Skulls in the Stars

I noticed recently that, after December, we have no hosts lined up for the history of science blog carnival!  If you’re interested in hosting over the next few months, please leave a comment, or let one of the carnival managers, Dr. SkySkull or ThonyC, know!  (If you have a nice idea for a special edition of the carnival, let us know that, too!)

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• Study: More Privilege Means Less Empathy. David Berreby at Mind Matters describes some interesting research that suggests that, the higher up in social status one is, the less empathy one has for others.  Though it will surely be used as political fodder, the study has important implications for the study of class relations.
• Lunar lost and found. Forty years ago, a Soviet  lunar rover landed on the Moon.  Though it provided some initial data, it was more or less lost until recently, when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found it again!  Emma at we are all in the gutter provides the details.
• To see the world in a grain of sand – movement from a turtle hatchling’s perspective. This may sound like a biology post, but it also includes a significant amount of physics!  Turtle hatchlings must deal with a daunting variety of sand conditions in their voyage from next to water, and their motion is optimized for each condition.  Alistair Dove in Deep Type Flow takes us on a journey with the turtles, explaining how and why they move the way they do.
• The Blood of Louis XVI. Researchers are now using blood samples from the executed monarch Louis XVI to reconstruct his genetic profile.  The source of this blood is a rather ghastly one, and Terri Sundquist of Promega Connections gives us the science and the history behind it.
• Faunal Friends: Evolution and the Animal Connection. Human beings love animals; it is natural for scientists to seek to understand this rather unique tendency for cross-species bonds.  Krystal D’Costa of Anthropology in Practice walks us through the origins of our love for many creatures great and small.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and check back next Monday for more selections!

The Giants’ Shoulders #29 is now up at Heterodoxolgy, and it is an “esoteric sciences special”! The carnival focuses on the strange, alien and counterintuitive in the history of the sciences.  Thanks to Egil for putting together a lovely carnival!

Giants’ Shoulders #30, A (Scientific) Christmas Carol, will be hosted by the Ghost of William Whewell in person at his very own blog on 16^thDecember 2010 and is a celebration of the science of the 19^th century. Submissions should be made to Rebekah Higgitt or to the Giants’ Shoulders Blog Carnival by 15^th December.  (I’ve already got the perfect topic for my post!)

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• The demon is out of the bottle. No, we haven’t regressed to a superstitious era of witches and demons — we’re talking about Maxwell’s demon, a hypothetical Second Law of Thermodynamics-violating creature!  It is well-known now that this “demon” can’t violate the Second Law, but Joerg Heber at All That Matters describes an experiment that demonstrates explicitly the relationship between the demon and energy.
• Could “hairier” crops help mitigate climate warming? Humankind plays such a large role in our planet’s ecosystem that it is easy to forget that unusual and offbeat changes can affect the climate in significant ways.  Phil Camill at Global Change describes one of these odd possibilities — changing the reflectivity of the planet’s surface by using “hairier” crops — and the pros and cons of such an approach.
• Mini frog packs a powerful punch. In a wonderfully written piece, Grrlscientist of Punctuated Equilibrium introduces us to a newly-discovered species of poisonous tree frog — and the efforts to determine how it achieves its toxic “punch”.
• The Mines of the Future and of the Past. A disastrous 1527 Spanish expedition left only a handful of survivors who traveled across the Southwest for years to find save haven.  Along the way, some natives gave them a gift made of copper that sparked a mystery — where did the copper come from?  At Gambler’s House, teofilo looks into the origins of the copper artifacts used by the Southwest natives, and what those origins can tell us about our future.

Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” selections!