Fieldnotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning

Fieldnotes is a weekly collection of links to some interesting blog posts and articles about science all over the Web. You will find a new set of suggestions here every Thursday.

As a chronobiologist, and as a night owl who managed to figure out how to be productive and useful in early mornings during protracted periods several times in my life, I naturally liked No, Mornings Don’t Make You Moral by Maria Konnikova on her blog at The New Yorker.

... “Our results should really dissipate those stereotypes of morning people being more saintly,” Sah says. “The important thing is the match.” Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences. We are expected to function well early in the morning. We can’t just wake up when our bodies tell us to and work when we feel at our peak....

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Leopard-spotted horses of Pech Merle

Horses have always played a big role in my life. Evolution (and the rest of biology) is likewise one of my major obsessions. Putting the two together in a fascinating way, Darren Naish wrote Spots, Stripes and Spreading Hooves in the Horses of the Ice Age on his Tetrapod Zoology blog:

...The majority of Palaeolithic art depicts caballoid horses that looked much like – if not exactly like – the wild horses that survive today on the Asian steppes. And, thanks to the Selerikan horse, we have direct evidence that some Pleistocene horses did indeed look like this. But good, consistent cave art indicates that horses of some populations (subspecies or species?) were more elaborate in appearance, with stripes here and there, and tidily demarcated flank and belly colouring. Were some Pleistocene horses even more elaborate, with spotted coats and heads and necks far darker than those of their bodies? These are exciting concepts that make for a more vivid view of the Pleistocene world, but are they accurate? Maybe, maybe not....

Why do you feel so awful at high altitudes? A drop in air pressure and oxygen can make you feel pretty out of shape by Rebecca Harrington at Scienceline, the website where NYU science journalism students practice their craft:

Your chest heaves, lungs burning, but you can’t catch your breath. Your head pounds, vision blurring, but you feel like you’ll faint any second. You’re definitely fit enough to climb a flight of stairs without trouble — is this some sort of nightmare?....

I am also quite interested in food and agriculture. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who should have known to be more skeptical, told me about the wonders of Biodynamics, which prompted me to check it out. I found a number of excellent articles (including the one on Wikipedia) debunking this thoroughly mystical practice, but have not seen much about it lately, until this article suddenly showed up in my feed: Cult of Biodynamics: Future of farming or agrarian organic witchcraft? by Antonio Saltini at the Genetic Literacy Project:

...For those who work in the agricultural sector – that is, actual farmers and buyers and sellers of imagesagricultural produce – “biodynamics” is infamous for its oddity. It’s adherents, known as adepts, see the arrival of autumn as the time to set about burying within their fields an animal organ stuffed with rotting plants, leaving it there throughout the winter so that it can absorb the beneficial influences bountifully supplied by the stars in the invernal heavens. When spring arrives, this putrescent mess of animal and vegetable matter is then dug up and scattered over the soil, its prodigious influence apparently being far more efficacious than animal manure or – heaven forbid! – man-made fertilizers. The recipient used to capture these astral energies varies in accordance with the type of crop one hopes to grow. For example, one might use an ox skull, a stag’s bladder (the more elaborately branched the animal’s antlers, the better) or even a horn. Whether this latter should be from the left or right side of the head I am unable to say, though perhaps here one should follow the lead set by the great eighteenth-century Florentine scientist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti: in discussing similar potions in his own day, he wrily assured readers that “the right horn has the same effects as the left”.....

If you prefer your information in a graphical form, rather than a block of text, see The Snakes That Ate Florida by Andy Warner at The Nib.

Let's finish with some fun - Conspiracy Revealed: The Simpsons Has Been Lying to You, in which Phil Plait (on Bad Astronomy blog) reveals that something's been fishy on TV for many years:

But look at the Moon. LOOK AT THE MOON! It’s backwards. The scene is clearly at dinner, early evening, so that’s the setting crescent new Moon. But in the Northern Hemisphere, the tips of a waxing crescent Moon point to the left, away from the Sun (that link describes how the phases of the Moon relate to the time of day and the Moon's position in the sky)............ There’s only one way. Springfield is not in the United States at all. It’s not even in our half of the world. Springfield is in the Southern Hemisphere!...