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Storkicide
I have to point to Robert Krulwich's blog post, "Killer Storks Eat Human Babies", about the giant extinct Maribou stork relatives of Flores. When the discovery of those stork bones was reported last...
View ArticleSpider monkey followers
Anthony Di Fiore writes in the NY Times "Notes from the field" feature about his work with spider monkeys in Ecuador: "Spider monkey fathers and sons". One trick we’ve learned for locating samples is...
View ArticleReflecting on Nabokov
Carl Zimmer yesterday had a NY Times article about some new genetic work on butterflies -- the interesting thing was that the work vindicated a scenario for New World butterfly evolution that had been...
View ArticleBabies and dominance
I have a reader chock full of articles from this week's Science. One that I found interesting may not get a lot of attention: "Big and Mighty: Preverbal Infants Mentally Represent Social Dominance"...
View ArticleQuote: John Shea on the perils of interpretation
John Shea, quoted in an article about the Jebel Faya tools by writer Katherine Harmon: "When the Earth offers up what you have long been seeking, a good archaeologist needs to be on guard."
View ArticleThanking Reader readers
I just want to quickly thank all you readers who are following the site on Google Reader. I've been doing an audit of my stats from different sources, and I was totally humbled to discover that 9,176...
View ArticleJebel Faya and early-stage reduction
Simon Armitage and colleagues [1] describe archaeological remains from Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates. The assemblages come from a rock shelter in the mountain, which is around 100 km south of...
View ArticleHam the space chimp
Remembering Ham, 50 years later: "The chimp that took America into space." Fifty years ago tomorrow an African-born astronaut made it into space ahead of Soviet pioneer Yuri Gagarin. His name was Ham,...
View Article"Gutless" TV science
Martin Robbins last week posted a column with a great title: "Return to the Silence: Is theatre exposing the gutlessness of TV science?" In it, he discusses some innovative storytelling approaches, not...
View ArticleWhitman, "Beginning my studies"
Walt Whitman: Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first...
View ArticlePaying for personalized medicine
Virginia Hughes writes about the challenges on the business side of personalized medicine: "Genomics Revolution(s)". She builds the topic up from a few people pursing the information challenge of...
View ArticleGenomes to the people
Misha Angrist has written a strong guest post at Daniel MacArthur's "Genetic Future", taking a clear stand in favor of disclosure of genetic information from research studies. In response to the...
View ArticleFalling in love with your research
Matt Wedel of SV-POW gives advice on "How to find problems to work on". I don’t describe this as “falling in love” lightly. That’s what it feels like: a positive feedback loop wherein the more you...
View ArticleMoving out of academia
Kathy Weston describes in Science Careers how she came to leave her position as a research scientist in Britain: "Falling Off the Ladder: How Not to Succeed in Academia". It's a powerful dose of...
View ArticleBoas goes low
While researching another question, I have been reviewing some Franz Boas. In 1936, American Anthropologist ran a piece by Alfred Kroeber which reviewed some of Boas's ideas and work. Boas was not...
View ArticleBlogginheads: Clancy and Hawks
It's Kate Clancy and me on bloggingheads Science Saturday! Topics include, Kate's research on fertility in Poland, the variation in normal menstrual cycles, the challenges facing women in science, the...
View ArticleIs the Biological Species Concept a "minority view"?
Last week, Science ran a couple of items by Ann Gibbons that give further perspective on the discoveries last year that Neandertals and Denisovans both contributed to the ancestry of recent human...
View ArticleUW Darwin Day activities
The rest of this week is Darwin Day here at the University of Wisconsin. I have a bunch of local readers, and I want to make sure the word is out about all the activities, Thursday through Saturday....
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 9
Why do they have to bring poor Neandertals into it? The eyebrow-raising slap came in response to [former senator Rick] Santorum's recent comments that Palin was likely skipping an annual gathering of...
View ArticleFinding hidden incest
Another unexpected result of gene chips: Identifying hidden incest in the course of routine tests for developmental disabilities: Houston doctors are reporting that the newest generation of DNA...
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