Platypus Found: WATER Institute on NPR

Friday, May 9, 2008

WATER Institute on NPR

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes WATER Institute will be featured on the Friday, May 16 broadcast of NPR's Science Friday. I know these folks a little. They and the issues they discuss are important and interesting.

More on the broadcast here.

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Books I've Found Worthwhile Recently

Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Deception Point by Dan Brown
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Greek Mythology for Everyone: Legends of the Gods and Heroes by Donald Richardson
Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records by Gary Urton
The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths translated by Padraic Colum
The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Republic by Plato
The Symposium by Plato
Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

On Platypuses

Platypuses—yes, that's the preferred plural—are quite remarkable creatures. Not only are they egg-laying mammals, but they have a sixth sense. Their duckbills function as an electrosensory organ, similar to how dolphins use echolocation, only with electromagnetic fields instead of sound waves. They are so sensitive that many a platypus died of sensory overload from being transported by boat across the Pacific.

The platypus is known as a peculiar creature, with attributes seemingly cobbled together from any number of other animals, but that's only because of our frame of reference. It's certainly well adapted to its own environment, swimming in rivers and swamps and darting across land, burrowing into underground mud nests. Females lactate but have no teats; young obtain milky secretions directly from their mother's underbelly. Males have a poisonous horny spur—presumed a weapon in courtship fights.

Although the species is threatened by habitat destruction, the platypus' survival reminds us of the artificiality of humankind's categorical systems in the face of natural spontaneity, adaptation, and diversity. And also emboldens those among us who can relate to taxonomical isolation.

Platypus Found

Friday, May 9, 2008

WATER Institute on NPR

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