bushwells

A friend in another galaxy far away, when presented with photos of another friend's wide-eyed infant, remarked that the cute (and she truly is) baby made her icy heart melt. In today's New York Times, Natalie Angier discusses primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's forthcoming book Mothers and Others:…

My Illinois homeboy, Philip Jose Farmer, died on Wednesday Feb 25. Please find linkage here: the obit in the New York Times and the announcement at his website. From the NYT: Philip José Farmer, a prolific and popular science fiction writer who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with…

Nabbed via digg, check out this clip of NdGT's wonderfully acerbic commentary on the Day of Doooooooom! That is to say, December 21, 2012.

Correspondent SDC, reporting in from the Land o' Hoosiers, offers an awe-inspiring account of a recent visit to the famous Creation Museum, located "just seven miles west of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport." A teaser follows. The rest of the article (including photos),…

I am so pleased to see that Adam Kay's masterwork has made it to the big time: YouTube. Happy holidays, bonobos! (Pharma-phunnies, some medically graphic, contained therein.)

A few regulars who drop by for grooming sessions and pant-hoots at the Refuge are probably aware that I am a long time J. Robert Oppenheimer fangrrl, or more accurately at my age, a fancrone. So when I discovered that Doctor Atomic was playing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I impulsively…

Yeah, yeah, so you've seen this before. I still found it amusing. Hat tip to a dedicated Bertie fan in Ireland. My favorite: (Intelligently designed by Patrick Quigley and submitted to Inkling Magazine's Design Your Own Darwin Fish.)

My seventeen year old daughter is keenly interested in politics and political figures so I wasn't surprised that she wanted to see Oliver Stone's biopic W. We saw it on Friday night in an almost full theater. In a nutshell, the movie was entertaining in a squirm-in-your-seat fashion. Josh Brolin…

A couple of posts back, I plugged the Spore game a bit, and I see that proprietor of Pharyngula asks if anyone has played the game yet? PZ shrugs his skeptical shoulders and says insouciantly (well, maybe...I just like the adverb): I've played with the creature creator, which is actually rather…

So Spawn the Elder (my son) is an avid gamer in such milieus as World of Warcraft, Halo, Civilization, and Lord of the Rings Online, the latter of which, errr, I might have indulged in a few times -- I'm pretty hopeless with gaming so my foray into Middle-earth was an unmitigated disaster. So the…

The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) recently announced the arrival of a peregrine falcon chick. The proud parents nested in the steelwork under the I-95 Scudders Falls Bridge. I traverse that bridge once a week when I'm attending my little class o' regulatory dabbling at…

After coping with an immediate family member's severe illness (thankfully resolved; better living through chemistry pays off) and discovering that my talents do not lie in management within a very large company, I stepped back from my almost 20 year career in discovery research several months ago…

The lead article in Salon's newsletter caught my eye this morning when I perused the ol' Google-mail Inbox. Under the auspices of Salon's "Atoms and Eden: Conversations About Science and Faith," Steve Paulson interviews James Carse (retired director of NYU's Religious Studies Program) in Religion…

Speaking of procrastination, from LOLtheorists: See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Even though my e-mail address in buried amongst the piles of banana peels and dried bonobo scat that litter the Refuge, I receive various "you might want to blog about this" tips from the media and commercial interests. Don't interpret this as self-importance on my part since all of my dear, dear…

So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim's list of "hot women," but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (…

Courtesy of S.T., intrepid Chimp Refuge photographer on assignment, I offer a cast member of the V Monologues for your consideration. That would be a macrolicious close-up of a common vetch flower. Ms. Vetch has also posed as a model for Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.

""The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he's too thick - my husband is sexier." So says Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, whose surname translates to English as "Berlin Wall." The Telegraph resurrected Frau Berliner-Mauer's fascinating case of objectum-sexual in a news of the weird article: Woman "…

From one of my favorite "Oh, my! Isn't that quirky?" sites, technovelgy, comes Useful Body Modifications (submitted by Bill Christensen). Here we find a dude who has a ruler tattooed on the underside of his forearm... ...others who have small magnets implanted under the skin to attain a "sixth…

Bill O'Reilly's meltdown thanks to a hapless teleprompter is making the rounds again; I saw it on The Colbert Report. Thanks to the wonders of technology, someone has constructed a dance remix of Bill blowing a gasket. Pant-hoot to Bill from Dover for passing this along. Word has it that he…

I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out. Spider porn below the fold…

Old folks tend to repeat themselves, so bear with me if this is redundant. A cursory search of Science Blogs turned up a comment in response to Razib's post in Gene Expression that calls attention to the video of Sean B. Carroll's 2005 HHMI Holiday Lecture on Charles Darwin and the development of…

Finally! A prescription medication tailor-made for me! From the makers of Damitol and Fukitol, here is...

Now what pollinator could resist this fine beard? The rest of the flower and a little Darwinism (of the Erasmus variety) follow. The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame, And three unjealous husbands wed the dame. [Iris. 1. 71. Flower de Luce. Three males, one female. Some of the species have a…

Lewis Black is my favorite comedian these days, and as such, he has drawn me into the accretion disk of his latest offering on the Comedy Channel: Root of All Evil. My response to its premier was tepid, but as I have kept watching it, the show has grown on me. The format has Black as hilariously…

Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Spook, has a new book debuting this month: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. To promote her new book, Roach is making the interview rounds. Check out her interview with Katharine Mieszkowski for Salon: Getting it on for science. An excerpt pertaining…

So. It's National Poetry Month. Type that key phrase into the "search" query field on the main page of SB, and you'll find that April brings forth a veritable poetry slam among Science Bloggers. In this fine tradition, I will don my black trousers, turtleneck, jaunty (but dirty) beret, take a…

One of the guilty pleasures of my sabbatical from the dark halls of Pharma-dur is the freedom to take in a movie on a weekday afternoon. There's just something special about sitting in a theater of the local googolplex with maybe three to ten other people and watching a new release on the big…

A conversation with a fellow raptor fan and Kevin's recent entry pertaining to the injured bald eagle congealed and triggered a few of my geriatric neurons, prompting the following nostalgic reverie about a former pet: an American kestrel. I think I have mentioned that I grew up on a farm in east…

Cue boom-chukka-chukka soundtrack. First, hat tip to loyal reader Suesquatch for calling my attention to the photos that have been making the rounds. In a vain attempt to find credits for the work, I stumbled across a video by LukaIsntLuka (that link is rated SI for extreme self-indulgence but…