pharyngula

You've probably heard this explanation for the virtue of religion: that even if god doesn't exist, belief in god (or some other monitoring authority) makes people behave more morally. There have been many experiments that have actually shown that people are nicer or more generous when exposed to…

Can we all just pretend that vipers and serpents are hairless, limbless cats?

There's another paper out debunking the ENCODE consortium's absurd interpretation of their data. ENCODE, you may recall, published a rather controversial paper in which they claimed to have found that 80% of the human genome was 'functional' — for an extraordinarily loose definition of function —…

(Found on a site called The Cephalopodiatrist. I wish I'd thought of that name.)

What with all the bad weather around here, my wife is staying at an apartment near her workplace. And every time she does that, she starts sending me these kinds of photos. Should I be concerned? (via petitchef)

Bees get caffeinated at coffee flowers? But of course they do. (via NatGeo)

After that debate between Tzortzis and Lawrence Krauss that was overshadowed by the disgraceful anti-egalitarian exhibition of Muslim misogyny, iERA is now trying a new tactic: they're releasing tiny snippets of the debate that they believe they can spin into anti-Krauss sentiment. Here's a perfect…

Oh, boy. The Intelligent Design creationists are all excited about a new paper that purports to have identified an intelligent signal in the genetic code. Here's a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do…

(via Monterey Bay Aquarium)

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

Last year, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium caught a paper nautilus that survived long enough to lay a few tens of thousands of hatchlings. It must be nice to be a member of a species that's beautiful at every stage of life, rather than none.

"TRI-LO-BIIITE!" Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You'll only know what the heck I'm talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it's such a pathetic joke it's only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you're a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you'll…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

(via MBL)

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, that is. One of the common complaints about evolutionary psychology is that it claims to be addressing evolved human universals, but when you look at the data sets, they are almost always drawn from the same tiny pool of outliers, Western…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

I just got back from this evening's Cafe Scientifique — where were you guys? — and I got to see lots of pretty pictures of halos and sundogs and light pillars. One of the nice things about living in Morris is that we actually get a lot of that weird atmospheric phenomena here, because we have lots…

Philosophers are still grumbling about Lawrence Krauss, who openly dissed philosophy (word to the philosophers reading this: he recanted, so you can put down the thumbscrews and hot irons for now). This is one of those areas where I'm very much a middle-of-the-road person: I am not a philosopher,…

(From a pleasant story about rescuing orphaned night monkeys)

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

Wow. Talk about major failure. A new study out correlates levels of Foxp2 with levels of vocalization in rats: basically, male rats squeak more than female pups when they're stressed by separation from their mothers, and mothers tend to rescue the rat who squeaks the loudest. They then found higher…

You'd think with all those arms they'd have at least one free to focus and set the exposure. This is a picture taken by an octopus who stole a divers' camera. The diver chased it and got the camera back. Otherwise, we'd be waiting for the octopus to get online and upload the pictures to youtube.

I rarely laugh out loud when reading science papers, but sometimes one comes along that triggers the response automatically. Although, in this case, it wasn't so much a belly laugh as an evil chortle, and an occasional grim snicker. Dan Graur and his colleagues have written a rebuttal to the claims…

The baseball player Jose Canseco made a remarkable series of tweets yesterday. I may not be 100% right but think about it. How else could 30 foot leather birds fly?The land was farther away from the core and had much less gravity so bigness could develop and dominateMy theory is the core of the…

Hey, go look: Carl Zimmer has a gallery of Cambrian beasties!

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

Every once in a while, I hear these stirrings from scientists that there can be an objective morality, and that by following reason and evidence we can achieve great advances in ethics and reduce human suffering. I agree, in part. I think reason and science are the only ways we can implement our…