“Research on chimpanzees is contentious, expensive, and of increasingly limited necessity,” wrote medical researchers in a piece titled “Guiding limited use of chimpanzees in research” published last week in the journal Science. This same sentence could have introduced an article published in this week’s Nature – with the word ‘Whaling’ replacing the phrase “Research on [...]

It’s not true that aesthetics must be be compromised for meaning. I visited the excellent Infinite Balance: Artists and the Environment show at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts earlier this week, which features the shortlist for the Prix Pictet contest, the world’s top (and only? I ask myself) prize for photography and sustainability. The [...]

One in every six species related to characters in the movie Finding Nemo is threatened by extinction, according to a new study out today. The authors examined the extinction risk of 1,568 species within 16 families of well-known marine animals represented in the 2003 Academy Award-winning animated film. All species of marine turtles (“Squirt” and [...]

We cannot ignore the past, and to remind us of this, the present has yielded a refreshing and essential perspective on marine science in the new book Shifting Baselines: The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries. Looking at today’s data is simply not good enough, especially when the abundance of reef fish has declined 90-95% [...]

Today the New York Times put out their list of the top ten books of 2011. Among them, Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a remarkable read about how the human mind works and necessary material for anyone, anywhere, period. To go with the piece, the Times constructed a blazer [...]

Male fiddler crabs (Uca annulipes) try to get the ladies by waving their one big claw. Females prefer fast wavers, which is a lot of work (see some examples in the videos below). A new study shows that males are willing to wave harder when there is competition. In a study published last month in [...]

Some people, like Joe Romm, want more coverage on climate change. For me, climate change is one of those subjects that I actually try to ignore. I am often silently thankful that I do not have to stare at a headline about one of the most crushing subjects of our time in the morning. Reading [...]

We call it ‘trick or treat’ but we all know the chances are much higher of getting treats on Halloween night. Similarly, it seems that scientists have a higher probability of publishing research about reward rather than research about punishment. I queried ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ in the following databases of academic literature: Google Scholar, Scirus, [...]