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Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygensprobe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of course, the really exciting stuff for us bio-freaks will come in a few months.
Continue reading “Like the Elections, Except in Outer Space”
Scrape off those stickers! AP reports that a judge has ruled that those goofy “Evolution is just a theory” stickers must be taken off of textbooks in Georgia. Now, how about those “Continental drift is just a theory” stickers on the geology textbooks?
More to read: The Tangled Bank–The Tangled Bank is a semi-regular banquet of posts from various blogs on biology. Thanks to the powers that be for including one of mine in the latest issue. Go read it for the rest, which are fascinating.
Dinosaur-eating Mammals (You heard me right): Jeff Hecht at New Scientisthas a good write-up of the discovery of a dog-sized 130-million year old mammal with dinosaur bones in its gut. Most mammals may have been humble little critters during the Age of the Dinosaurs, but at least a few seemed to have turned the tables.
Continue reading “Dinosaur-Eating Mammals (You Heard Me Right)”
The more time I spend talking to biologists, the more they remind me of detectives. I have two stories in tomorrow’s New York Times that make this connection particularly clear. In the first, E.O. Wilson attempts to solve the mystery of a plague of ants that devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World. In the second, I look at another mystery–is there life on Saturn’s moon Titan. The space probe Huygens will be falling into its hazy atmosphere on Friday to see what lurks under its cloak. I inteviewed University of Florida chemist Steven Benner who will be trying to search for signs of life in Huygens’s data. But if Titan does have life, it may not be based on DNA or even need liquid water. So how do you look for something you’ve never seen before?