Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
July 9, 2008
A Wolf's Guenon (Cercopithecus wolfi). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
July 8, 2008
I made a bit of an error this past weekend. Wanting to make better use of my camera I eschewed the automatic settings I previously relied on for one that would allow me to change the shutter speed, contrast, white balance, etc. The photographs looked absolutely amazing when I saw the previews on my…
July 8, 2008
As I poked around the shelves of the Cranbury Bookworm a few weeks ago, picking up dusty and tattered copies of discarded volumes, I couldn't help but wonder what may eventually become of my own work. There were some classics on the shelves, earlier editions of books that have been printed and…
July 8, 2008
Eliza
Madeline
Why start off the day with pictures of the kittens rather than a juicy science post? I think this explains it well enough;
more cat pictures
July 8, 2008
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
July 7, 2008
For H.A. Reid, the secretary of the State Academy of Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa, evolution and Creation fit perfectly together. Writing in the Kansas City Review of Science and Industry in 1881, Reid echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson that it was impossible to look at the natural world and…
July 7, 2008
Oh dear. I guess the History Channel decided that the U.S. needed an equivalent to "The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" and will soon be featuring a show called "Jurassic Fight Club." Here's the synopsis;
JURASSIC FIGHT CLUB
They were the ultimate fighters -- prehistoric beasts who walked the…
July 7, 2008
Last summer I started up the paleontology blog carnival The Boneyard, a bi-weekly gathering of links featuring the best of blogging about fossils. Sadly the carnival has now become defunct, and outside of Will (who has admirably tried to kick me in the butt to get it going again) not many people…
July 7, 2008
A black leopard (Panthera pardus). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
July 6, 2008
A clip from the Nature documentary "Murder in the Troop."
Before June of last year I didn't particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates…
July 6, 2008
A clip from Young Frankenstein.
Scientists suffer from an image problem. If you were to ask a child to draw a picture of a scientist, for instance, you'd probably receive a depiction of an old, crazy-haired white male holding a bubbling test tube, the image drawing heavily from Dr. Frankenstein…
July 6, 2008
A pair of ring-tailed mongoose (Galidia elegans). Photographed in the Madagascar exhibit at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
July 5, 2008
Are science writers starting to suffer from blogging burnout? It seems that way. For one reason or another a number of bloggers (including three of my favorites) have seriously pondered the question of giving up on science blogging (or at least leaving Sb) since the summer began. Why are so many…
July 5, 2008
One of the two snow leopard sisters (Panthera uncia) I first saw two years ago, all grown up. Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
I'm still learning how to use all the functions on my new camera but I have to say that I think I took some of the best photographs I have ever taken on…
July 5, 2008
A young western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) fast asleep against an adult female. Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
July 4, 2008
Edouard de Montule's 1816 painting of the mastodon reconstructed in the Peale Museum. Note the down-turned tusks which were later turned the right way up.
Thomas Jefferson had an axe to grind when he wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781. Twenty years earlier the French naturalist…
July 4, 2008
A polar bear (Ursus maritimus) playing catch with itself, photographed at the Bronx zoo in the spring of 2008.
[As a side note, I'll probably head back to the Bronx zoo tomorrow to get some new photographs. The forecast is calling for thunderstorms but I'll probably go anyway; I just can't say…
July 3, 2008
Remember Christina Comer, the woman who was expelled from her job at the Texas Education Agency for merely forwarding an e-mail about a talk by Barbara Forrest? According to reports released yesterday she is suing the TEA and Education Commissioner Robert Scott for illegally and unconstitutionally…
July 3, 2008
Note: Many thanks to Lars Dietz (see comments) who has done so much to correct some errors of attribution I made in this piece. He truly went above and beyond to dig up the truth behind John Hill's book and I am certainly thankful that he has done so.
In 1751 John Hill, upset the Royal Society of…
July 3, 2008
A five-lined skink (Eumeces fasciatus), photographed at the Delaware Water Gap in the summer of 2007.
July 2, 2008
Michael Bolton and I share the same birth date, February 26th (he being considerably older than I, of course). Who is better? It's an absurd question (I opted out of comparing myself to Johnny Cash and Victor Hugo; I know when I'm beat), especially since it's like comparing apples and lawnmowers.…
July 2, 2008
If you haven't had enough of Wallace and Darwin yet, head on over to the Beagle Project Blog where there is a guest post by George Beccaloni that summarizes Wallace's involvement in the events that occurred on July 1, 1858. I don't agree with his hypothesis about why Wallace was forgotten or…
July 2, 2008
So the big news finally came out yesterday; Carl and Phil have moved on over to blogs run by Discover (which also houses Reality Base, Better Planet, 80 Beats, Disco Blog). With Jennifer starting up an additional blog over at the Discovery Channel site (which has a collection of space blogs) the…
July 2, 2008
A white-tailed deer fawn (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in the summer of 2007.
July 1, 2008
It is one thing to remember the date of an anniversary and quite another to truly recognize the significance of it. When it comes to Charles Darwin it seems that we have too much of the former and not enough of the latter, especially concerning what transpired 150 years ago today. Many are saying…
July 1, 2008
The past few six months have seen a lot of changes here at scienceblogs.com. A new wave of bloggers came in, super readers were recruited, channel photos posted, and lots of other cool stuff, but one of the biggest changes is the amount of traffic. According to a release that popped in my e-mail…
July 1, 2008
It seems that today is going to be a big day for science bloggers. Although updates were scheduled to go up yesterday, both Carl Zimmer and Phil Plait have delayed their announcements until sometime today. I've got a big announcement, too, something that I am definitely excited about.
My abstract…
July 1, 2008
Two Amur tiger cubs (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed in September 2007 at the Philadelphia zoo.
June 30, 2008
[Note:] I realized I posted this entry very recently, only three months prior to today, but since it is the anniversary of the Oxford debate/lectures I thought it would be fitting to throw this entry up again (with a few minor edits). I have also included two caricatures of Huxley (top) and…
June 30, 2008
Last week Ed blogged about a new PLoS paper implicating canine distemper, parasites, and climate changes in the severe reductions in lion some lion populations seen during the last 15 years in Africa. Coincidentally, the PBS show Nature featured a special last night called "Vanishing Lions" about…