When I first heard about giant sperm, I thought those MUST be the greatest. I mean, why have a giant copulatory organ when you can let the sperm speak for itself? Some species of ostracods (a type of crustacean) can have long sperm that are TEN TIMES the body length of the ENTIRE ANIMAL. I […]
(Source) Sci Am Blogs is one year old today! And to celebrate, I’d like to find out about YOU. WHO…are YOU…? Taking a page from the illustrious Ed Yong today, and I want to know who you are. I know that many people find it a hassle to comment at SciAm, so here is the […]
Today’s Friday Weird Science comes to you courtesy of the perspicacious Ivan Oransky, who was kind enough to send me this paper. And this paper is great. It’s proof that anything is worth measuring if you do it in an fMRI. Like peeing! Have you ever wondered what happens to your brain when you pee? […]
Things I should have been doing today: 1. Working on a paper 2. Running an experiment 3. Wrangling students 4. Planning more experiments 5. Reading some lit 6. Preparing a talk 7. Other Basic daily list, and much less than I often deal with (example, no teaching at the moment and the exam doesn’t have […]
Sci is at SciAm blogs today, talking about a study showing that Parkinson’s is more than dopamine, and that serotonin may have something to do with it. It’s an interesting study with some widespread implications that cover more than Parkinson’s. Head over and check it out.
Yesterday Hilda Baston (of the Statistically funny blog which I only just discovered!) posted to the SciAm Guest Blog, with a thoughtful and useful critique of my critique (I know, so meta!) of the recent exercise and depression study. And she’s got some great points. But you know what? I’ve got great points, too. 🙂 […]
I keep seeing posts which go on and on, we don’t understand science, there’s not enough scientific outreach, and this is all the scientists’ fault. This is the message I get, over and over. It is the scientists’ fault. If we really cared about outreach we should be doing it, it is our job, our […]
We all know what this song is trying to tell us: And what about this one? Yes, shocking as it might be to some, a lot of songs, classical, pop, or of any other genre…talk a lot about sex. But not just sex, there are a lot of reproductive messages in music. We might notice […]
I was alerted by the Neurocritic to a new paper out in PLoS ONE on research blogs and discussion of scientific information. It’s an analysis of researchblogging.org bloggers, who there are, what they blog about, and who is significant. It’s an interesting ‘state of the blogsphere’ type read (though I don’t feel the significance of […]
Scientopia has now been going strong for well over a year. We’re all really proud of how well we’ve done as a community, and we hope this community will continue to be a proud autonomous collective: But in order to continue, we’re going to have to find a way to cover our costs! In an […]