Stories by Jason G. Goldman

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: “So, sometimes we settle for less than George Clooney or Heidi Klum.” Casey Rentz at The Lay Scientist asks do we REALLY want what we say we want, when it comes to choosing mates?

Whether you’re a dog, a cat, or a grad student who hasn’t been home to shower for a few days, fleas are a major problem. They make skin itch.

Science Someone had to ask it. Why do squirrels masturbate? Obviously, it’s a piece by Ed. Sentiment-sensing software could aid in weeding hostile online comments.

Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds – biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth.

The National Institutes of Health announced that by 2011 it will transfer almost two hundred chimpanzees from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico to a lab in San Antonio, Texas, lab for use in invasive research.

Aaron Rowe and I are organizing a tweet-up for LA-area science writers/communicators. Many of us interact daily through our blogs or through twitter, but rarely in person – so this is a chance to meet up face to face.

via Voice of America News blog: Organizers of the Commonwealth Games in India say they will try to prevent wild monkeys from disrupting the event by deploying a team of larger, fiercer monkeys to scare off their smaller cousins.

The list is growing fast – check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own – an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: American family values: where even the dull can dream! “One of the issues when talking about the effect of environment and genes on behavioral and social outcomes is that the entanglements are so complicated.

Your humble narrator finds himself sick with a cold, so here’s a post from the archives. There is considerable research on how children interact with other children and with adults, and how child development can be influenced by those interactions.

Science The NY Times had an article on why we like spicy foods…a week after I had my piece in the Guardian making the same arguments.

Ravi Iyer, a graduate student and colleague of mine at the University of Southern California in social psychology, blogs regularly about moral psychology at polipsych.com, and tweets from @ravi_polipsych.

Below the fold, you’ll find a complete listing of all tweets from #SMWUSC, in reverse chronological order.

The time is upon us. As I wrote about earlier this week, it is Social Media Week in Los Angeles, and I’m participating, liveblogging (on this post!

Morality and convention are so mired in culture that it may seem near impossible to determine the extent to which biology and environment give rise to it.

This week is Social Media Week in Los Angeles, as well as in Mexico City, Milan, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. What does that mean, exactly? Social Media Week is a multi-city global conference connecting people, content and conversations around emerging trends in social and mobile media.

We initially planned on doing these group blogcasts roughly once per month, but then, well, Pepsigate happened and blogs were moved, people were distracted, and so on.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. Dr. Shock says that Internet and Video Games Improve Reading Skills and Visual Spatial Skills in Children.

Cooperation and conflict are both a part of human society. While a good deal of the academic literature addresses the evolutionary origins of conflict, in recent years there has been an increased focus on the investigation of the evolutionary origins of cooperative behavior.

Another week, another new blog network. Go say hello to the bloggers at Wired Science. Five of the six should look familiar, if you’ve been around Scienceblogs for a while: Brian Switek, David Dobbs, Daniel Macarthur, Maryn McKenna, Rhett Allain and Brian Romans, joined Jonah Lehrer, who had already been there a few weeks.

My Child’s Play co-blogger Melody and I are the subjects of today’s Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday program. Watch us chat with eachother for about an hour on how we became scientists and science bloggers, our thoughts on the state of psychology as a field, peer review and the journal system, how the study of language learning [...]

The schwag shop has opened! Imagine how awesome your desk would look with a Thoughtful Animal mug on it. Need a bag to lug your books around in?

Quandaries such as those involving stealing a drug to save a spouse’s life or whether or not to have an abortion have historically dominated the study of the development of moral thinking.