When was the last time you used some variation of the phrase “Thank you”? At the coffee shop this morning? While you were having dinner last night? Because someone held the elevator for you? How about online? Have you used it to sign an email recently? Did you intentionally not use that phrase? And did [...]

This post originally appeared on Anthropology in Practice on December 6th, 2010. New Yorkers are hand talkers. We often use gestures to add emphasis to our conversations; from pointing to direct tourists, or waving to demonstrate our exasperation with traffic, drivers, or pedestrians, or trying to interject—because New Yorkers don’t interrupt!—we gesticulate. We’re not the [...]

That’s right! After a bit of a delay, the #NYCSciTweetUp is back! Save the date for March 29th, at the Peculier Pub in NYC. Updated details will be posted on the Facebook page (as they always are). And as per the norm, for more information you can always: Read “What Is: #NYCSciTweetUp” Follow the #NYCSciTweetUp hashtag on Twitter [...]

There is a man—a very well-known man, a legend of sorts—whom I’ve been privileged enough to have seen on occasion through the years at various venues and events. (Never mind his reputation. To protect my career, he shall remain anonymous.) Our exchanges have been pleasant enough, I should say—inconsequential, really, and empty of any real [...]

The radiation crisis in Japan worsens for two reasons: one that we’ve heard about, one that we haven’t but which may in the end do far more harm. The Japanese government, and the company in charge of the crippled nuclear complex, are struggling with their risk and crisis communications, and their missteps are fueling mistrust [...]

In July, 2010, one corner of the blogosphere erupted with the seething, burning rage that online communities seem to have a unique ability to muster. The spark that lit bloggers’ fuse was a decision by SEED Media Group decision-makers to allow a team of writers from PepsiCo Inc. to operate a blog about nutrition and [...]

Dear Dr. Shanahan, Thank you for your application to the Summer Institute on Unicorn Science. We appreciate the effort that went into all of the applications. We received over 1,000 excellent submissions and had a very difficult decision to make. Unfortunately, we were only able to select 10 applications and yours was not among those [...]

I live in a relatively small town: the centre has three roads, no railway station and you can’t walk ten feet without running into someone you know. However, even in a small town like this you notice birds acting differently to how you might expect if they were in a more natural setting. For example, [...]

Let’s be honest: tarsiers look odd. Among the smallest of all primates, most species of tarsier would fit easily in the palm of your hand. They have long, slender, largely hairless tails and elongated fingers with knobby knuckles and mushroom-cap finger pads. To fully confront the tarsier’s bizarre anatomy, you must stare it in the [...]

The touching stories that advocacy groups are so good at telling—the 49-year old mother whose breast cancer was detected by an early mammogram before it had spread; the 60-year-old neighbor who had a prostate tumor removed thanks to a routine PSA test—should inspire scientists to use anecdotes of their own, argue two doctors from the [...]

Human #1: "Hello, nice weather today, isn’t it?" Human #2: "Ummm…actually not. It’s a gray, cold, windy, rainy kind of day!" Many a joke depends on confusion about the meaning of language, as in the example above. But understanding the sources of such confusion is important in realms other than stand-up comedy, including in the [...]

New research shows that plants "can think and remember," according to a news story published this week. Plants can transmit information "from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems," BBC News wrote. The article continues to assert that plants remember information and use "information encrypted in the light to [...]

What do Tokyo commuter-rail designers and the slime mold Physarum polycephalum have in common? The two will build strikingly similar networks. A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting [...]

While natural selection works operates over an individual’s ability to survive, sexual selection operates over an individual’s ability to mate and successfully sire offspring. In other words, sexual selection is a process through which individuals of a given species struggle to be more reproductively successful. It works in two primary ways, first identified by Charles [...]

My high school biology teacher once told me that nothing was binary in biology except for alive and dead, and pregnant and not pregnant. Any other variation, he said, existed along a continuum. Whether or not the claim is technically accurate, it serves to illustrate an important feature of biological life. That is, very little [...]

Predator-prey interactions are often viewed as evolutionary arms races; while predators improve their hunting behaviors and their ability to sneak up on their prey, the prey improve upon their abilities to detect and escape from their predators. The problem, of course, is that there is a trade-off between maintaining vigilance – the attention necessary to [...]

When you dive into the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California, the first thing you notice is the silence. Other than the bitter cold. Your body begins to adapt to the chilly water as blades of slimy kelp brush across your ankles. You spit out the bit of brackish [...]

Babel’s Dawn, a book that grew out of a blog about the natural history of speech, is probably not like any other book you’ve read. That’s because it’s not really a book about the natural history of speech: it’s a book about a (fictitious) museum that tells the story about the natural history of speech. [...]

The recent talk of ultrasonic tarsiers reminded me of a post I wrote a couple years ago. You see, tarsiers aren’t the only animal to communicate at a sound frequency beyond the level of human hearing: mice do as well. But, for some reason, some mice actually chatter in such a way that they can [...]

Editor’s Note: While I’m on vacation, I’ve arranged a series of guest posts from other writers who routinely cover animal behavior and cognition. Today’s post, about attack behavior and social communication in great white sharks, comes from David Manly, who blogs at The Definitive Host. Follow him on twitter: @davidmanly. In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s thriller [...]

Dogs are particularly good at tasks that involve communicating or cooperating with humans, which has led some researchers to speculate that they are really good at solving social tasks, more generally. For example, dogs can figure out where a human’s attention is, are really good at picking up on eye-gaze and finger pointing cues, distinguish [...]

The Harpy Eagle (Harpia harpyja) is a nasty scary-looking muppethugging monster of a carnivorous bird. Female harpies weigh 14-20 pounds, and males weigh 8.5-12 pounds. They stand between 2.9 and 3.5 feet tall. The wingspan of the harpy eagle can reach 6 feet, 7 inches. The talons – sharp claws to grasp onto its prey – are up to 5.1 inches long. INCHES!!

What information is contained in the call of a mammal? Some calls might reflect the internal emotional state of the animal, like fear or anxiety, or they can refer to an external object, agent, or event, like the presence of a predator. Rhesus monkeys, lemurs, baboons, and guinea pigs, for example, will produce calls when [...]