Some scientists get to have a lot of fun. "Hey, let's do an experiment where we get to shock people - there are endless possibilities here. Oh, and maybe we'll learn some stuff." These scientists determined that people would sacrifice a certain amount of pay not to be shocked (no surprise there), but they would sacrifice... Continue Reading →
Organizing Life
Linnaeus probably couldn't have guessed that we would one day be able to classify organisms by sequencing and comparing large chunks of their genomes (since he didn't know what a genome was). That's what phylogenomics does, and it's leading to rapid advances in our understanding of how life evolved. In the late '90s, my dad... Continue Reading →
Words Are Sexy
As I've long surmised, lexiconic erudition has salubrious effects similar to sybaritism. Well, that's not exactly true, but you get the point. According to a new study, learning new words triggers feelings similar to those you get from having sex. Evolutionarily, this may have helped encourage language development. I wonder if learning in general also stimulates the... Continue Reading →
Passenger Pigeons: Why Extinction Matters
I had a dream last night that I was keeping dodo birds the way one might keep chickens. They had been resurrected, phoenix-style, through DNA lab work. I was excited to tell my stepmom - this would be a great bird to add to her life list. In the category of birds that have run afoul of man's... Continue Reading →
Poppa's Cottage 