Behavioral Ecology Blog

A map of the location of all aircrafts over the USA on Thursday, Sept 27th 2007 at 4pm PST. I bet it looks even worse in the early AM!

Are this many plans necessary? Do we travel too much? Via the NATCA

[Read more →]

Just in case you have always wondered, “old” is not an insult in the bird world… Actually, multiple studies have not shown that old birds have a competitive advantage over younger birds when it comes to extrapair access to fertile females. The latest (and one of the best in my opinion) is a a study [...]

[Read more →]

Specifically about the fuss everyone made about his visit to Columbia…
Since when do we believe that ignoring the problem leads to the solution… I for one think that it is great that he was given the opportunity to speak- Remember the saying, Know thy enemy?? People with whom we disagree still have valid points on [...]

[Read more →]

The goal is this step is to ligate double stranded linkers to each end of the DNA fragments you created with restriction enzymes. The linkers provide PCR primer binding sites for subsequent steps.. It is a pretty cool idea!
1st step is to make the double stranded linkers.. This is easy. Simple mix equimolar [...]

[Read more →]

Tuesday 9/18/07
Step 2 of the protocol calls for a restriction enzyme digest of genomic DNA. The idea is to chop up DNA into pieces small enough so that they can be easily cloned, but large enough to have a good chance of having a microsatellite AND enough flanking sequence to allow for primer development.
The authors [...]

[Read more →]

Monday I started the long process of isolating microsatellites de novo for 5 mammal species…. I’ll plan on posting a step by step account of how things are going, so interested people and family can stay up to date. But in addition to this, I hope that this series of posts will serve to [...]

[Read more →]

So Jeff Wall came to Berkeley today, and spoke to The Department of Integrative Biology on his recent work..
As many of you may be aware, Jeff is a Professor over at the Institute For Human Genetics at UCSF. His recent publication on PLoS Genetics, “Inconsistencies in Neanderthal genomic DNA Sequences“, has received a lot [...]

[Read more →]

Welcome to the 88th edition of the Tangled Bank, the best and longest running science blog-carnival out there. For the newbies, we blog about science, casting a wide net over the physical, social, and life sciences. Anybody is welcome to submit, so long as it is about science. This weeks posts come from as [...]

[Read more →]

Here are some quotes from the loser coach and the talented running back.. Notice the difference in accepting personal responsibility?
Michigan’s Coach Carr:On if this is the most difficult start to a season in his career …. “I don’t think we could have a more difficult opening than we’ve had. We had tremendous expectations, yet we’re [...]

[Read more →]

“Maybe” I suppose is the best answer I can give right now.. What we do know is that there is a strong correlation between industrial pollutants and shrinking polar bear dong’s. Now Ursids are not exactly “close relatives”, but they are mammals, and many of our physiological processes are identical… I bet the experiment [...]

[Read more →]