Posts
April 29, 2013
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Synopsis: A faunal exploitation study finds clues about brain consumption and prey choicesJoseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya [1]. Kanjera South is an archaeological assemblage of Oldowan artifacts and associated animal bones from around 2 million years ago. The site was once a plain next to a lake, and gradually built up clay and silt sediments over years and years of flooding and soil formation. Stone tools and bones
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8:00 PM | Most Popular Plastic Surgeries: Photos
Cosmetic surgery dates all the way back to 1890. But today there are more options than ever, including the latest trend -- arm lifts.
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The plastic surgery procedure saw the biggest rise between 2000 and 2012, finds a new report.
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For a species, habitats are successful in the long term when they sustain seasonal balancing between food sources and prey. Flowers that insects feed on have to be in bloom when the insects that feed on and pollinate them have hatched and are looking for food, insects that a given species of bird feed on have to have hatched when that bird has arrived back from its winter or summer migrations, and so on. So, climate change has the potential to disrupt complex habitats if migration […]
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7:07 AM | April Blog Love Challenge: Day 29
Welcome to the penultimate day of the April Blog Love Challenge! Today’s blogs are:
The Wellcome Trust blog has an extract from Guru magazine on why we’re constantly battling chaos and will never have tidy desks.
More coming after breakfast…. This blog posting is © copyright Emma Cooper 2013. Unauthorized duplication and/or republication is not permitted.
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4:03 AM | When and Where Is It Okay to Cry?
A few weeks ago, an article appeared in my LinkedIn feed that asked “Is crying acceptable in the workplace?’ I’ll save you the click thru: the short answer in this piece is no. While emotion is a part of life, the article concludes it isn’t rewarded in the workplace because it suggests weakness. A quick [...]
April 28, 2013
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8:08 PM | The World Science Festival is Coming!
Heads up, readers: The World Science Festival is coming to New York City! From May 29th through June 2nd, New York City will be host to a variety of events designed to make science accessible to a larger audience. While some events do require a ticket, many are free, including a science fair done street-style [...]
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4:11 PM | We Are Not Aquatic Apes
The aquatic ape hypothesis is still supported by groups of anti-intellectuals. Professional anthropologists consider it pseudoscience because there is no evidence to support it. We are not, and never have been, aquatic apes.
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8:05 AM | April Blog Love Challenge: Day 28
It’s the last few days of the April Blog Love Challenge! Today’s blogs are:
The Chocolate Log Blog has been topping off delicious cup cakes with edible flowers.
Kew’s Economic Botany blog is sharing some old photos of the original (Victorian) museum of Economic Botany.
Gluts and Gluttony has some lovely ways to use a wild garlic glut.
My Tiny Plot has been making salad in vacuum jars.
And Plants People has been pondering The Impact of Collection.
Come back for more
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April 27, 2013
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4:04 PM | Profile of Deborah Blum
The Guardian interviews my University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague and friend, Deborah Blum, on what inspires her to write about science: "Deborah Blum on science writing: I'm a neurotic over-researcher".
Or to give you another, more recent example, consider the complex chemistry and biology of plants. It sounds like a dust-dry topic but I love being able to demonstrate that it's wholly fascinating. So stories about plants run like a theme through my Wired blog: the chemical reasons that
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9:39 AM | April Blog Love Challenge: Day 27
I have had to miss a couple of days of the April Blog Love Challenge because I have been ill. I’m still coughing, but I should be able to manage it today. Here are today’s choices:
Mark in Flowers is planning a Mexican garden, with lots of plants with names ending in tl.
There is floriferousness afoot at the Oxford Botanic Garden.
The Garden Larder has declared rosemary to be a herb for all seasons.
More to follow…. This blog posting is © copyright Emma Cooper
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9:25 AM | New Plants: Pepinos
Spalding Bulbs have been kind enough to send me three pepino (Solanum muricatum) plants to grow this year, a ‘Lost Crop of the Incas’ that I have yet to try. The pepino (also known as pepino dulce, poire-melon and melon pear) is a low-growing, evergreen shrub native to South America. Here in the UK, it needs winter protection as it is frost-sensitive.
The fruits are reported to taste like a slightly sweet cucumber when unripe, and melon with a hint of pear when they’re
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Closer Blog: De bijzondere en voor velen inspirerende auditie van Sevval, een 19-jarige Arnhemse, bij X Factor van RTL.Read more: Hallo dan! – X Factor, Sevval en Inspiratie
April 26, 2013
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A widely reported survey found that 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful, but what does that really mean? Continue reading →
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5:03 PM | Can Facebook Guess Your Weight?
Your social-media habits and interests say a lot about your health, researchers find. Continue reading →
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3:57 PM | Cro-Magnon 1, dating and mtDNA
I'm running through the new paper from Qiaomei Fu and colleagues [1] about Upper Paleolithic mtDNA genomes. Probably several readers were wondering, as I did, about this passage in the paper concerning Cro-Magnon 1:
The exception was the Cro-Magnon 1 sample, which belonged to the derived hg T2b1, an unexpected hg given its putative age of 30,000 years [16]. Since the radiocarbon date for this specimen was obtained from an associated shell [16], we dated the sample itself using accelerator mass
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Nature's "SpotOn" feature has interviewed University of Rhode Island biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth about her social media mastery: "Social Media for Science Outreach – A Case Study: Blogging about Evolution".
I also saw the blog as an opportunity to not only to find my voice, but to be comfortable doing so in public. Having been confined to a few academic papers and one reference book, I was excited to be writing about my field, and beyond, with immediate publication and full
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2:52 PM | Turning eyes toward the future
The Guardian covers a story on risks to humanity: "How are humans going to become extinct?" The occasion for the story seems to be Cambridge University's desire to have a parallel to Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute:
The Future of Humanity project at Oxford is part of a trend towards focusing research on such big questions. The institute was launched by the Oxford Martin School, which brings together academics from across different fields with the aim of tackling the most "pressing global
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You're probably not thinking about gene expression while stretching into downward dog, but your genetic expression may in fact be changing for the better. Continue reading →
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1:08 PM | Anyone Missing a Giant Head?
A college crew team finds an oversized head bobbing in the Hudson River. Its origin remains unknown. Continue reading →
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1:03 PM | Paleofuture radio MOOCs
The Chronicle of Higher Ed takes us to a time in the past, when massive radio correspondence courses were the wave of the future, including at my alma mater, Kansas State: "Before MOOCs: 'Colleges of the Air'".
Finally, even when students endured the isolation and passivity of this new mode of learning, conquered the temptations of popular radio programs, and finished a course, it wasn’t clear what that meant. Students in Kansas State’s radio classes received certificates verifying they had
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And now another in our irregular series on the role of anything-but-genes in chronic disease. We've posted about the possible role of inflammation in many late onset or chronic heart disease, diet and lifestyle in heart disease, inflammation in asthma, cleanliness in asthma, inflammation in macular degeneration, and so on. Diseases, it must be noted, for which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the search for risk factor genes. The excuse for this, used by […]
April 25, 2013
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4:13 PM | Extreme Evolution
The coelacanth is often referred to as a "living fossil". This is because many evolutionary scientists believe that it has not changed much in the past 300 million years. Is this possible? Does evolutionary change occur at variable time scales?
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3:42 PM | The game theory exam story
UCLA animal behavior professor Peter Nonacs describes his experiment in learning by doing: "Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm".
So last quarter I had an intriguing thought while preparing my Game Theory lectures. Tests are really just measures of how the Education Game is proceeding. Professors test to measure their success at teaching, and students take tests in order to get a good grade. Might these goals be maximized simultaneously? What if I let the
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1:32 PM | An Australopithecus sediba paean
Kate Wong: "Is Australopithecus sediba the Most Important Human Ancestor Discovery Ever?"
Second—and this may sound a little insidery, but it’s critical–the way Berger and his collaborators are studying the finds and disseminating what they learn represents a real departure from the cloak-and-dagger manner in which paleoanthropological investigations often proceed. Berger has assembled a huge team of specialists to work on the remains and has made the project open access, with a policy of
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1:23 PM | Clench Your Fist to Get a Grip on Memory
Simple body movements might improve memory. Continue reading →
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Another in our very irregular series on unexpected biological function. We've written before about spermatogenesis genes found in the brain, and vision-related opsins found in unseeing sea urchin spines. Today it's bitter taste receptors in the airways -- and testis, and brain, and immune cells, and gastrointestinal tract. And they may soon be harnessed for the treatment of asthma. More than 300 million people have asthma worldwide, a disease that is estimated to […]
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Closer Blog: Hebben salafisten een probleem met de democratie? Is het een soort sekte waar je nooit meer uitkomt? Hebben mensen nog wel enige vrijheid als ze ‘salafist’ zijn?Read more: Leven als de profeet in Nederland: Salafisme, democratie en autonomie
April 24, 2013
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A few weeks ago I was reading over page proofs for a now-published manuscript, and I must have had my science writer brain on. I started to read what I had written and, for one excruciating moment, was horrified at what I saw. The writing seemed so stiff, so lifeless! Who the heck was I [...]
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Last week in class, we attempted to define what precisely avant-garde is, and we got into the mood by watching some old Project Runway clips from an avant-garde challenge. The most discussion-worthy topics included Amber Case's idea of cyborgs and cyborg anthropology -- are we already cyborgs due to our reliance on technology? Do we suffer from split personality issues because of the various statuses and personae we maintain and project? From there, we talked about the […]
