Finals season
This is the time of year when hapless students all over the world turn to my blog to answer their exam questions. Of course, they don't know they're looking for my blog. They just turn to Google, cut...
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Photo
Santa Maria in Trastevere, and the moon. All the cool kids meet on the steps of the fountain in this piazza. A place to be seen.
View ArticleStone age selectivity
I'm pointing this morning to a nice recent post by Brigid Gallagher, discussing the importance of raw material and processing steps for stone age technology: "Working With Stone, Connecting the Past"....
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My Vatican visit
Today I went to the Vatican Museum. I haven't done all that many travel updates here, but I'm going to do more of them this summer because I have some interesting research travel underway. On the...
View ArticleOpen science radiocarbon databases
Last week I wrote a lot about the radiocarbon chronology of late Neandertals in Europe ("Neandertals didn't disappear before 40,000 years ago", "Neandertals of the North"). For more information about...
View ArticlePublic impact
Alice Bell on public engagement for social scientists and humanists: "Being professional about 'impact'." Me, I’m a public sector professional, and as such, I take pride in the ways in which I may...
View ArticleFrinking around Titan
From an article about exploring Saturn's moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would say: "Waves on Titan's seas will be far...
View ArticleNarrow anthro
Archaeologist (and blogger) Michael E. Smith writes some thoughts about "Why anthropology is too narrow an intellectual context for archaeology." Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips (1958) once claimed...
View ArticleBlueprints and recipes
Greg Mayer has a post on preformationism and epigenesis on the Why Evolution Is True blog:"Development is epigenetic". He later quotes Richard Dawkins in a similar light, but I'm linking because of...
View ArticleThe new wired physical anthropologists
Katy Meyers, graduate student in anthropology at Michigan State, has posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education her experience "hacking" the AAPA meetings in Minneapolis: "Using Twitter and QR Codes...
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Wolves in coyotes' clothing
Razib's post on the genetics of canids ("A map of charismatic canid genomic variation") does a nice summary of a recent paper in Genome Research, by vonHoldt and colleagues [1]. I just want to quickly...
View ArticleFun with Hawass quotes
The Guardian writes about the amazing comeback of Zahi Hawass ("Egypt's man from the past who insists he has a future"). Whether it's a comeback or just an unusually slow slide into prison is not yet...
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My turn as a science fair judge in Italy
Yesterday I had the distinctive experience as a judge of a scientific poster session, featuring the work of Italian high school students. The session was in the main lecture hall in the Physics...
View ArticleAgriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populations [1] ("Population structure within Africa:...
View ArticleSplit lumps
The Friends of Darwin blog notes that the terms "lumpers" and "splitters" in taxonomy go back to Darwin's time. The example is a letter Darwin received from Hewett Cottrell Watson. A nice piece of...
View ArticleThe Ur-museum
This is a fun story: "The story behind the world’s oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago". In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a curious collection of artifacts...
View ArticleOpen every box
Fascinating: "Unique Canine Tooth from 'Peking Man' Found in Swedish Museum Collection" Swedish paleontologists were the first scientists to go to China in the early 20th century, and they carried out...
View Article"I would run screaming away"
This is such an incredible story about the "Clovis comet" hypothesis, I don't know where to start: "Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth". Oh, well how about we start with the fact that the idea's main...
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