by Greg Mayer PZ noted my and Jerry’s pieces on the new Hall of Human Origins at the USNM, and one of his commenters, DavidCOG, points to this piece at Climate Progress (based in part on Jane Mayer’s (no relation) New Yorker article on the Koch brothers), which in turn points to a couple of […]
by Greg Mayer Matthew recently asked if there is life on Gliese 581g– a newly discovered Earth-like (in some ways) planet (I’m tempted to say “class M planet“). There’s also the question of if there is life in the Solar System (Earth doesn’t count)– on Europa, or Mars, or Enceladus, say. On the same trip […]
by Greg Mayer The Hall of Human Origins, a new permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian‘s National Museum of Natural History (aka the USNM) opened last March (at which time I got only a peek), and over the summer I finally got a chance to take in the whole exhibit. Like Edward Rothstein of the New […]
PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science) is an open-access journal with an unusual mission: Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication […]
I don’t know what’s gotten into E. O. Wilson. He’s certainly the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist, and has gone from strength to strength over the years, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, writing great general books on not only ants but conservation and social behavior. And he’s kept his hands in the ant work, producing any […]
You may have seen a small flurry of reports this week about a science paper showing that “Darwin was wrong.” The paper wasn’t a creationist or ID screed, however—it was a paper in a good science journal (Biology Letters) by a crack team of paleontologists from the UK and Canada (Sarda Sahney, Michael Benton, and […]
Friday science quickie: a new paper in Current Biology reports an intriguing adaptation: the breath of mammalian herbivores induces aphids to drop off plants, saving them from being eaten along with the leaves. Three biologists at the University of Haifa in Israel noticed that two species of aphids, the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) and Uroleucon […]
A new paper in Nature on bird reproduction ends with this provocative quote from E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: “sex is an antisocial force in evolution.” What does that mean? In the case of cooperatively breeding birds, the subject of the report by Charlie Cornwallis et al., it means that the cooperation between parents and their […]
I mentioned yesterday the new Nature paper showing evidence of tool use promoting carnivory in Australopithecus afarensis. The evidence—ungulate bones with crush or cut marks that seem likely to have been made with stone tools—pushes back tool use in our ancestors/close relatives to 3.4 million years ago, 800,000 years earlier than we previously thought. I’ve […]
Going through the July 13 issue of Current Biology, I was struck by just how many interesting things you can learn from a single issue of a journal: From a review of the new book Butterflies: Messages from Psyche, by Philip Howse: The Atlas moth (Attacus atlas) evolved the image of a snake head at […]
