Jonah,The first thing I asked my dad when I got to ScienceOnline 2011 was “Is Jonah here?” You weren’t but I spent the next few days with a group of people that truly wanted each other to succeed...
As an undergraduate studying primatology, I was always confused about great ape and human taxonomy. Were we great apes? Or were we hominids? Or were we both?
In 2009 I had the pleasure of interviewing two luminaries in the Open Access publishing world, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt. Back then, Peter was the managing editor of PLOS ONE, the world’s largest scientific journal and arguably the leading academic Open Access journal, and Jason was the Chief Scientist and VP of R&D for Mendeley, a social reference manager that enhances the way scientists share information...
I spend a lot of my weekends snuggled up on the couch with my family, but since I found out my couch is toxic, I’ve been spending a lot more time on the floor.I recently learned that the foam inside my couch contains the carcinogenic chemical, Chlorinated Tris...
On December 20, 1994 Mexico’s newly installed president Ernesto Zedillo devalued the currency, the peso, by 15%. As a candidate he had said he would “defend the peso like a dog.” That day the peso went from 3.47, where it had been for a year, to 3.95 and the trading floors of Wall Street were filled with the sounds of barking dogs.On that day I was in research working with the emerging markets trading desk of Salomon Brothers...
Editor's note (11/7/13): Find the entry point and new posts of Bob Grumman's M@h*(pOet)?ica at http://poeticks.com/ #StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format – fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip...
Thor—Norse god, Marvel superhero, and Hollywood eye candy—presents those of us living in the real world with a few problems. Thor is a “demigod,” and any attempt to scientifically explore his otherworldly abilities can be dismissed as such...
It could be difficult for human civilization to survive a global catastrophe like rapid climate change, nuclear war, or a pandemic disease outbreak. But imagine if two catastrophes strike at the same time...
How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q...
Grosse Ile is a place defined by disease. The two-mile long island is in the St. Lawrence River off the coast of Quebec, Canada. It functioned for over one hundred years as a quarantine station for victims of major infectious diseases...