Mokele

Generally, anything attributed to the moon other than tides is BS

Probably a function of both your core temperature (which may be slightly higher than normal) and your natural tendency to shed heat. If you naturally don't shed as much heat as other people, you'll not feel 'cold' as easily, since 'cold' is really just your body signaling that it's losing heat too fast. However, because you don't shed heat as fast as others, in warm temperatures you cannot get rid of excess heat as well, and your body overheats, resulting in the preception of warmth.

More specifically, your body's "temperature sense" is most strongly tied to your core body temperature - your limbs aren't as vital to keep warm as your organs, after all. So if you've been running, which generates a lot of heat, you'll feel warm and sweat. If it's a cold day, the sweat will evaporate rapidly, making your skin cold, while your core still hasn't dropped to a low enough temperature yet to stop the sweating and feeling of warmth.

Yep, pretty much any sort of powder will help clot blood. Or even non-powders that have enough absorbancy to draw out the fluid and leave a mass of platelets to start the clot. That's why little scraps of toilet paper stop the bleeding from shaving cuts.

Some algae species live in Antarctica, and thus could theoretically survive on Mars. However, an important consideration is the Q10 rule - in general, any biochemical reaction will drop in speed by 1/2 for every 10 degree Celsius temperature drop. Thus, while the algae could photosynthesize on Mars, they'd do so very, very slowly.

Which is precisely why scientists are often so leery of talking to the media - because they *always* get it wrong.

I suspect it's not that simple, and that the regeneration ability has been deliberately lost. Mammals are fairly unusual in their risk for cancer, in large part because we have such a super-fast metabolism which constantly spits out DNA-damaging waste. As a result, to keep cancer at bay until old age, we've had to discard some formerly useful genetic traits in favor of maximal developmental and genetic stability. We've lost regeneration so that cancer cells have to recreate cellular immortality, holding them at bay just a little longer. It's the same think with our necks. Why do most mammals have just 7 neck vertebrae, while the number varies with evolution in other lineages? Because of the desperate needs for developmental stability in the face of such a fast metabolism. Kids born with cervical ribs have a 125x higher rate of cancer. Not 125%, 125 times. Conversely, the only mammals who depart from 7 cervical vertebrae are sloths and manatees, known for their slow metabolisms. Mokele

The paper in question merely suggests an *extra* response by females to longer-term stress. It actually explicitly spells out that both females and males display the same response to immediate, short-term stress (like a monster jumping out of a bush).

Wait, at first you seem to get that evolution isn't forward progress, but at the end of the paragraph, you imply it is? Why the disconnect? What on earth are you graphing? All you're doing is drawing random curves through made-up numbers. Mokele

Other way around - the SNS stimulates the adrenal glands. I was taking Medical Anatomy (the one first-year medical students take), which includes cadaver dissection. Teaching, actually. In our program, everyone takes Medical Anatomy, then teaches it for the next 2 years. My research is currently focused on frogs, but they do indeed possess mostly fast-twitch muscle.

Pretty much, yeah.

PNAS does that? Damn, my faith in the system just gets lower and lower all the time. Obviously peer review isn't perfect, but it's sure better than the alternative.

Clots still form, but no scarring.

It's absolute, utter bullshit. First, testosterone has NOTHING to do with the fight or flight response. That's adrenaline. Second, women *do* have testosterone, just at lower levels. Third, and more importantly, adrenaline is only a small part of the fight-or-flight response. The most important part is the sympathetic nervous system, and I can guarantee that women have this, because I just spent several weeks picking these nerves out of the corpse of a 93-year old woman. Morbid Mokele

Yes, but a paper with an N of 1 wouldn't make it through any sort of peer review at all. The problem is, PLoS doesn't have true peer review - it says right in the documentation that they can publish articles immediately if an editor signs off on it. And it shows - "sexy" articles have been published with gross flaws such as totally inadequate knowledge of prior work or the aforementioned N of 1.

According to the MSDS of that chemical, it's corrosive and painful, so it's probably not a good idea to apply to wounds. The clotting effect is probably just due to the powdery nature of the substance giving the platelets something to hold onto and form a clot faster.

I've seen papers in both PLoS ONE and PLoS Biology that are, well, utter crap.

It's rather odd that science, so advanced in so many respects, seems to be so backwards with respect to publishing. The problem is, PLOS is...well, it's got a lot of problems, including some pretty egregious failures of peer-review and quality control.

I've edited the poll to add "Biology" and "other" I'm definitely biology, though my field overlaps strongly with physics - I study the mechanics of animal locomotion, in terms of forces, power, stability, etc.

If it doesn't set seed, you're pretty much screwed. The only way to genetically manipulate an asexual plant in any way is via tissue culture, which means you'd have to set up this big, complex system for harvesting tissue, making media, keeping media sterile, doing transfers, etc. It's possible (there are several books on home tissue culture), but it's a HUGE pain in the ass.

It'd be just shots in the dark unless to know what gene you're targeting, and have some idea of the gene's sequence. There is one possibility - using colchicine to induce polyploidy (whole genome duplication), which often results in stronger, larger, faster-growing plants (though they're often sterile). However, colchicine is also fairly nasty as a carcinogen, so I doubt you can find it without permits. Or you can just select on natural variants in a large population of seeds.

Are we? Opsins can vary between individuals, and it's possible that my red is not the same as your red by just a bit. Remember, we don't learn color names from anything absolute - our parents point to a blue ball and say "blue", so we call it blue. Imagine someone with a hypothetical mutation that causes them to shift the color wheel one value (red is orange, orange is yellow, yellow is green, green is blue, etc.). Because they can still distinguish the colors, they'll just give each the "wrong" label as they learn, and such an individual would call a ball blue just as I do, even though what they actually see, what they have labeled as 'blue' is different from what I see and what I've labeled as 'blue'.

I think the main issue is that "ring species" hinges on geography. What you describe for dogs would be more like simple divergence, admittedly incomplete divergence. The biological species concept (that the definition of species is being unable to breed) is not without its flaws, and how it applies to domesticated species is tricky, to say the least. Generally, most biologists don't consider "breeds" of any domesticated organism (plant or animal) to be species.

From the IUCN Red List: Atelopus longirostris Status: Extinct Chrysophyllum januariense Status: Extinct Cnidoscolus fragrans Status: Extinct Conuropsis carolinensis (Carolina Parakeet) Status: Extinct Craugastor chrysozetetes Status: Extinct Cryosophila williamsii (Root-spine Palm) Status: Extinct in the Wild Discoglossus nigriventer (Hula Painted Frog) Status: Extinct Elaphurus davidianus (Père David's Deer) Status: Extinct in the Wild Pop. trend: increasing Ilex gardneriana Status: Extinct Juscelinomys candango (Candango Mouse) Status: Extinct Madhuca insignis Status: Extinct Myrcia skeldingii Status: Extinct Philautus travancoricus Status: Extinct Pouteria stenophylla Status: Extinct Pradosia glaziovii Status: Extinct Rheobatrachus silus (Southern Gastric Brooding Frog) Status: Extinct Rheobatrachus vitellinus (Northern Gastric Brooding Frog) Status: Extinct Sterculia khasiana Status: Extinct Taudactylus diurnus (Mount Glorious Torrent Frog) Status: Extinct Traversia lyalli (Stephens Island Wren) Status: Extinct Vanvoorstia bennettiana (Bennett's Seaweed) Status: Extinct Wendlandia angustifolia Status: Extinct Note: this is just a list of species (22 of them) that went extinct due to residental and commercial development. If I add in other factors that destroy habitat, such as climate change, pollution, mining, and habitat fragmentation, the total jumps to 137. The species killed by invasive species or hunting get all the press because it's 'sexier' than "and then we built a car park over the last breeding pond, and they all died." You completely missed the point. Bird species losses are not going to be subject to the same factors are losses in beetles, worms, fish, and a thousand other species that are much more representative of earth's biodiversity. I'm not disputing the causes of those, I'm saying they're a poor example to generalize from. I agree, and said so in my initial response to the OP. However, what we have already done is enough to qualify as a minor mass extinction, especially when you consider all the Pleistocene megafauna we've killed. It's also worth noting that just because something isn't dead yet, doesn't mean it will survive. Some endangered species have such low populations that nothing can save them - inbreeding depression will finish what we started. Hell, look at Lonesome George, a single Galapagos tortoise who represents the last of his species. Granted he'll probably live another 70 years, but when he dies, that's it. Mokele

Read the links above. While there are problems in resolution for past extinctions, we actually have a very good idea of current rates. Your insistence on 'per year' is splicing the system into irrelevantly small units - per decade or even per century are more than sufficient gradations. Hi. He's right. Remember, speciation often occurs due to geographic separation, and those separations can be small (a river, a ridge of hills, or a tract of different habitat). Many species have highly restricted ranges, and those ranges are being wiped out. Irrelevant and a poorly chosen example. Birds have huge ranges, and can often find new habitat with ease. Remember, if we killed every single mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish on the planet tomorrow, that would barely be a blip against the background rate of extinction, since they make up a measly 0.1% of living species. In contrast, there are 250,000 species of flowering plants, which, barring some crappy sci-fi movies, cannot move when the people with chainsaws come. Biodiversity = beetles, snails, and flowers You realize that the best estimate of 'background extinction rate' is 1 per year, right? That means by your own numbers, we have a 200-fold increase in extinction. 1/10th of that many species is a much more widely-accepted number, reducing the duration to 45,000 years. But even 450,000 years is less than half the estimated duration of the Permian extinction. Congrats, you just proved yourself wrong. You also make some unfounded assumptions, such as that the Permian 90% figure reflects 90% of all life, not 90% of *fossilized taxa*. You can immediately throw unicellular organisms out, since they don't fossilize at all well, and also throw in a hefty bias towards things that a) are big and b) have hard parts. Vertebrates account for less than 0.1% of all animal life (let alone all organisms), but account for a much greater proportion of fossils, especially on land. Consider that there are currently 15,000 species of annelid worms, but in the fossil record, most will just show up as "worm" or "worm burrow", because the fossils don't preserve enough to allow us to make out species. It's difficult to get fossil arthropods to below family-level classification, if even that, and most never fossilize. Now, consider that big things that fossilize easily are also at greater risk for extinction. Big animals needs more resources, thus more habitat per individual, meaning that a habitat of a given size can support fewer. Small populations are at greater risk of extinction than large ones, so for big animals, the loss of, say, 50% of their habitat is a much bigger problem than for something 1/10th their size. So from the perspective of fossils, you'd see extinctions as being much more severe and rapid than they actually are. If we restricted our current inventory to what some hypothetical future paleontologist would see, the rate would seem much more rapid compared to the known number of species. I would also like to point out that you seem fixated on the End-Permian event and the K-T event. These happen to be two of the three biggest (the second biggest is the Ordovician-Silurian event), but other, smaller mass extinctions have occurred more commonly, resulting in "minor" losses of 20% of species or so. Mokele