Observations
Masks and Emasculation: Why Some Men Refuse to Take Safety Precautions
They think it makes them look weak, and avoiding that is evidently more important to them than demonstrating responsible behavior
Blogs
Observations
How a Landmark Physics Paper from the 1970s Uncannily Describes the COVID-19 Pandemic
Phil Anderson’s article “More Is Different” describes how different levels of complexity require new ways of thinking. And as the virus multiplies and spreads, that’s just what the human race desperately needs...
Observations
The Fight against COVID-19 Threatens to Cause Collateral Health Damage
The pandemic is no excuse to abandon chronic disease management and prevention
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Growing old with NF-kB
Aging happens. As you get older, your body slows down, eventually your brain slows down, too. Some things go gradually, and some go suddenly.To many people, this might seem like a pretty random process...
Unusual Offshore Octopods: More (Octopus) Suckers Born Every Minute in Cold Water
That octopuses can survive in the extreme, sunless environments around deep hydrothermal vents is surprising enough. But comparing octopuses that make their homes there has led to some even more interesting discoveries about animal development.The rarely seen Muusoctopus hydrothermalis live some 2,495 to 2,620 meters below the surface, along the East Pacific Rise...
The Incredible Importance of Mom
Imagine that you're an infant monkey, and you've just been thrown into a cage after several hours in isolation. You've been deprived of food, so you're starving.
Top 10 Commander Chris Hadfield Videos from the ISS!
Colonel Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, a former mission specialist on STS-74 who also performed multiple EVAs on STS-100, and, for a few hours longer, the well-loved commander of the International Space Station mission 35...
Mosses Make Two Different Plants From the Same Genome, and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference
Two plants in one. Both are mosses, but they look wildly different. Creative Commons ndrwfgg. Click image for license and link. One of the most astonishing secrets in biology is this: every plant you see makes two different plants from the same genome...
Ants and the problem of impostor mothers
In honor of Mother's day, I present a portrait of a Tennessee winnow ant with her mom.But wait! This scene is not as heart-warming as it may seem. This mother has a dark past of murder, impersonation, and trickery.To explain the story, I'll start with a perhaps oversimplified observation about ant families...
Idol Tweets: Mapping the Social Space with Twitter
Many viewers who tuned into American Idol on April 4th expected the dismissal of Lazaro Arbos, a likeable young man with an endearing stutter but marginal talent and an unfortunate tendency to forget lyrics...
In pursuit of the Rook
Any adventures about the more rural parts of the UK typically involve (for me, anyway) a lot of looking at the Rook Corvus frugilegus , a remarkable Old World corvid that occurs from the far western shores of the UK and France all the way east to Japan (it’s generally absent from the cold northern parts of Eurasia, only visits the Iberian Peninsula and most of southern Europe during the winter, and is absent from much of tropical Asia)...
What is Wrong With Dissections?
Hint... It is not what you think. Here is a story you might find a bit laughable. At the end of the dark ages in what is now Italy, when knowledge was being reborn, anatomists would read from an ancient Greek text while their assistants dissected a human body and pointed out its parts...
May 12, 1931: Alfred Wegener's last Journey
March 1929 the German meteorologists Alfred Wegener , Johannes Georgi (1888-1972), Fritz Loewe (1895-1974) and Ernst Sorge (1899-1946) arrived to Greenland, searching a site for a coastal base camp - a starting point for an ambitious expedition to the inner ice sheet - they found it in the Kamarujuk Fjord .One year later 18 scientists, 25 Icelandic ponies and 98 tons of material were unload onto the unusual thick ice of the fjord - as the expedition couldn't reach the shore they had to wait 38 days, loosing precious time in the short Arctic summer...
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