pharyngula

Featured Creature See it live around the 2 minute mark here:

But then, if you want to repel nuisances, I guess being disgusting is a good strategy. Six Seriously Strange Animal Adaptations

Real Monstrosities For perspective, it's roughly 10 meters long.

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Featured Creature

Stephanie Bush

What does it take to get Carl Zimmer to review your research in the New York Times? I suppose it helps to be at Harvard. It also helps to have a combination of subjects — evolution and the human brain — that Zimmer has written about in the past. It helps to have a paper with lots of very pretty…

The cephalopod with the most impressively Goth name ever — Vampyroteuthis infernalis — turns out to be all show and no fangs. It still looks awesome.

HHMI

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

I've been distracted lately — it's end of the world semester time — and so I didn't have time to comment on this recent PNAS paper that reports on dramatic sex differences in the brains of men and women. Fortunately, I can just tell you to go read Christian Jarrett, who explains most of the flaws…

Razib Khan poked me on twitter yesterday on the topic of David Dobbs' controversial article, which I've already discussed (I liked it). I'm in the minority here; Jerry Coyne has two rebuttals, and Richard Dawkins himself has replied. There has also been a lot of pushback in the comments here. I…

Jean McKinnon

The one thing you must read today is David Dobbs' Die, Selfish Gene, Die. It's good to see genetic accommodation getting more attention, but I'm already seeing pushback from people who don't quite get the concept, and think it's some kind of Lamarckian heresy. It's maybe a bit much to ask that the…

Ocean Portal

In Medias Res Vampyroteuthis would like you to know that it is forgivable that you visit Walmart or any of the other greedy big box stores today in search of bargains; however, the retailers who exploit their workers and gin up scarcity and treat the desperate poor as targets are going to…

Last year, the Elsevier journal Food and Chemical Toxicology by Gilles Seralini and others that purported to show that rats fed genetically modified corn were more prone to get cancer. The cranks loved it; Mike Adams thought it was great, it was touted on the Dr Oz show (I don't know why they were…

UCMP

So you won't be surprised that I really like that Erin Podolak has asked, Can We Stop Talking About Carl Sagan? It feels like I’m committing an act of science communication sacrilege here, but I have a confession to make: Carl Sagan means absolutely nothing to me. No more than any other dude from…

Consider it your morning meditation. Or an opportunity to learn something about cell motility.

I don't understand how this happens. You've got a good academic position. You're bringing in reasonable amounts of grant money. You're publishing in Nature Genetics and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. And you don't even understand the basic concepts in your field of study. For instance,…

Echinoblog

I am not a fan of the convergent evolution argument for humanoid aliens. I can well believe that it's likely that intelligent aliens exist out there in the universe, but I'm not even going to try to predict what they look like: there are too many alternative paths that are possible. But for some…

Roland Deschane Science is always working a tough room. It's inherently progressive — we're constantly achieving incremental improvements in our understanding, with occasional lurches forward…and sometimes sudden lurches backward, when we realize that we got something wrong. We're performing for…

Last month, I wrote about the terrible botch journalists had made of an interesting paper in which tweaking regulatory sequences called enhancers transgenically caused subtle shifts in the facial morphology of mice. The problem in the reporting was that the journalists insisted on calling this a…

The article this came from says something cute and charming about Finding Nemo, but I just don't see it.

I've had, off and on, a minor obsession with a particular number. That number is 210. Look for it in any review of evolutionary complexity; some number in the 200+ range will get trotted out as the estimated number of cell types in a chordate/vertebrate/mammal/human, and it will typically be touted…

I prepared for the Carnival of Evolution late at night over the last several days, bracketing the Halloween holiday, and coupled them with my traditional custom of watching horror movies. It wasn't a good match. The evolutionary stories were far more frightening! Terrifying complexity!…

He's persistent, I'll say that for him. I first encountered Mark McMenamin as an enthusiastic promoter of Stuart Pivar's inflatable donut model of development. He then sank from sight, along with the pretentious septic tank salesmen, until two years ago, when he presented piles of ichthyosaur…

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a clever scheme for aerating their babies that involves a little creative surgery on pop bottles. It looks good, though! I'm tempted to try something similar with zebrafish, just because. I don't have a problem with keeping them supplied with oxygen, but I do have to…