Mac attack
From satirical site Glossy News: "Painting of Big Mac Found in Neanderthal Cave". “What is most striking about this painting,” says Bouisquet, “is that this is precisely the time period during which...
View ArticleOlder and younger Acheulean in India
Shanti Pappu and colleagues [1] report on date estimates resulting from new excavations at the old site of Attarampakkam, India. The news element is that they date an Acheulean occurrence to as old as...
View ArticleViolet eyes
Oh, I suppose I should go ahead and link to that Elizabeth Taylor mutation article: Double rows of eyelashes are usually the result of a mutation at FOXC2, a gene that influences all kinds of tissue...
View ArticleTortoises down
John Wilkins comments on an old fable, often attributed to William James, in the service of commenting on the snooty attitudes toward common folk beliefs ("Turtles all the way down"). The anecdote in...
View ArticleGoodall record digitization
Jason Goldman covers the acquisition of Gombe chimpanzee records from the Jane Goodall Institute by Duke University ("Digitizing Jane Goodall's legacy at Duke"). Now, researchers at Duke University are...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 12
British wine guru, Oz Clarke, of Top Gear-head James May as he teaches him how to judge wine and squash grapes: Time to show the wine Neandertal how it's done. Now, I think there's a more than decent...
View ArticleScience Pub, day of creationism
I had a wonderful afternoon Sunday at the Madison Science Pub. The featured guest was Ron Numbers, the historian of science at UW-Madison whose research has focused on the origins and history of the...
View ArticleE-mail etiquette guide
This etiquette guide from Nature Education is enormously useful for students: "How to send a professional e-mail to a professor". I could not possibly count the number of "Hey, John" e-mails I've...
View ArticleHoudini and Doyle
John Rennie wrote last week on the occasion of Houdini's birthday about the great magician's efforts to disabuse the spiritualist beliefs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creater of Sherlock Holmes ("How did...
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Finding more Neandertal genes, chromosome 19 edition
When I last wrote about the Neandertal genome, I showed that across the X chromosome, Europe and China have different Neandertal genes. There is overlap between the two, but as a generalization few...
View ArticleDarwin's Y
The Telegraph has done a puff piece about the Genographic testing of Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson. Last week I got to attend an incredible panel discussion that focused on the issue of genetic...
View ArticleBrain scans and gene scans
Wray Herbert notes the fallacy of interpreting fMRI and other brain imagery as especially meaningful: "The Brain Is Not an Explanation". I'm pointing to this because of the similarities between brain...
View ArticleJoshua Foer's memory racket
For Sunday morning (here in California, still, although it's fading into afternoon in my native land), I can point you to a book excerpt by Joshua Foer, from his new book, Moonwalking with Einstein:...
View ArticleSAA Twitter feed curation
You don't have to be on Twitter to follow the tweets from the Society for American Archaeology conference in Sacramento. Nicolas Laracuente (@archaeologist) has been using Storify to collate tweets...
View ArticleBlogging archaeology
Following up on Nicolas Laracuente's Storify collections of tweets from the SAA meetings, I wanted to point to his compilation from the Blogging Archaeology session. It was a great session, organized...
View ArticleThe "gay caveman"
I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the "gay caveman" story. No, I don't mean the Geico caveman who likes mango duck breast and who has Talia Shire as his therapist. His...
View ArticleBest open letter ever
I so totally wish I'd thought of this first: "An Open Letter To People Who Think They Have Found The Artifact That Will Change Archaeology As We Know It" Don't get me wrong, I really do want to see...
View ArticleGleick interview on information
The Guardian has an interview with James Gleick about his new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. The book focuses in part on Claude Shannon and his development of information theory,...
View ArticleOpening up paleontology
Ewen Callaway writes in Nature News this week on open access science in paleontology: "Fossil data enter the web period". I write about this topic quite a lot. Me last year on the NSF data management...
View ArticleHard-headed science
Scicurious has been blogging from the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting. This morning she writes about some of Lynn Copes' work: "Experimental Biology Blogging: On Thick Skulls and...Chewing." Copes...
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