Stories by Jason G. Goldman

I’ve got a new piece over at the Scientific American Guest Blog: On Friday, March 11, Japan was rocked by an earthquake. People were displaced, a nuclear reactor was in trouble, and the world watched as a tsunami flooded Japan, threatened the islands of the Pacific, and ultimately hit the western coasts of North and [...]

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: Dr. Sharma asks, at his eponymous blog, what are the psychological effects of exercise on adolescents?

You kept submitting your posts all year long and watching, every Monday, to see which other posts were also entered. Then we closed the submission form.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: What should you talk about on your first date if you want a second? Not films, apparently.

Welcome to part 3 of the Science Blogging 101 series. You can find part 1 here, in which I discussed my own experiences with blogging, and part 2 here, which I discussed some of the big questions regarding audience, purpose, and so forth.

Watch this video and it might appear as if that beetle is being operated via remote control.

Studies of animal territoriality are particularly hard to conduct, because territorial behavior exists across multiple levels of analysis, from the individual animal, to groups, to entire populations.

Welcome to the second installment of Animal Territoriality Week. Today, we’ll look at a case where differences in territory size can have implications for neuroanatomy.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. Embodied cognition never ceases to amaze and entertain. Mo Costandi of Neurophilosophy has the latest – Tough and tender: How touch affects sex categorization.

It seems that everyone becomes an amateur animal behaviorist while walking their dogs. They notice that their dogs tend to pee on, well, just about everything, and infer that Fido is marking his territory.

The narrator laureate of the science world, David Attenborough, describes the birth of a baby grey kangaroo.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. “Whether it’s a raised eyebrow or curl of the lip, we usually think of emotions as conveyed through facial expressions and body language,” writes BPS Research Digest’s Christian Jarrett.

Lots of animals are well aware that bigger means scarier. In stressful or aggressive situations, for example, the hair or fur of chimpanzees, rats, cats, and even humans stands up on end (in humans, given our lack of fur, this results in goose bumps) in an effort to dissuade a potential attack.

PsychBytes is an experiment: three recent findings in psychology, each explained in three paragraphs or less.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: To start us off, a pair of killer posts by tag-teaming science-blogging super-duo Kate Clancy and Scicurious.

There is a small bit of land, only about a square kilometer, that has added a new wrinkle to the story of animal domestication. This bit of land located in Northern Jordan, just southeast of the Sea of Galilee near the banks of the Jordan River, is home to an archaeological site known as ‘Uyun [...]

“At home, a young man should be dutiful towards his parents; going outside, he should be respectful towards his elders.” -Confucius (Chinese philosopher, 551-479 BCE) “Your real boss is the one who walks under your hat.” -Napoleon Hill (American author, 1883-1970) Those two quotations reflect a cultural difference in how people construct their own conceptions [...]

Yesterday I posted this photo and offered up a prize for the best caption. “Well, me and Joan been together…oh, ‘most forty years now.

This photo, titled “Zookeeper Ernie Bowman and Hippopotamus, Joan, London, 1934″ comes to us via The Guardian. Comment with your best photo caption – as many as you want.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: I believe this is the first time I’ve featured a cartoon in my weekly editor’s selections.

Part 2 of the n00b Science Blogging 101 series concerns the big questions of blogging: audience, purpose, and so on. You can find part 1 here, in which I discussed my own experiences with blogging to provide adequate context for this and the remaining posts in the series.

Painstaking scientific research has identified seven dating tips that could boost your chances on Valentine’s Day … including shouting in his right ear and scaring him witless.

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of speaking via Skype with Dan Simons‘s graduate-level science writing class. We talked about the ins and outs of academic blogging, and the nature and ecosystem of science communication online, and the students asked some terrific questions.