much more secular, but women are, resulting in an aggregate of serious secularization.

Here are the percentages for 2004 and later in relation to attitudes toward the bible.

So some, but not all, of the closing of the “evolution gap” across sexes can be attributed to decreased belief in the core precepts of organized religion (e.g., the revealed nature of scripture). Rather, if you constrain the beliefs about evolution to those who believe that that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, you see that women are converging with men in the proportion who are theistic evolutionists, and turning away from Creationism. Among these believers, for those who were 61 or older 42% of women accepted evolution vs. 56% of men. For those in the age bracket 18-30 the proportion was 65% for both sexes.