The Sciences
World's Largest Aquatic Insect Reportedly Found in China
Hello, giant friend, and welcome. Please step through the hallowed gates of "World's Biggest" and join your freakishly long, abnormally bulky peers.
"Evolution"
Evolution
Scopes Monkey Trial: Guilty
July 21 is verdict day in the infamous Scopes "Monkey" Trial of 1925. The verdict came in from a jury in Dayton, Tenn., that John Thomas Scopes had committed the crime of teaching evolution to students at his high school, for which transgression he was fined $100...
Some Spider: My House Spider Took Out a Scorpion
Two scorpions, actually. One of the more unpleasant facts about life in the Deep South is the sheer number of insects who call your house home.
Evolution
Bread Wheat Genome Contains "Shocking" Plot Twist
“Wheat P1210892” by Copyright © 2007 David Monniaux – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Yesterday scientitsts announced in a quartet of papers in the journal Science that the draft genome of bread wheat — Triticum aestivum — had been decoded and mapped...
De Loys’ Ape and what to do with it
Purely because the time feels about right, I thought I’d post an excerpt from the cryptozoology-themed book that John Conway, Memo Kosemen and myself published last year – Cryptozoologicon Volume I (Conway et al...
The Sciences
"Gene Drives" And CRISPR Could Revolutionize Ecosystem Management
A note from the authors: With this guest blog post we want to share the key features of an innovative method for the high-precision genome editing of wild populations that has been outlined by our team at the Wyss Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health...
A detailed look at the microbes that grow on cheese
My new lab’s paper is out! I had nothing to do with this work (it was submitted just before I joined), but it’s an incredibly exciting study investigating the diverse microbial communities that grow on cheese rinds...
The Sciences
Baby Mountain Gorillas Celebrated by 40,000 People in Rwanda
Well I just found something to add to my bucket list. Earlier this month 40,000 people gathered in Rwanda for the 10th Kwita Izina, the annual ceremony that celebrates and names all of the known mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) born during the previous year in the Virunga National Park Transboundary Collaboration, which stretches across [...]..
What can teeth tell us about our prehistoric ancestors?
Our distant past is just that: the distant past. It’s this murky place that science is slowly filling in but the landscape still largely exists just on the periphery of our imagination, and it’s dominated by raw, somewhat violent natures...
Amazing New Eminem Parody by A Capella Science
The genius that is Tim Blais has come up with a fantastic new parody video to the tune of Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’. Called ‘Eminemium – Choose Yourself’, the video is a compilation of many levels of Blais, doing his own singing, rapping and background sound...
Amazing new Eminem Parody Music Video from A Capaella Science
The genius that is Tim Blais has come up with a fantastic new parody video to the tune of Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’. Called ‘Eminemium – Choose Yourself’, the video is a compilation of many levels of Blais, doing his own singing, rapping and background sound...
The Sciences
Tiger Skins Are Like Fingerprints; Could That Help Stop Smugglers and Poachers?
Last month forest rangers in India arrested a 21-year-old engineering student and his friend who had been caught carrying a tiger skin that they intended to sell for nearly $25,000.
Evolution
DNA Finds New Octopus Species Hiding in Plain Sight
Describing a new species for science is not quite as easy as it was in the days of 17th- or 18th-century naturalists. But that just means we have to look a little more closely.
Mind & Brain
A Good Man is Hard to Find, So Here’s an (Evolutionary) Tip
We’re herd animals... especially the female members of our species when it comes to their dating instincts. That’s the conclusion one might reasonably draw from the results of a new study in press at the journal Human Nature...
The events of TetZooCon 2014
The world's very first Tetrapod Zoology Convention - we're calling it TetZooCon - happened on Saturday 12th July, and what fun it was. Our venue: the London Wetland Centre, a Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust conservation park officially opened in 2000 and situated in Barnes, west London...
Mind & Brain
Scientific Heretic Rupert Sheldrake on Morphic Fields, Psychic Dogs and Other Mysteries
For decades, I’ve been only dimly aware of Rupert Sheldrake as a renegade British biologist who argues that telepathy and other paranormal phenomena (sometimes lumped under the term psi) should be taken more seriously by the scientific establishment...
Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon
The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American‘s quality standards.
Evolution
Seven New Species of Pill-Millipede Found in Madagascar
http://www.pensoft.net/news.php?n=394&SESID=5eebde6fd8471b050adfb405b7a280b9http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/7730/integrative-revision-of-the-giant-pill-millipede-genus-sphaeromimus-from-madagascar-with-the%C2%A0description-of-seven-new-s...
Science Merit Badges
I was only in the Girl Scouts for a few years, but I really like the idea of merit badges: you do a task, master a skill, learn something new, and you get a physical token of your achievement to display on a sash...
Mind & Brain
Voices Carry (Signals of Your Sexual Intent and Reproductive Value)
If you really want to know if someone is into you - as in, wants to have your babies - never mind what they say. It's all in how they say it.
