“Research on chimpanzees is contentious, expensive, and of increasingly limited necessity,” wrote medical researchers in a piece titled “Guiding limited use of chimpanzees in research” published last week in the journal Science ...
It's not true that aesthetics must be be compromised for meaning. I visited the excellent Infinite Balance: Artists and the Environment show at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts earlier this week, which features the shortlist for the Prix Pictet contest, the world’s top (and only?...
One in every six species related to characters in the movie Finding Nemo is threatened by extinction, according to a new study out today. The authors examined the extinction risk of 1,568 species within 16 families of well-known marine animals represented in the 2003 Academy Award-winning animated film.All species of marine turtles (“Squirt” and “Crush”) and more than half of all hammerhead sharks (“Anchor”), mackerel sharks (“Bruce” and “Chum”), and eagle rays (“Mr...
We cannot ignore the past, and to remind us of this, the present has yielded a refreshing and essential perspective on marine science in the new book Shifting Baselines: The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries...
Today the New York Times put out their list of the top ten books of 2011. Among them, Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a remarkable read about how the human mind works and necessary material for anyone, anywhere, period...
Male fiddler crabs ( Uca annulipes ) try to get the ladies by waving their one big claw. Females prefer fast wavers, which is a lot of work (see some examples in the videos below).
Some people, like Joe Romm, want more coverage on climate change. For me, climate change is one of those subjects that I actually try to ignore. I am often silently thankful that I do not have to stare at a headline about one of the most crushing subjects of our time in the morning...
We call it 'trick or treat' but we all know the chances are much higher of getting treats on Halloween night. Similarly, it seems that scientists have a higher probability of publishing research about reward rather than research about punishment.I queried 'reward' and 'punishment' in the following databases of academic literature: Google Scholar, Scirus, Web of Science, SpringerLink, Ingenta, the journal Science, the journal Nature, and JSTOR...
Imagine you, but better. Apparently this is what most of us do most of the time. Our tendency toward self-deception is captured in Robert Trivers' Folly of Fools in bookstores this week...
My dad used to take my brother and a Macintosh in to his college classroom to show his students that even a four-year-old could use a computer. My brother (pictured right; that's me on the left) would skillfully perform some task, like playing Brickles...
LAUGHS! from Everynone on Vimeo.
About a man with an obsessed olfactory system and the red-headed virgins he cannot resist, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was written in 1985 by the hermetic German, Patrick Suskind.
1. It's explicit in the title: you get to swim with whale sharks (Rhincodon typus). It's not shark watching (although the behemoths are often easily visible from the surface): you get to get up close in the water with the largest fish in the world.2...
Most kids are heading back to school this month. Last week, my friend, a high school biology teacher in Mt. Vernon, Washington, got the inevitable: "So are you saying we're related to monkeys?" To which she replied: "I'm saying you're related to yeast." For those who disagree back to school radio ads exclaiming "It's not what you learn, but what you wear" -- here are a few favorites and soon-to-be favorites in teaching evolution:--Neil Shubin's book Your Inner Fish and, more important, his interview with Stephen Colbert;--Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True and blog of the same title; --Carl Bergstom's co-authored soon-to-be-released (November 2011) Evolution textbook;--Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos; --And, of course, South Park's version of the theory of evolution (not appropriate for all audiences)...
Ground Zero officially becomes the National September 11th Memorial today. The memorial is impressive in so many obvious ways and also in less obvious ways.
We are just one of a newly estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species, according to a study published last week in PLoS One. But it doesn’t look like we’ll get to know a lot of them.
No one wanted to eat a toothfish. It sounded gross. So in the 1970s, fishmongers marketed Patagonia toothfish ( Dissostichus eleginoides ) from the southern reaches of our globe as ‘Chilean sea bass’...
