laelaps | January 28, 2010
"The Barefoot Professor", a behind-the-scenes look at the new Nature paper.
Humans that had to escape from saber-toothed cats, giant hyenas, and charging mammoths did not wear Nike or Adidas sneakers. They ran barefoot, but don't feel too bad that they did not have good running shoes to help them. As suggested by a team of researchers led by Daniel Lieberman in the latest issue of Nature, habitually shoeless runners have a unique step that may be better for our feet than even the most expensive, cushioned running shoe.
Whenever I go for a jog I run in the way that is most familiar to me…
laelaps | January 27, 2010
A few weeks ago the first packet of edits for Written in Stone was slipped under my door. I did not know exactly what to expect. As I opened the mailing sleeve I started having flashbacks of returned elementary school writing assignments, the pages cut and bleeding from the merciless slashes of the teacher's terrible red pen. Had my editor also cut my prose to ribbons?
I took the sheaf of papers, covering the first two chapters of my book, and sat down with my laptop to start making corrections. Nothing on page one. So far, so good. A typo on page two, marked in black (thank god) ink. Not…
laelaps | January 26, 2010
An osprey (Pandion haliaetus), photographed in Yellowstone National Park.
laelaps | January 26, 2010
So many books, articles, and documentary films have been produced about the life of Charles Darwin that it is difficult to keep track of all the Darwiniana, but the recently-released feature film Creation is something special. It is not a straight biography, nor is it an entirely fictionalized account. Instead it is an amplified version of a challenging time in Darwin's life which largely eschews intricate details in favor of broad, powerful strokes.
Viewers hoping for a 100% historically-accurate dramatization of Darwin's life will be disappointed from the very first scene. The film opens…
laelaps | January 25, 2010
A pregnant female elk (Cervus canadensis), photographed in Yellowstone National Park.
laelaps | January 24, 2010
A polar bear (Ursus maritimus), playing with a plastic ring at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | January 24, 2010
I got a nice little surprise this week. It turns out that my twitter feed (@Laelaps) was recommended by Scientific American in their latest issue. The scan I have (kindly sent to me by Anne-Marie Hodge) makes the endorsement a little difficult to see, but it simply reads;
Brian Switek, science writer with a focus on evolution (@Laelaps)
With any luck my name will someday appear in the magazine as an author of an article, but this is not a bad start. And congrats to Karen James (@kejames), too, who was also recommended by the folks over at SciAm.
laelaps | January 24, 2010
The view from behind Jackson Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
laelaps | January 23, 2010
A mother mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and her ducklings, photographed in Cape May, New Jersey.
laelaps | January 22, 2010Last weekend I attended the annual North Carolina sci-shindig (called ScienceOnline2010 this year), and it was the best iteration of the conference yet. I am still reeling from everything that happened during the three days I was there. Rather than post a session-by-session discussion of what happened there, though, I thought I would simply share a few of the main lessons I took away from the conference.
Writers Help Other Writers
Writing a book is no easy task. It involves much more than simply sitting down and hammering out an arbitrary number of words or chapters, and as someone who is…
laelaps | January 21, 2010
A group of sanderlings flees from an incoming wave, photographed in Spring Lake, New Jersey.
laelaps | January 20, 2010
A Pachycephalosaurus, photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 20, 2010
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Who doesn't love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa's southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.
Documenting the paths of animals during geological history is not an easy task. In the days before scientists understood plate tectonics, land bridges, now sunk beneath the ocean, were often…
laelaps | January 19, 2010
A stuffed Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 19, 2010
The restored lower jaw of Arcanotherium (formerly Numidotherium savagei). (From Delmer, 2009)
Unlike the folks at this past weekend's ScienceOnline 2010 meeting, fossils don't come with nametags. The identification of preserved bits of ancient life relies upon careful comparison with what is already known, a task made all the more difficult for vertebrate paleontologists by the fragmentary nature of many of their subjects. Scraps of bone given one name could turn out to be parts of another partial skeleton given another name, or other bits of bone attributed one name could turn out to be…
laelaps | January 18, 2010
A stuffed fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 18, 2010The wonderful thing about this past Saturday's ScienceOnline session on going "from blog to book" is that my co-panelists and I were able to highlight the ways in which the web is becoming increasingly important for authors. The only drawback was that there was so much to talk about that we could not have answered all the questions even if we stayed in session for the rest of the day! Fortunately audience members continued to ask me questions and make comments throughout the rest of the conference, and I wanted to specifically address one comment brought up by the wonderful blogger Stephanie…
laelaps | January 18, 2010
A restoration of Acrocanthosaurus, photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
laelaps | January 17, 2010
A dolphin skull, photographed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.