Guilty Planet

A Worse You Could be Better Off: Robert Trivers' Folly of Fools

Imagine you, but better. Apparently this is what most of us do most of the time. Our tendency toward self-deception is captured in Robert Trivers' Folly of Fools in bookstores this week...

Vintage Apple

My dad used to take my brother and a Macintosh in to his college classroom to show his students that even a four-year-old could use a computer. My brother (pictured right; that's me on the left) would skillfully perform some task, like playing Brickles...

Laughter

LAUGHS! from Everynone on Vimeo.

Fall Google Trends

Books to Read Together: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The Emperor of Scent, Perfumes: The A-Z Guide

About a man with an obsessed olfactory system and the red-headed virgins he cannot resist, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was written in 1985 by the hermetic German, Patrick Suskind.

7 Reasons to Swim with Whale Sharks

1. It's explicit in the title: you get to swim with whale sharks (Rhincodon typus). It's not shark watching (although the behemoths are often easily visible from the surface): you get to get up close in the water with the largest fish in the world.2...

Back to School: Teaching Evolution

Most kids are heading back to school this month. Last week, my friend, a high school biology teacher in Mt. Vernon, Washington, got the inevitable: "So are you saying we're related to monkeys?" To which she replied: "I'm saying you're related to yeast." For those who disagree back to school radio ads exclaiming "It's not what you learn, but what you wear" -- here are a few favorites and soon-to-be favorites in teaching evolution:--Neil Shubin's book Your Inner Fish and, more important, his interview with Stephen Colbert;--Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True and blog of the same title; --Carl Bergstom's co-authored soon-to-be-released (November 2011) Evolution textbook;--Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos; --And, of course, South Park's version of the theory of evolution (not appropriate for all audiences)...

9/11 Memorial Name Placement

Ground Zero officially becomes the National September 11th Memorial today. The memorial is impressive in so many obvious ways and also in less obvious ways.

We're Not Alone: 8,699,999 other species on Earth

We are just one of a newly estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species, according to a study published last week in PLoS One. But it doesn’t look like we’ll get to know a lot of them.

Mislabeled MSC-certified fish

No one wanted to eat a toothfish. It sounded gross. So in the 1970s, fishmongers marketed Patagonia toothfish ( Dissostichus eleginoides ) from the southern reaches of our globe as ‘Chilean sea bass’...