In honor of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12, 2009, Mike White at Adaptive Complexity decided to engage in a massive undertaking; 30 days of science in Show Me The Science month.     Nothing new, you might think, because we do science 365 days a year and some people who are just bloggers post 5 things every day.

An unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma galaxy cluster has been imaged using data obtained by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. It reveals fine details of the galaxy, NGC 4921, and an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early Universe.
 
The Coma galaxy cluster, in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice, is one of the closest, very rich collections of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The cluster, also known as Abell 1656, is about 320 million light-years from Earth and contains more than 1000 members. The brightest galaxies, including NGC 4921 shown here, were discovered back in the late 18th century by William Herschel. 

The simple recipe scientists earlier discovered for making adult stem cells behave like embryonic-like stem cells just got even simpler. A new report in the February 6th issue of the journal Cell shows for the first time that neural stem cells taken from adult mice can take on the characteristics of embryonic stem cells with the addition of a single transcription factor. Transcription factors are genes that control the activity of other genes.

Emergence of black-colored wolves is the direct result of humans raising dogs as pets and beasts of burden, according to new research by a University of Calgary biologist in Science. The dark coloring may also aid the survival of the species as wolf habitat is affected by climate change in the future, the study suggests.

Show Me The Science Month Day 9

In what is now central Pakistan, an eight-and-a-half foot long, pregnant aquatic mammal went belly-up, and sank to the bottom of the shallow coastal waters. 47 million years later, a huckster by the name of Duane Gish denied that such mammals ever existed:

There simply are no transitional forms in the fossil record between the marine mammals and their supposed land mammal ancestors . . . It is quite entertaining, starting with cows, pigs, or buffaloes, to attempt to visualize what the intermediates may have looked like. Starting with a cow, one could even imagine one line of descent which prematurely became extinct, due to what might be called an “udder failure” (Gish DT. Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record. El Cajon (CA): Creation-Life Publishers, 1985 p.78-9, quoted at Talk Origins).

Gish may have found it entertaining to imagine what a half-whale, half-buffalo looked like, but today's scientists don't have to imagine the appearance of land-based ancestors of whales. The fossil series leading up to whales tells a very detailed and remarkable story of how furry, four-legged land mammals eventually gave rise to behemoth marine descendants. A spectacular fossil find, reported yesterday in PLoS One, reveals some amazing details from the evolutionary history of whales.



Figure 5A from Gingerich, et al.

My Dear Mr. Darwin,

Happy 200th birthday! I hope you are as well as can expected for someone who has been dead for nearly 130 years. I suppose that your final book, the one about earthworms, has a special significance for you these days. Are the worms of Westminster Abbey superior to the ones you studied so carefully in the grounds of your home at Downe in Kent?   They’ve certainly mulched some distinguished people over the years!

The use of stem cell research in medical therapies has been hotly debated by the political, scientific, ethical and religious communities alike. Ethical considerations are weighed against the potential of life-saving therapies offered through the development of stem cell research.

But the debate over stem cells is no longer between adamant pro-lifers and research scientists anymore, it has grown into multiple debates over the efficacy, ethical implications, and overall viability of the different types of stem cells available.

Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, have unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species they named Titanoboa cerrejonensis. 

Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.