Every single day, all across the globe, extraordinarily creative and talented students sit in our classrooms bored out of their minds. These budding innovators may differ drastically in what particular domain captivates their attention, whether it’s science and engineering, architecture and design, arts, music and entertainment, business and finance, law, or health care. Nevertheless, as Richard Florida [...]

I was probably 12 years old (fine, 13) the last time I played with Barbies. School was closed for a snow day, and one of my best friends trudged over to my house for mac and cheese and Barbies. But after choosing our dolls and clothing, we stopped. We couldn’t remember what came next. All [...]

Millions of people around the world come home to four legs and a wagging tail, and many spend some of their time together playing. While dog-dog play has been studied extensively, dog-person play, which takes on a different form and appears to have different rules, has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention. At the [...]

Why do animals like to play? Scientists have often used the word play simply to describe any behavior that does not have any apparent adaptive function. In The Animal Mind, James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould describe play as an “apparently purposeless activity with no immediate adaptive goal, utilizing species-typical motor programs that are [...]

Is the red panda playing? Maybe. Just a little bit of Friday Fun. Teaser photo via Fotopedia/griangrafanna

On Friday, I quickly posted this video, which shows a crow – likely a hooded crow (thanks to a commenter at Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog for the ID) – appearing to “snowboard” down the roof of a Russian building, using a small object as a makeshift snowboard. Over at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal also [...]

This video (via Al Dove on twitter), which appears to be from Russia, shows a crow (can anybody confirm the identity of the bird?) engaging in an activity that can only be described as play. There is at least some scientific evidence (behind a paywall) that corvids, as well as some species of parrots and [...]

Can dogs pretend? This is the question I asked yesterday, prompted by Sheril’s story: …this afternoon Happy did something unusual. She carried a toy frog over to her water bowl, and gently put it down as pictured. Given its orientation, I’m skeptical that her placement was an accident. The frog continues to sit like this [...]

Earlier today, friend-of-the-blog Sheril Kirshenbaum (blog, twitter) asked a question on her blog, Culture of Science: Do Dogs Play “Make Believe?”: …this afternoon Happy did something unusual. She carried a toy frog over to her water bowl, and gently put it down as pictured. Given its orientation, I’m skeptical that her placement was an accident. [...]

The party continues! Today you get a double-dose of Monday Pets. Here’s one from the archives. Later today, you can expect a new one. I often write about animals that the average person does not interact with all that much on a day-to-day basis. Today, I introduce something I like to call “Monday Pets”. The [...]