Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology. He is an OpenSource and OpenAccess advocate. Greg's wife, Amanda, is a High School biology teacher, his daughter Julia is a world traveler and his son Huxley is 2.
It was predicted that Sara Palin would not be able to pull off laughing at herself. They were right. But that's OK, there were plenty of people tuned in to laugh at her.
The BEST part of the show was of course the Sarah Palin rap done during Weekend Update. Again, Palin showed an inability to…
General Colin Powell, the African American former Secretary of State famous for winning the First Gulf War as Chief of the Amy and, later, for being duped by Dick Cheney and George Bush to convince the world that Iraq was harboring illegal weapons of mass destruction, oft considered to be a…
Yet another missing link has been found! This new find links whales to quadrupedal land mammals.
Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the genus Indohyus is represented by a remarkable set of remains, including cranial and…
Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in…
Minnesota Atheists' "Atheists Talk" radio show.
Sunday, October 19, 2008, 9-10 a.m. Central Time
World-renowned astrophysicist Lawrence M. Krauss joins us for the
entire hour to discuss cosmology and the new Origins Initiative that
he is heading at Arizona State University. Also a discussion about…
You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online.
Here is the summary of the article:
Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in…
Oh. It's you....
Well let's see. If you put lipstick on a pig, she still raises her kid to be like Michele Bachmann. Or something like that.
I got this here, thanks to SZ for telling me about it.
On the October 17 episode of MSNBC's Hardball, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota claimed that Barack Obama and other members of Congress share anti-American views.
Bachmann thinks that anyone who disagrees with her personal political agenda is unpatriotic. But she is the one who has a lot to learn…
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today filed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint against the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, MN for violating IRS law by openly endorsing state Senator Michele Bachmann's candidacy for the U.S. House of…
And Pat Buchanan too. Buchanan is a thousand times smarter than Bachmann (as is the ant I just stepped on by accident in the garage). But Buchanan is scum. Sku-fucking-um.
Just in case you are interested in contacting MSNBC to respectuflly ask that Pat Buchanan be dropped from the team, click…
Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily…
What went wrong was exactly the kind of thing that used to go wrong for me almost every time I tried to build something like the LHC in my secret laboratory when I was a kid. The electricity got the better of part of the machine and ... ZAP ... a bunch of parts got ruined.
We now know, from a…
John McCain has got to be the biggest moron this side of stoopidville. For so many reasons. The latest is his very public cozy-ing up to the now famous "Joe the Plumber."
We are at war in two countries. The economy is in a state not seen since the beginning of the Great Depression and no one…
UPDATE: Since Bachmann's appearance on Hardball, the Tinklenberg Campaign has received over $30,000.00 in donations! Much of this could be because of the link from Pharyngula, but I think a fair number of people also watch Hard Ball.
I'm sure Tinklenberg would appreciate more...
The Trivers Willard Hypothesis predicts that under certain conditions, individuals will bias their investment in offspring differently depending on the sex of the offspring. It is believed that this can be as extreme as infanticide or as subtle as providing different amounts of breast milk.
A…
I have three neat news stories to report, including the oldest insect ever, all cool fossil finds being reported just now.
Walking Fish Helps Fill Evolutionary Gap
Some 375 million years ago, a unique fish existed with features in its head that helped pave the way for vertebrate animals to live…
Your weekend reading is ready!
A totally multimedia version of Boneyard XIV is up at the Other 95%. You must see this carnival.
Carnival of Homeschooling: The Missing Day is at Homeschoolbuzz.com
Carnival of the Recipes: Tricks, Treats & Eats at Everything and Nothing
Good News Film…
I have had this experience. I've traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.
But I've also…
ZooBorns is a new site dedicated to scarfing up everyone else's internet traffic by posting nothing but cute baby animals, like these Red Panda Cubs recently born in the Edmonton Valley Zoo:
Zooborn is produced by Chris and Andrew, who are very dedicated animal-symps. Andrew runs the blog…
How often do you see people in the gym doin' it wrong? All the time. Improper use of free weights and exercise machines can lead to poor results and embarrassment.
Well, of course. She's a suburban middle class Republican hockey mom running on the Republican ticket for Vice President. But, do we have anything more specific to say about it at this time? Well, of course.
A complaint was filed this week with Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg over the…
