Can smart phones change the way we do research? Cognitive scientists believe that they may provide a vital means of widening the participant pool, as discussed in a recent September PLoS paper that explores the intersection of technology and behavioral experiments. The potential application of Internet-based research to extend laboratory exercises to wider audiences has [...]

It’s Thursday! Which means it’s time for my ResearchBlogging.org Editor’s Selections. Here are my picks for this past week: Can linguistic diversity be hazardous to your health? Sean Roberts at A Replicated Typo ran a series of statistical analyses on traffic patterns in Africa and found that the rate of road fatalities could predict linguistic [...]

There’s a sign hanging in my local deli that offers customers some tips on what to expect in terms of quality and service. It reads: Your order: Can be fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. Can be fast and cheap, but it won’t be good. Can be good and cheap, but it won’t [...]

One of my other homes online is at ResearchBlogging.org where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Every Thursday, I select notable research posts in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research/scholarship, and in addition to the RB News page, I share my selections here on AiP. Here are the picks for this week: Is there [...]

Who will win the first $50,000 Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American? This award, offered as part of the 2012 Google Science Fair, will recognize a student project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community, and that [...]

Scientific American is very happy to help expand the Google Science Fair this year with the new $50,000 Science in Action Award. The international online fair, launched in 2011, has three age categories, for teens from 13 to 18. The Science in Action Award will honor a project that addresses a social, environmental or health [...]

In November 2011, Scientific American, Zooniverse and a team of research partners launched the Web site Whale.FM, a citizen-science project devoted to cataloging the calls made by Pilot whales and Killer whales (Orcas), both of which are actually dolphin species. Different whale families have their own dialects and closely related families share calls. Underwater microphones, [...]

This summer has seen the release of a blockbuster movie, acclaimed documentary and news-worthy research paper that all—in different but weirdly complementary ways—present sympathetic portraits of chimpanzees, our hirsute doppelgangers. So this is an ideal time for a proposed ban on invasive research on chimpanzees and other apes. A sponsor of the Great Ape Protection [...]

‘Dogs and Cats in the Home: Happiness for All?’ was a Finalist in the inaugural ScienceSeeker Awards* in the category Best Post About Peer-reviewed Research (winners and finalists listed here). Congrats to all those recognized and many thanks to the judges** for putting in how many hours? A version of this post first appeared at [...]

Erica Feuerbacher smiles when she talks, and why shouldn’t she? As a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida with the Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab, she spends a lot of time with dogs (or at least dogs in the form of data). Through her research, she meets many, many, many dogs, some of whom [...]

For the past few days we’ve covered some of the scientists on board through their PI’s: Kay Bidle, Jack DiTullio and Rachel, Petey and Jacob, Marco Coolen and Cherel, Anna Martins, Assaf and his gang. But there are still some scientists you haven’t met yet. Let’s go alphabetically. Benjamin Bailleul is a physicist turned physical [...]

June 19th, 2012 We stopped at one of our target points — a place where the scientists thought there would be lots of phytoplankton — a few days ago. The weather is nice, and the ocean is surprisingly calm (knock on wood). I’m hoping it stays like this for the rest of the trip. Everyone [...]

Hi there! I’m Rose, a science journalist and producer. I live in Brooklyn now, where I write, produce and generally try to explain science-y things. But in a few weeks, I’ll be writing to you from somewhere far, far away from Brooklyn: the North Atlantic Ocean. I’m heading out to sea with a research group [...]

Editor’s Note: Marine biologist William Gilly is on an expedition to study Humboldt squid on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research vessel New Horizon in the Gulf of California. He and other scientists are learning about the giant squid, their biology and ecology on this National Science Foundation-funded expedition. This is his sixth blog post [...]

Editor’s Note: Marine biologist William Gilly is on an expedition to study Humboldt squid on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research vessel New Horizon in the Gulf of California. He and other scientists are learning about the giant squid, their biology and ecology on this National Science Foundation-funded expedition. This is his second blog post [...]

Editor’s Note: Marine biologist William Gilly is on an expedition to study Humboldt squid on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research vessel New Horizon in the Gulf of California. He and other scientists will spend the coming weeks learning about the giant squid, their biology and ecology on this National Science Foundation-funded expedition. This is [...]

Endangered Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi) have a bad reputation among some local fishermen, who accuse the 200-kilogram mammals of eating the fish that the humans catch for their livelihoods. A new project aims to find out if that notoriety is deserved and the public—in particular, teens—has a chance to participate. The National Marine Fisheries [...]

My frail, 92-year-old mother was prescribed 80 mgs of the cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, simvastatin for years. She fell four times in the last four years of her life: the last fall was the least forgiving. Doctors diagnosed her with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition, and acute kidney failure; she was dead within 8 weeks. Source: [...]

First, a confession—I’m a mathphobe, traumatized by growing up in a family skewed with an overabundance of math genes for whom math skills came as naturally as breathing.  I always got confused, and thought it was “sadistics,” not “statistics.” So it was with a bit of hesitation that I tentatively began Between the Lines (BTL), [...]

President Obama has restored science to its rightful place in the White House, says John Holdren, Obama’s senior science advisor. “Science is again where it should be,” he told an audience of 200 as part of a lecture series at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. on Wednesday, although he warned that the [...]

By now we’re all painfully aware of the federal government’s across-the-board cutbacks on discretionary spending—better known as the sequester—and how it has imperiled publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. The only thing less clear than the sequester’s long-term impact on academia, industry and the economy is how to end its austerity measures, which could [...]

After public outcry against research into avian flu strains that can be transmitted among mammals, 40 of the top scientists working on the influenza strains signed a voluntary moratorium on research last January. The goal of the pause was to properly—and publically—weigh the potential risks and benefits of such investigations. Critics of the research noted [...]

“Global society operates as a network of creativity and innovation.”–John Sexton, writing in Scientific American. In the October 2012 issue, we publish our Global Science Scorecard, a ranking of nations on how well they do science—not only on the quality and quantity of basic research but also on their ability to project that research into [...]

More than half a million people died from cancer in the U.S. in 2011. We have many astounding advances in medicine to thank for that number not being higher. But that grim figure could also be a lot lower even without a breakthrough drug for breast or lung cancer. In fact, more than 280,000 of [...]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new drug that tackles the underlying cause of  cystic fibrosis (CF) in 4 percent of patients. The drug, called ivacaftor (brand name Kalydeco), acts by helping the body make better use of a protein that works incorrectly in cystic fibrosis patients. The underlying research behind this [...]

Big clinical trials—to test new drugs or procedures—generate reams of important data about safety and efficacy. Only a fraction of that information sees the light of day, a publishing practice that could put patients at risk, according to a special report published this week in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Even though scientific and medical [...]

A workplace accident might mean a paper cut or spilled coffee for many—or even loss of life or limb for others. For a select few scientists, however, a little slipup on the job could release a deadly virus or toxin into the environment. Some 395 reported “potential release events” of “select agents” occurred in U.S. [...]

In late May, Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman and the son of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, gathered a group of luminaries to launch "One Mind for Research," which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of his uncle’s call to trek to our natural satellite. This "moon shot" for the brain was intended as a targeted [...]

Since the turn of the 21st century, the number scientific papers published predominantly by Chinese researchers in any of the Nature journals has risen from six to nearly 150 according to a new index published by Nature on May 12. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Campuses such as Tsinghua University and Peking [...]

We continue our exploration of the many mysterious octopuses that live far from shore—and the eyes of humans. Today we meet the blanket octopus (Tremoctopus), a genus with four species that, until recently, had only been described based on female specimens. Why? Although they live in the vast open ocean, they are big (up to [...]

Shallow-water octopuses can be difficult enough to find. They camouflage against corals, hide in holes and generally make themselves scarce. But researchers can at least attempt to observe and collect them by snorkeling, diving or skimming nets and bottom trawls. The rest of the vast, dark ocean, however, presents a much larger sampling challenge. So [...]

Legions of animal-inspired robots are being created to improve military missions and disaster response efforts—from crawling cockroach-like RHex bots to leaping Sand Flea robots and the speeding Cheetah machines. Now, a squishier source for smart robo-tech has joined the ranks: octopuses. Teams of researchers are already developing soft-bodied, octopus-esque robots for search and rescue. These [...]

Elephants cooperate to solve problems. Chimpanzees teach youngsters to make tools. Even octopuses seem to be able to plan. So should we humans really be surprised that “consciousness” probably does not only exist in us? This privileged state of subjective awareness in fact goes well beyond Homo sapiens, according to the new Cambridge Declaration on [...]

White is a mixture, made by a combination of signals at equal intensity across a perceptual space. White light can be split up into all the colors of the visible spectrum, and white noise covers a range of frequencies within the audible range. Our other senses don’t have as clearly defined ranges of perception. We [...]

Smell is notoriously subjective and hard to define. Odors can be perceived differently by different people depending on genetics, culture, past experience, the environment, and whether they’ve had a really bad sinus infection or not. Even worse, the same person can perceive the same smell differently at different times, depending on how the smell is [...]

The following is a guest post by Perrin Ireland, a Senior Science Communications Specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. If you were at any of the recent Science Online conferences, you may have noticed her in some sessions stationed at the front of the room, taking notes in her dynamic “sketchnoting” [...]

It took longer to get,set up but I am finally trapping. That means I’m collecting data. Woo, hoo! Here is a peek into all of the fun I’ve had working hard in Tanzania! (You can follow my real time updates from Tanzania on Twitter, @DNLee5 and the hashtag #DispatchesDNLee. If you would like a Dispatch [...]

The focus has been getting the trapping research going. It is labor intensive because it requires the labor of setting it up. But as I stated before, the weather is not being my friend. But here is the recap of my second week in Tanzania. [View the story "#DispatchesDNLee Getting To Work" on Storify]

I am back and ready to work. Kind of. LOL, this heat and humidity is kicking my butt. What was I thinking coming back in the rainy season? Oh, yeah, I gotta know how the different seasonal patterns may affect natural history of the Pouched Rats. My time has been on getting the necessary approvals [...]

I safely arrived to Mororgoro Tanzania on Wednesday afternoon, April 17. While most of my friends in the States and Canada were rising from their sleep, I was happy to see the cloud-covered Uluhuru mountains high in the sky.  I swear it felt like I was just here! As I was coming up the main [...]

I’ve got plenty of stamps, so please don’t be shy about postcard requests. Like last time, I’ll be sending engaging people here, online. Ask questions, share stories. AND I will be sending postcards! Just like before, I am happy to send a postcard to anyone who requests one. Please complete the Google Document below. The [...]

Mambo! I’m departing today for Tanzania. I’m actually looking forward to returning to the field. (I love field work and the chance to get dirty, travel and experience the world from different perspectives.) I’m telling you, being a field ecologist is the best! I managed to get most of everything I said I needed and [...]

I will be departing the United States for Tanzania, Africa. I am actually quite excited about the return. I’m looking forward to returning to the field, seeing how things may have changed, remained the same, everything. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again, catching up, hearing stories.  I am also excited about getting back to [...]

My hands are full lately, as you can tell. Here I am checking on one of my Ghana Pouched Rats. Just as adorbs, but I am sure very different than my Tanzania Pouched Rats – in look and behavior. Notice how I’m NOT in this picture with this sleepy-head rat.  I’m interested in working with [...]

A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over– like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does [...]

I have been pre-occupied with paperwork and approvals to get my rats to Oklahoma so that I can get started with my laboratory studies on behavior and genetics.  Fingers crossed (and prayers solicited) for a safe and uneventful trip for my rats and the courier. UPDATE: Rats are NOT en route. While I was sleeping [...]