by Piter Kehoma Boll and Rafael Silva do Nascimento
Silene stenophylla, a 30,000 years old plant ressurected from tissue found in permafrost soil. Image by Yashina et al, 2012
News
- New life-forms formed in blue holes – Clues to life in alien oceans?, once more, an interesting life-form found in the oceans with a somewhat different chemistry for feeding.
- 165-Million-Year-Old Cricket Croonings Resurrected from Fossil, the fossil of a jurassic cricket has so well preserved wings that scientists were able to recreate its call.
- Subglacial Lake Vostok reached!, on February 5, a Russian team penetrated the subglacial lake Vostok, which was sealed under 4km of Antaric ice for at least 15 million years!
- Why zebras got their stripes, a new research suggests that zebras’ stripes avoid flies due to the polarization of light.
- Wild flower blooms again after 30,000 years on ice, a group of seeds found frozen on permafrost soil were sucessfully germinated, becoming the oldest living creatures on Earth.
- Nature is Disappearing from Children’s Books, Study Finds, a sad new. If children doesn’t get in touch with nature, how will they possibily learn do respect it?
- Strange New Leaf-Nosed Bat Found in Vietnam. Published this month in the Journal of Mammalogy, an article describing a new leaf-nosed bat having a weird protuberance on its nose.
- New Amphibians Without Arms or Legs Discovered. A new family of legless amphibians from India, closely related to the Caecilids, is described.
- Giant Prehistoric Penguins Revealed: Big but Skinny, a slender 25 million years-old penguin from New Zealand is reconstructed and looks way skinnier than modern penguins.
- Earth was spinning faster last November. Due two a slower Antarctic current, Earth spun about 0.1 millisecond faster during two weeks.
- Iceman’s DNA reveals health risks and relations. DNA of the most famous frozen corpse, Ötzi, reveals that he had brown eyes, type-O blood, was intolerant to lactose and related to people in Corsica and Sardinia.
Blog
- When Beetles Ate Dinosaurs, by Brian Switek at Dinosaur Tracking, talking about the new Nemegtomaia specimen found with bones eaten by beetles.
- World’s Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar, by Adam Mann at Wired Science, talking about the cute chameleons recently described.
- General Systematics of the Theropoda, by Marc Srour at Teaching Biology, presenting a brief review of the evolution and systematics of theropod dinosaurs.
Books
- Extinct Birds, by Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters, the first comprehensive review of the hundreds of bird species and subspecies that have become extinct over the last 1,000 years of habitat degradation, over-hunting and rat introduction. Covering both familiar icons of extinction as well as more obscure birds, some known from just one specimen or from traveller’s tales, the book also looks at hundreds of species from the subfossil record – birds that disappeared without ever being recorded.
Art
- Acrocanthosaurus by Rafael Albo – Check his gallery and see other wonderful India ink drawings!
- Tarbosaurus bataar by Rafael Nascimento – Take a look at these magnificent and realistic drawing with watercolor pencils by one of our main blog editors!
- Small Carolina Mantid by duggiehoo – I really like those macro photographies of arthropods, don’t you?
- Jellyfish by Julia Lorenzutti – Beautiful details and the drawing seems to be really shining!
Scientific Articles
- No evidence for Emotional Empathy in Chickens Observing Familiar Adult Conspecifics, apparently, chickens care a lot about their children, but don’t give a sh*t when concerning their adult friends.
- Conspecific and Heterospecific Information Use in Bumblebees, so besides learning with their own species, bumblebees can learn also while interacting with honey bees.
- Evidence for Two Numerical Systems That Are Similar in Humans and Guppies. Even fish can distinguish numerical values!
- Female Fertility Affects Men’s Linguistic Choices, so it seems that men change the syntactic construction while speaking according to the fertility of the females nearby.
- Rock Art at the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary in Eastern South America. The earliest known rock art from Americas is found in Brazil!
