Linkfest: Hiatus-break!

It's time to break this blogging hiatus, so I'm going to start with something easy: a Linkfest!

Link 1: Manuel Lima of Visualizing Complexity was kind enough to send me this link to a featured project, a visualization of "The Evolution of the Origin of Species." The diagrams model each edition of the book as a "literary organism," illustrating changes from one edition to the next down to sentence level! The results are highly organic, beautiful, and undeniably reminiscent of complex phylogenies:
Click the link to see how it all works... the morphs from one edition to the next are worth seeing and make the entire thing clearer.

Link 2: From National Geographic.com: Ancient Birds had Iridescent Feathers!
As someone who desperately wants to be a paleo-artist, any hint of evidence about what color fossil organisms may have been just tickles me pink! Or rather tickles me iridescent black! (On the other hand, part of what has always attracted me to paleoart is the relatively high amount of artistic liberty it can offer, but those are selfish, selfish thoughts!)

Link 3: From BBC Earth News: Axolotle verges on wild extinction.
This is truly depressing. I worked with these guys for two years as an undergrad and they are the coolest critters. Amphibian extinctions around the world have to be one of the scariest and saddest environmental problems we currently face.

Linkfest: Spider, Orangutan, and a dozen others

Last entry for the year! Hope everyone enjoys their extra second of 2008! Now some links:

From Science Daily: How the Spider Spun Its Web: Missing Link in Spider Evolution Discovered

Even in this form, spiders creep me out.

From National Geographic News: Whistling Orangutan May Hint at Language Evolution


From Wired Science: 12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

AMI Website

The Association of Medical Illustrators has finally launched their new website, and I am extremely impressed with it (especially considering what we used to have.)

Check it out: www.ami.org

Linkfest: Sexy Plumage

First, "ask and ye shall receive"! Thanks to everyone who offered and/or sent me a pdf of the nature article in my last post. The pictures look much clearer since I was able to grab them directly from the source! And I promise I'm actually going to read the entire article once I have the time!

Now a couple of links.

Science Crimes: How the Democrats Tried to Destroy Dinosaur Art - you can't make this stuff up. Politicians certainly weren't subtle back in the day.

"Work on the paleozoic museum caught the attention of William 'Boss' Tweed, the notorious figurehead of the city's corrupt Democratic political machine, who denounced the project (there was no apparent graft that could be had from an institution built around collecting fossils). Hawkins, a Londoner raised to believe in the virtue of making public declarations at Hyde Park Corner, held a demonstration in support of the museum during which he openly denounced Tweed. That evening, Tweed's henchmen entered Hawkins's studio and destroyed the dinosaur sculptures."

Early Dinosaur's Feathers Were for Show, Not Flight - A good example for demonstrating that evolution is not goal-oriented. The Jurassic Epidexipteryx couldn't fly, but sported fancy feathers which, like those of a modern peacock, could be used to entice the ladies.

"How YOU doin'?"

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death - Slightly off-topic maybe, but I found this Scientific American article too mind-blowing to not share.

"...the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?"

Er... and uh, finally, I just noticed that my lovely Coldplay evolution photo has been bumped from the front page, so here it is again, color-balanced to match my blog layout! (Oh god, someone help me!!)

Linkfest: All Hail The Great Asteroid!

Yes, it's been quiet around here for awhile. But the week of demotivation is finally over. So, to kick-start the new week, here are some links I've been saving up!

Cartophilia: A neat visual blog about maps.

Art in the Science of Medicine: An article on teaching visual literacy. "The research, headed by Dr Joel Katz from the HMS Medicine Education Office, revealed that undergraduate medical students taking a class in fine art had a 38% improvement in their ability to make accurate clinical observations."

Big-Brained Animals Evolve Faster: From Science Daily

Wolf is to Thylacine as Crayfish is to What? The answer is Palæmon, a type of freshwater prawns. Convergent evolution rocks.

Artist gives 'life' to remains of prehistoric animals: Keny Marshall has a really cool job putting together dinosaur skeletons for exhibits.

Illustrating the Unknown: An art exhibit by Adrian Hatfield. I wish I had this man's color sense.

“What I really have tried to focus on was the visual language science uses to convey information ... And also how creative decisions and aesthetics fill in so many of the gaps that we don’t know … But for example, if a scientific illustrator is doing an illustration of a dinosaur, he has a very limited amount of knowledge. So everything else—their color, whether they had head feathers are if they didn’t have feathers—a lot of the aspects of it are just made up by the artist.” - Adrian Hatfield

And finally, from ShortMinds Webcomic:

Linkfest

Good news for those of you who had trouble viewing Julian's animation on Microevolution--it is now being hosted on the U of T Biomedical Communications' site. He updated the original post with the new link, but since not everyone's going to be hanging out in my archives, I figured I'd let you all know with a new post. Unless you are hanging out in my archives... why would you do that?

Also, if you like beetles, and who the hell doesn't, here is an amazing collection of beetle photographs by Poul Beckmann called Living Jewels. I wish I knew how he got them all so perfect; they don't even have pins through them! (Found the site through Bug Girl's Blog a while back).

And finally, since three is a nice round number, here's an older article from NewScientist on Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals. They are: culture, mind reading (deception), tool use, morality, emotions, and personality.