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PNAS: Hamish Johnston, Physicsworld.com Editor

I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track. The tenth profile of this round features the editor of PhysicsWorld.com, which is probably the best physics magazine web site out there. 1) What is your non-academic job? I am editor of physicsworld.com, which is a website aimed at working physicists and people with a background in physics…

Blog Table Discussion with Puff the Mutant Dragon (part II)

In which we have the next round of the conversation with Puff the Mutant Dragon. Previous entries here and there. ------------ Amusingly, your post was singled out for high praise in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker review of the book. Probably because Deborah Blum, who wrote it, wrote a book about poisons, so the topic was close to her interests, but still, congrats. You're definitely right about blogging being a weird hobby. I think it's one of the more interesting but less examined aspects of the rise of social media that there's been this explosion of text writing by all sorts of…

Time is running out (Ain't it always?)

While the U.S. Senate's sense of urgency on the climate change front wanes, a new campaign originating on the other side of rapidly warming pond is urging us all to get with the program by cutting our emissions sooner rather than later. This is obviously a good idea from a scientific point of view, but what are its chances of success? The 10:10 campaign draws on the always-obvious-when-you-think-about-it, but until recently largely ignored, fact that it matters very much how quickly we reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping all the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans. A pair of…

Things that are unlucky (or lucky?): Carbon tax game on when gas prices high.

So, there's been much argument lately in my neck of the woods, over the BC's new carbon tax. This is coming online in a few days (July 1st), and will be responsible (amongst many other things) for what has been figured to be a 2.4c/litre hike in gas prices. Anyway, folks are getting quite antsy here, with the opposition government saying all the usual things about getting rid of it, etc. In many ways, however, I think the timing couldn't be better. Mainly because this convergence of activity has just raised the "carbon tax" and "things concerning fossil fuels" to a whole new, almost…

Baby signing in the real world

Take a look at this video made by fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis. She's talking with her son, a toddler who adorably mimics her as she says very complicated words such as "Adventures in Ethics and Science" and "Wackaloon" (but sadly, not "Cognitive Daily"): It's cute, but it's difficult to say whether Dr. Isis is really talking with her child. The difficulty babies have pronouncing words has led many parents to suspect they might be able to communicate better with their children using hand signs. Last week we talked about a study suggesting that teaching babies even a few signs like those…

iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer

iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There's an app for that! Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I'm not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Ironically,…

Dr. Mehmet Oz: Gone completely over to the Dark Side

For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…

Academic samizdat

Since early days indeed, it's been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints. I've even had publishers give me e-offprints (which to me, preprint disseminator that I am, just feels weird). The repository software ePrints can place an "ask the author" button on items that are withheld from public view for whatever reason. As best I can tell, just about everyone involved in scholarly communication…

Thurs. @ NYAS: Public Communication Re-Considered

The NY Academy of Sciences offers a stunning venue for public talks, forums, and receptions, with a view from the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center. Thursday morning I will be heading up to New York to give a 7pm talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. A crowd of more than 100 is expected for what I am hoping to be an interesting discussion and entertaining reception to follow. (Register for free here.) Here's a brief preview of what I will be talking about followed by more specific details: Over the past few years there have been signs of a major shift in how the scientific community in…

Birds in the News 155

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Sun Conure chick, Aratinga solstitialis. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Christmas Bird Count News The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count for your state, please let me know so I can include it in the list: Alabama (Thanks, Chazz Hesselein) Arizona (Thanks, Sheri Williamson) California (Thanks, Joseph Morlan) Idaho (Thanks, Denise Hughes)…

A horrendously bad "vaxed/unvaxed" study rises from the dead yet again

Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for example, a bit of pseudoscience has gained traction in mainstream groups and readers keep writing me about it, to the point where I finally give in. This is one of the latter posts. None of this is to say that I don't still do my best with these posts to explain and argue my points. Fear not, I'll get…

Hire Google for your denialist campaign!

An alert reader noticed that when he performed a Google search on 'Sicko', guess who pops up in the sponsored links? Why, our good friends at AEI, a denialist organization second only to CEI, but since they have a lot of the same people working for both it's really just academic which one you're arguing with. When you need your crappy industry defended from public criticism, you can always rely on AEI or CEI to chomp at the bit and pretend there is "no problem". What's even more interesting is that Google actually solicited ads (fixed link) to combat Sicko's bad PR for the insurance…

Hayek vs Hobbes and the theory of law

There is, of course, a theory of law. As soon as you ponder the question, you realise there must be. But it had never occurred to me (in my faint defence I find, now I look, that whilst wiki has a category for theories of law, it doesn't seem to have an overall article on the concept of theory of law). Nor, when I mention it to various friends, did the question strike any kind of "oh yeah, I know that stuff" answer. My children, who have done some "philosophy" in school, hadn't heard of the idea either. So this post is likely to be naive. But my dumb opinions are just as good as anyone else…

Interference with 10,000-Particle "Particles": "Matter-wave interference with particles selected from a molecular library with masses exceeding 10000 amu"

I'm teaching Quantum Optics this term, and one of my students picked "Atom Optics" off the list of suggested paper topics. When he asked for pointers, I said "You should check out the diffraction stuff Markus Arndt's group does." And just like that, a paper from the Arndt group turns up from the Arxiv Blog... This is apparently only recently posted to the arxiv, though the article in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics claims to have been online since July. Since I never get tired of talking about this, let's talk about this one, too. So, what's this one about, then? In a lot of ways, it's…

Gene Genie #24

Welcome to Gene Genie #24: with a heavy emphasis on Personal Genetics The previous Gene Genie was hosted at DNAdirect Talk and it is still fresh, so go have a look if you have not already. The next Gene Genie will be hosted at My Biotech Life. By the way, the Gene Genie logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life -- see the other award winning artwork here. If you wish to submit a post for the next Gene Genie, you may use the handy-dandy submission form. And, now, on with the show: Did you ever wonder How many knocked out genes in Knock Out mice? at molecular B(io)LOG(y) One would…

Weekend Diversion: My Love Letter to Winnie Cooper

"When you're a little kid you're a bit of everything; scientist, philosopher, artist. Sometimes it seems like growing up is giving these things up one at a time." -Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years Like many who grew up around the same time I did, The Wonder Years was one of my favorite shows, putting on display much of the awkwardness, anxiety, hope and powerlessness that comes along with being a pre-teen/teenager in this world. And like many, I had a secret crush on Winnie Cooper, played by Danica McKellar. To accompany this post, with a modern twist, here's the Easy Star All-Stars singing…

Public health takes on the opioid abuse and overdose problem, building on strengths as conveners, educators

This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose problem. Read the previous stories in the series here and here. (We'll be publishing a bonus addition to the series next week — a discussion with Dr. Daniel Carr, director of the Pain Research, Education and Policy Program at Tufts University.) by Kim Krisberg A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the…

Boston Marathon

The rowing one, that is. It was just like last year except wetter, and we were better, but our cox was less lovely. Oh, and as promised, this is the last of the random rowing-n-running types posts here. You need to go to the other blog for that from now on, except for important stuff like the bumps, of course. Pic: all of us: L to R: Jo (3), Mel (7), Anne (6), William (4), Joss (4), Freya (Stroke), Amy (Bow), Me (5), James (Cox). Spot the survivors from last year. You can also read Amy's take on it all. The results are now up: 4:43:04 for us (I made it 4:42, but I started my watch a fraction…

The Oldest Human Bones, Jebel Irhoud, Morocco

You've heard to story. I'm here to give you a little context. A pretty typical early handaxe, made by a Homo erectus. This was a big flake made from a bigger rock. The big flake was subsequently flaked to make this handaxe. The word "handaxe" can be spelled about nine different ways. But in case you haven't heard the story, this is from the press release which is, so far, the only information generally available: New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by…

EU will ban neonicotinoid pesticides to save the honey bees

Being a bee is hard. I'm speaking specifically of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, the one that produces the honey you buy in the store. Many insects, and other critters, eat by finding food and then eating it, and then they do that for a while and now and then reproduce by finding a mate, laying eggs that they perhaps put in a good location but thereafter leave alone, etc. etc. But honey bees do all of these thing in a way that makes it seem like they are trying to make it harder for them than it is for everyone else. Much of the food that honey bees eat is gathered at rare and hard to…

On Framing, Part One

My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet have created quite a stir recently, first with this article in Science and later with this article for the Washington Post. The basic premise is that scientists need to become more effective communicators, especially on controversial issues like evolution and global warming. In particular, they need to “frame” scientific issues in a way that will have resonance with specific groups of people. In some cases this might mean eschewing a discussion of the scientific minutiae in favor of discussing more practical ramifications of the issue at hand.…

John Edwards embraces enviro politics, a little too warmly

Every campaign it's the same thing. The editors and their reporting staff vow to pay more attention to the issues and focus less on the horse race. And every campaign that promise turns out to be as hollow as the campaign promises of the candidates the journalists are covering. So it is with the mountains of attention paid to the fundraising efforts of the presidential contenders. The latest has Barack Obama pulling in a mind-boggling amount of... but there I go, sucked into the vortex of distraction. What I want to explore is John Edwards' environmental platform, which I think is remarkable…

Casey Luskin vs. Homo naledi

The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label -- they're not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They're scientists, they think. They're just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth than those horrible Darwinist notions. But of course, everything about them just affirms that they're simply jumped-up creationists with airs, from their founding by an evangelical Christian, Phillip Johnson, to their crop of fellows like Paul Nelson and William Dembski, who happily profess their…

Race, ethnicity, diversity - the saga continues

On Monday, I posted two parts to my ethnic story as a white person in the US, and they prompted a variety of comments. Rather than respond in the comments, I thought I'd write another post. First, I want to thank the people who took up the challenge to write their own stories. DH, grad student, Eric Lund added their stories to the comments, Academic wrote about hers on her blog, as did Ginger Peach, and Makita. Sciencebloggers took up talking about race/ethnicity/diversity and science too including ScienceWoman, razib, Janet, Greg, DrugMonkey, and Maria, and anyone else I missed. If you'…

Ortega y Gasset On Science

Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're relevant to the attitude towards science that some atheists take. The essays were written in the 1930s (most of them during the Spanish Civil War), but as is often the case with Ortega y Gasset, they're infused with a prescience that insures that they're still relevant today, and will continue to be…

Expanding Medicaid can improve birth outcomes

Earlier this week, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation that accepts the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion for his state, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has signaled his intention to do so if the federal government approves his proposed program changes. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff notes that if Pennsylvania does expand its Medicaid program, that will mean the majority of the states have adopted one of the main aspects of the Affordable Care Act. This is good news for the millions of low-income uninsured US residents who will gain health coverage from Medicaid. Another…

Building the Infrastructure for a Local Food System

Last Sunday's New York Times had an article about the shortage of slaughterhouses for those raising non-industrial and local meat. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years. Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand.…

The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse

By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have studied vaccines and vaccine policy for almost forty years, The Pump Handle has invited me to provide its readers with some big-picture background on vaccines and vaccination policy in the US and around the world to accompany the link to my editorial. School Entry Laws In the 1970s, public health…

Houston, we have a workers' rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas' biggest city

by Kim Krisberg Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren't members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country. The workers reported multiple problems with the ExxonMobil subcontractor who hired them, including not being paid on time, not having enough water on site and no access to medical care in the event of an…

After GOPcare collapse, how will Trump administration respond?

Many of us breathed sighs of relief on Friday when House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the withdrawal of legislation to roll back the Affordable Care Act. The bill, the American Health Care Act, would have resulted in 24 million people losing insurance and $880 billion less for Medicaid over the next 10 years -- while giving an $883 billion tax cut targeted to the wealthiest. At town hall meetings and over the phones, members of Congress heard from constituents urging them to leave the ACA’s coverage expansions in place. Yet the bill’s defeat doesn’t mean that the idea of healthcare coverage…

On Time, Space, and Metaphor

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conceptual metaphor theory sucks. Why does it suck? Well, because there's no experimental evidence for it (and plenty of evidence against it). Except, that is, in one domain: time. Specifically, the work of Lera Boroditsky, along with Dedre Gentner and her colleagues, has provided interesting demonstrations of the influence of the way we talk about space on the way we conceptualize time. I've talked about their work before, and now Dave's talking about Gentner's work over at Cognitive Daily, so I won't go into a lot of detail. Instead, I'll give you…

Prediction: self-promoting hype meets interdisciplinary ignorance

There is a maddeningly vague press release floating around, and I think everybody has sent me a link to it now. It contains a claim by some chemists that they have discovered a new organizing principle in evolution. A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution. The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on…

Lightweight dinosaur, heavyweight publishing event

SciBling Bora (aka coturnix) at Blog Around the Clock has scored a major coup for Open Access publishing today. Fittingly the subject matter is a dinosaur, an apt symbol for the new nail in the coffin of traditional scientific publishing that the paper represents. Bora is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), one of the leading Open Access science publishers. PLoS ONE is unusual even among OA publications in that it concentrates on rapid publication after a baseline technical review by Editorial Board members. It covers all areas of science and medicine and…

Cato is shocked, shocked! To find wait times for care in the US.

The NYT reports on the differing wait times between high-cost cosmetic procedures in dermatology, and low-cost potentially life-saving screenings for melanoma and other skin cancers. Patients seeking an appointment with a dermatologist to ask about a potentially cancerous mole have to wait substantially longer than those seeking Botox for wrinkles, says a study published online today by The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Researchers reported that dermatologists in 12 cities offered a typical wait of eight days for a cosmetic patient wanting Botox to smooth wrinkles, compared…

Pathological Stack Hell: Underload

Our pathological language this week is [Underload][underload]. Underload is, in some ways, similar to Muriel, only it's a much more sensible language. In fact, there are actually serious practical languages called *concatenative languages* based on the same idea as Underload: [Joy][joy] and [Factor][factor] are two examples. [underload]: http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Underload [muriel]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/friday_pathological_programmin… [joy]: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html [factor]: http://www.factorcode.org/ Underload is a remarkably…

A Different Kind of Handshake: Interview with Vanessa Woods

Vanessa Woods is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group which recently moved to Duke University - just in time for her to be able to attend the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Vanessa is the author of four books (three of those are for kids, the latest one, It's every monkey for themselves just got translated into Hebrew, and is aimed at adult audience). She is a feature writer for the Discovery Channel and she documents her research on her blog Bonobo Handshake (and what it means? Check the blog!) Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my…

Fun times in the Big City

So … this weekend, we had an odd and informal secret meeting of the SciBlings in New York City. This was nothing official, it's like a whole bunch of the bloggers here decided they ought to get together some time, and a plan slowly crystallized and the precipitate settled out on NYC. It was decided to keep it informal and in-house, or I would have advertised our presence further ahead of time — but with about 3 dozen of us present it would have been too much to invite in a lot of others, even though there were lots of other NY bloggers and readers I would have liked to have met. I flew in…

The World Doesn't Need More Promotional Blogs

Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal): Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…

Forget Twitter: Slow blogging is the future

The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still call cyberspace. I doubt tweets will go away any time soon, and I'm not sure that they should go away, despite the legs my "Twitter is Evil" parody have acquired. Rather than dwell on the merits or shortcomings of the 140-character medium, I'm more interested in doing my part to improve the signal-…

Clozapine Augmentation with Lamotrigine

It is refreshing to see something like this.  Both drugs are available as generics, so the financial motivation for a study like this is not great.  But the clinical benefit could e substantial, albeit for a small subset of patients. Clozapine is considered to be the most efficacious antipsychotic medication, in that it is the drug to which the highest percentage of persons with psychosis have a positive response.  It is, however, considered a third-line drug.  The reason is that about 1% of patients will develop severe granulocytopenia.  So, in general, a patient will be tried on at least…

Communicating Science Through Science Museums & Centers

Two weeks ago, I spent my spring break at the Exploratorium, as a visiting Osher Fellow. One of the projects I consulted on was the Exploratorium's "evidence" project, an exciting initiative that will provide Web and floor content introducing the public to how science works as a process and how science develops as a body of knowledge. In June, a special expert workshop will be held on the topic at the National Science Foundation, and there is likely to be proceedings published. I hope to have more to report come summer. Among the other topics I discussed with staff were the themes presented…

Reading is fundamental

I have had two experiences in quick succession that have made me seriously wonder what kind of reading education kids these days are getting. (Jeez, did I just go over into old geezer territory? I think that's the first time I've used the phrase "kids these days" in a blog post. Next I'll be telling people to get off my lawn...) (Note: for simplicity in telling the stories, I'm just going to go with "him"/"he" to avoid the whole him/her s/he awkwardness.) In the first case, a student is helping me get materials ready for one of my classes. This involves setting up a particular piece of…

Nature Sticks One Toe In the Early 20th Century

By way of the daily Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned that Nature has made a quantum leap into the...well...sort of into the early part of the 20th century. In an editorial published online this afternoon, the journal announced that it would amend its mission statement, which appears each week next to its table of contents. The original statement, which dates to 1869, says that Nature's mission is, among other things, "to aid scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of natural knowledge throughout the world." In these tres modern times…

Is showing only part of the post as bad as breaking articles into pages?

One of the most hated practices on the Internet is the breaking of articles into pages. Jason Kottke swearingly rants against it here, and Mike Davidson denounces the practice here. I don't much like the practice either, especially when a short, pointless article is broken into four or more pages (Davidson mockingly points to this extreme example). Davidson argues that only extremely long articles -- more than 20 screens long -- should be broken up into pages, and these pages should correspond to logical divisions within the article, which he calls "acts" (I'd call them "chapters" or "…

Paleontology references: Read this, not that

The December 2009 issue of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has just been released, and among the new offerings is a paper on "Print Reference Sources about Evolution" by Adam Goldstein. It seems to be a spinoff of Goldstein's paper on evolution blogs published in the same journal earlier this year, and it stresses the importance of print references during a time when online resources are becoming more widely available. While I agree that print references are still very important for anyone who wants to educate themselves about evolution, though, I don't think that Goldstein made…

Seamount biogeography

We don't mention it often, but Craig and I publish regularly outside Deep Sea News, in the public arena of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Craig authors ~3 scientific journal articles per year since 2004. I author ~2/yr. The last two years were above average for both of us. This is amazing to me, because we spend so much time writing for DSN. Either our cups runneth over, or the glacial pace of scientific publishing obscures the impact of our extra-curricular reporting activities here at DSN. I tell you this so you know we are contributors to the field, not only journalists. We make the…

Health care blogger survey

I got this request the other day and finally decided to take the survey that it asked me to. It was relatively painless and it might gather useful information (although obviously it's not a scientific survey); so I thought I'd help publicize it. If you're a health care/ medical blogger, this survey is looking for you. This poll is co-produced by Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network (TMBN). WHY WE ARE CONDUCTING THIS SURVEY Over the past few years, the healthcare blogosphere has grown in size and importance. This means that more people are blogging about medical issues, healthcare…

Why ScienceBlogs is So Important

I am delighted to be part of ScienceBlogs, the largest online community dedicated to science. I accepted this challenge because I believe that most in my profession are far more focused on making the next discovery rather than explaining to the public the value of what they do. I invite you to join me on this journey and to share my articles with anyone who has that curiosity that each of us had as a child - remember discovering your first ladybug, seeing your first rainbow? You will be an important part of an ongoing discussion about the beauty and fascination of science. So it begins: "…

Extra, Extra

Science Someone had to ask it. Why do squirrels masturbate? Obviously, it's a piece by Ed. Sentiment-sensing software could aid in weeding hostile online comments. If this comes to pass, I imagine most of Physioprof's comments will be weeded out, sadly. An important new study of mirror self-recognition in Japanese macaques, explained by Carl Zimmer. And BPS Research Digest weighs in on the validity of the mirror self-recognition test in the first place. Lots of news this week about the discovery that the exoplanet Gliese 581g could be hospitable to life. Brian Romans explains the important…

A River Runs By It: Children growing up with science all around them

Look at this map, of a small part of the state of Minnesota: See the wide channel that runs from left to right with the windy river in it? You are looking at one of the most amazing stories in geological history ever. I'd like to tell you about it. When not in flood, the meandering river is little more than a slow moving stream in a wide marsh, with thickets and stands of pioneer trees dispersed among reeds and pools of open water. Largely bypassed by farm, rural and urban development, it is in this channel that the state's rare cougars live, and where some of the best birding in the…