Boto dolphins woo females with chat-up vines
Category: Animal behaviour
New evidence suggests that botos carry and thrash random objects as a courtship ritual
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Not Exactly Rocket Science
My small attempt to celebrate science and to make it interesting and fun by giving jargon, confusion and elitism a solid beating with the stick of good writing.
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Ed lives in London and works at Cancer Research UK. This blog is his attempt to make science interesting to everyone by beating jargon, confusion and elitism with the stick of good writing. Almost all posts will be proper articles that discuss peer-reviewed research, written from the original papers. Ed is an award-winning science writer and has freelanced for Nature, New Scientist and the Economist. He finds writing about himself in the third person strange and unsettling.
Recent Posts
- Orchid lures in pollinating wasps with promise of fresh meat
- How Big Brother keeps us honest
- Rats succumb to peer pressure too
- March of the locusts - individuals start moving to avoid cannibals
- Cuckoos mimic hawks to fool small birds
- Fungi transform depleted uranium into chemically stable minerals
- Making sense of obesity genes
- Fat cell number is set in childhood and stays constant in adulthood
- Dogs and devils - the rise of the contagious cancers
- Sexy jumping spiders court females with ultraviolet patches
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March 31, 2008
March 29, 2008
The smell of danger - shocks help people discriminate between similar odours
Category: Perception
People can learn to tell apart previously indistinguishable smells if one is paired with an electric shock.
Posted by Ed Yong at 12:28 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2008
A squid's beak is a marvel of biological engineering
Category: Cephalopods
The beaks of Humboldt squid are engineered to have both immensely hard tips and very soft bases.
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
City birds struggle to make themselves heard
Category: Other writing
My first ever feature article has just been published in this week's issue of New Scientist. It's about the ways in which songbirds are coping with the noisy din of cities. Low-frequency urban noises mask the calls that they use...
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2008
Chimpanzees take risks but bonobos play it safe
Category: Animal behaviour
Chimps gamble over rewards more frequently than bonobos, possibly because they rely on more uncertain food sources.
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:55 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2008
Rising carbon dioxide levels weaken plant defences against hungry insects
Category: Climate change
Soybeans grown in high CO2 levels produce fewer defensive chemicals when attacked by beetles
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2008
Bdelloid rotifers - the world's most radiation-resistant animals
Category: Animals
Bdelloid rotifers tolerate 100x more radiation than humans, including doses that shatter their DNA into 1,000 pieces.
Posted by Ed Yong at 5:00 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2008
One month inside the Empire...
Category: Personal
About a month ago, I migrated from the safe, stable climate of Wordpress to the unknown but promising habitat of ScienceBlogs. With four weeks having flown by, this seems like a good a point as any to have a bit...
Posted by Ed Yong at 10:00 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2008
Mantis shrimps have a unique way of seeing
Category: Animal behaviour
Mantis shrimps are the only animals that see circularly polarised light and swap secret messages with it.
Posted by Ed Yong at 12:00 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2008
Money can buy happiness... if you spend it on other people
Category: Psychology
Psychological experiments show that personal spending doesn't make people any happier but spending money on others does.
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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