evolution | Southern Fried Science

I want you to have amazing adventures with underwater robots, protecting the oceans like national parks, songs of a ice and warming, cannibals, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: October 22, 2018.

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

I want you to have amazing adventures with underwater robots. That’s why Nat Geo and OpenROV are giving away 1000 robot submarines!
National Geographic Announces Initiative to Donate 1,000 Underwater Drones to Explore the Ocean.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Get inspired with the latest TED Talk for OpenROV visionary David Lang.

Teen scientists went looking for meteorites in the Great Lakes. They found another type of alien.
- And follow these kids’ incredible expedition on Open Explorer.

Valuing the deep sea, send @mcmsharksxx to Antarctica, deep-sea mining takes a dive, explore Kiribati, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: July 9, 2018

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Melissa Márquez is fundraising to participate in a women-in-science leadership retreat that culminates in a 2.5 week trip to Antarctica. Help her out! Or back her Patreon!
The scandal-plagued, utterly ineffective, Scott Pruitt is out, just days after an American patriot told him exactly how she felt about him in a restaurant. Good.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Investing in indigenous communities is most efficient way to protect forests, report finds. This should surprise no one but it often does.
Explore the deep waters around Kiribati with OpenExplorer!

The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)

Virtual Reality Preserves Disappearing Land: Coastal communities are capturing their cultures and landscapes in virtual reality before sea level rise steals them for good.
Where Did the Oil Go In the Gulf of Mexico? a storymap.

Everything about hagfish is the best thing about hagfish, the battle for the deep-sea heats up, parasitic butt snails, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: December 17, 2017

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Andrew Thaler

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

The CDC was given a list of seven banned words for their upcoming budgets. Among the censored words are “science-based” and “evidence-based”, which, of course, are concepts central to the CDC’s mission. I have some thoughts about why this list has appeared at this time. If you think the CDC shouldn’t be censored in their mission to safeguard public health, call your representatives.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Bird and Moon author Rosemary Mosco is this week’s Hagfish Lover of note: Feeling Sick and Snotty?

Underwater robots reveal the all-you-can-eat-buffet of the deep sea.

Fun Science FRIEDay – Drug Resistant Bacteria, The Movie

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Kersey Sturdivant

In today’s FSF we bring you both a jaw dropping, and somewhat terrifying cinematic visualization of how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, and overtime can become super bugs immune to any antibiotic treatment. A concise and detailed description is presented below:

This stunning video of evolution in action captures how bacteria with no resistance to an antibiotic can in a very short time become resistant to concentrations of more than a thousand times the initial concentration. Other scientists have documented this phenomenon before, but never with such vivid clarity as that provided by Michael Bay and Roy Kishony of Harvard University.

Fun Science FRIEDay – Darwin Says Survival of the… empathetic?!

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Kersey Sturdivant

Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has been pushing an idea – Humans are built to be good, because it aids in human survival.

Photo credit: Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, UC Berkley

No bones about it

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Sarah Keartes

Hello, dear internets! Thank you for the warm welcome. I am extremely excited to be joining Southern Fried Science—talk about being in good company! For those of you who don’t know me, I am a student at the University of Oregon, where I study marine biology and journalism. I love all things science, but I have a small (ok, not so small) love for shark biology. I look forward to promoting ocean outreach through kick-ass science communication with the rest of the team, here at SFS.

Enough about me, on to some animal insides.

In honor of #unshark week’s end, I return to the awesome that is shark science. Like skates and rays, sharks are chondrichthyans, cartilaginous fishes whose skeletons are made primarily of cartilage rather than bone. Ever wonder what a mostly-boneless skeleton looks like? Sure you have (and if not, you are now thinking about it and the suspense is killing you, I say).

Shark skeletons are complex, beautiful, and thanks to Dr. Gavin Naylor, and his team at College of Charleston Naylor Lab, they are here for you to see.

Live from Dayton: Using twitter to shed light on the Scopes Monkey Trial, 87 years later

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Andrew Thaler

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, 1925

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve taken to twitter to “live-tweet” the Scopes Monkey Trial, as it happens, 87 years after the event. Through the news reports of H.L. Mencken and several historical documents, I attempted to capture the atmosphere of 1925 Dayton, Tennessee, the tension of the trial, the exciting, and sometimes irreverent, nature of the proceedings.

To accomplish this, I drew from several publications, most notably Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial a collection of Mencken’s Scopes Trial reports assembled by Art Winslow. The website The Evolution-Creationism Controversy: A Chronology was very helpful in establishing the dates for various events during the trial State v. Scopes: Trial Excerpts provided access to the public testimony for several key trial events.

Below the fold is the entire archive of my Scopes Trial tweets, with added resources and additional content. Enjoy!

What hybrid sharks mean (and don’t mean) for climate change and evolution: fact-checking the media coverage

Posted on January 6, 2012 by David Shiffman

Photo credit: study author Pascal Geraghty, New South Wales Department of Primary Industry

Last week, a team of 10 Australian scientists announced that they had found the world’s first “shark hybrids”, offspring of individuals from two different shark species which had interbred. During a routine survey of Australian marine life, 57 sharks were found that physically resembled one species of shark, but had genetic markers inconsistent with that species. Subsequent genetic investigation revealed that these 57 animals were hybrids between common blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) and Australian blacktip sharks (C. tilstoni).

Some of these hybrids were “F1″, meaning that one parents was a common blacktip and one was an Australian blacktip. Others were “B+”(backcrossed), which means that one parent was a common blacktip/Australian blacktip hybrid, and the other was a “purebreed” of one of those two species. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jess Morgan of the University of Queensland, “our genetic marker tells us that these hybrids are ‘at least’ F1, and that these animals are reproductively viable and can produce an F2…the hybrids may be generations past F2 but the existing genetic markers can’t distinguish how many generations past the second cross have occurred.”

Weekly dose of TED – Robert Full on engineering and evolution

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Andrew Thaler

We see so many powerful designs in nature, yet when we design our own structure we tend to build rigid, fixed, industrial beasts. What designs in nature inspire you? How do we break away from a culture of hard edges and inflexible machines?

A recipe for the evolution of smaller fish stocks?

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Amy Freitag

fish face a tradeoff of where to use their energy, much like the polluted fish in the Lorax by Dr. Suess

Overfishing is most often implicated as the cause of decreasing fish stocks and that makes a lot of logical sense if you’ve ever seen a large commercial trawler unload its catch. But there very well might be another force at work in the precipitous decline in fish stocks worldwide: pollution. The basic premise is that it takes resources to deal with pollutants that normally would be given to growth and reproduction. Through polluting the ocean, we have selected for the fish individuals that can most effectively divert those resources, inadvertently also selecting for smaller fish that reproduce less. That has huge implications for the fish’s population dynamics and potentially total fish stock. More details below the fold…