Now on ScienceBlogs: Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: more religion and child abuse
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.
Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer based in London. Not Exactly Rocket Science is his attempt to make the latest scientific discoveries interesting to everyone by beating jargon, confusion and elitism with the stick of good writing. He finds writing about himself in the third person strange and unsettling.
"One of the best sites for in-depth analysis of interesting scientific papers" - The Times
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March 31, 2009
Category: Culture
Archive footage reveals that successive generations of ballet dancers have subtly tinkered with positions that are supposedly fixed, moving towards more and more extreme and vertical postures.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 30, 2009
Category: Palaeontology
A 500,000-year-old skull belonged to a 5-8-year-old child with a deformity called craniosynostosis. It couldn't have reached that age without some care from its peers.
Posted by Ed Yong at 5:00 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Perception
Two-year-old children with autism lack normal preferences for natural movements. This difference could explain many of the problems that they face in interacting with other people.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 29, 2009
Category: Technology
Compared to other enjoyable but less hair-trigger games, playing shoot-em-ups seems to improve our sensitivity to contrast, and their benefits last for months or even years.
Posted by Ed Yong at 1:00 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2009
Category: Animal behaviour
Animals have distinct personalities and temperaments, but why would evolution favour these over more flexible and adaptible mindsets? New game theory models show that animal personalities are a natural progression from the choices they make over how to live and reproduce.
Posted by Ed Yong at 12:00 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2009
Category: Insects
When a founding termite queen dies, she leaves behind a dynasty of clones that mate with the same original king to create more workers. It preserves her genetic legacy while avoiding the risk of inbreeding.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2009
Apropos of nothing, a whinge: my name has no u in it. It rhymes with "song" not "sung" and "long" but not "lung". I'm fairly used to people adding in the errant u but for some reason, this has been...
Posted by Ed Yong at 9:28 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fish
Using new technology, scientists watch a quarter of a billion herring gather in a mega-shoal.
Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2009
Category: Neuroscience
The good moods induced by one's favourite music could help overcome a common visual problem in stroke patients called "spatial neglect", which leaves them unaware of things on one half of their field of vision.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2009
Category: Genetics
A small but select squad of genes, involved in the development of nerve cells, are activated much later in our brains than in those of other primates.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
