Stories by Jason G. Goldman

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. “The relationship between leaders and followers reflects a social contract wherein followers trust leaders to make decisions that benefit the group and leaders agree to pursue actions that are in the group’s best interests.

My contribution for the Guardian’s Science Blogging Festival has been posted! Healthy, sane humans do not stab themselves in the thighs, or bathe their eyes in lemon juice.

At least one dog can be found in forty percent of US households, and forty percent of those owners allow their dogs to sleep on their beds.

There was A LOT of stuff this week. Was this week particularly good for blogging or am I just aware of more blogs and blog posts in recent weeks?

If I had to describe the mission, the point, the raison d’etre of the entire field of psychology in just one sentence, I would say: Psychology aims to determine the relative extents to which biology and experience determine cognition and behavior.” And, as you might expect, there are widely differing schools of thought.

This talk, from last spring’s TEDxUSC (for those not in the know, USC held the first ever TEDx event, in 2009), is made of awesome, and worth watching in its entirety.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: “Now, five years later, there’s new evidence of the significant, negative impact of Hurricane Katrina on children’s mental health.” Many Children Still Haven’t Recovered from Katrina.

New-born twin giant pandas made their media debut at a zoo in Japan on Friday. The twins, one male and one female, were born on August 11 to mother Rauhin and father Eimei, by artificial insemination.

For today’s dose of monday pet blogging, head on over to a piece that I wrote for Scientific American that went up today. I used the invitation as an opportunity to a dig a little deeper into the story of Belyaev and his domesticated silver foxes (I previously wrote about them, here and here)

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week. Science Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.

As I’m sure many of you did, I recorded Phil Plait’s (twitter, blog) Bad Universe pilot last week, and it was so good that I watched it twice.

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 27th edition of the Carnival of Evolution is being served up at 360 Degree Skeptic. Lots of great posts included as usual, including my two part series on social dynamics in hyena groups: Silver Spoon Hyenas?

The universe is expanding, and so is the science blogosphere. Directly on the heels of the announcement last week of the big daddy meta-aggregator to end all aggregators, scienceblogging.org, there are not-one-but-two new science blogging networks that have launched in the last forty-eight hours.

Dogs are pretty smart. They can have huge vocabularies, they can infer meaning in the growls of other dogs, and they can effortlessly figure out if other dogs want to play or fight with them.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: “Distorted perceptions and an altered state of mind: two reasons why psychedelics have always attracted not only fascination, but also controversy for decades.” Noah Gray at Nature Blogs has curated a mini-carnival of sorts centering around a new paper called “The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: [...]

Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition. Science Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in.

Early developmental experiences can have significant implications for the growth, behavior, survival, and reproductive success of an individual.

A fascinating new paper just came out in Nature Communications and I intend to blog it in the usual manner, but I thought I’d try something new first.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week: Livia Blackburne asks what something called “visual noise exclusion” has to do with dyslexia.

Predator-prey interactions are often viewed as evolutionary arms races; while predators improve their hunting behaviors and their ability to sneak up on their prey, the prey improve upon their abilities to detect and escape from their predators.

Here’s your weekly round-up of fun and fascinating: To start with, I did a 6-part series on numerical cognition and the development of math skills, here and at Child’s Play: 1.

Two important notes for today – the full link round-up, as per usual, will come over the weekend. First, the meta-aggregator to end all aggregators.