bloggingheads

I had the pleasure of chatting with John Hawks about the two big science news stories of the past few months, the synthetic genome and the Neandertal genome, for Science Saturday at bloggingheads.tv. John is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin who studies population genetics of ancient humans, as well as a terrific teacher. I learned a lot of really fascinating things about how people study fossils and trace human evolution and it was interesting to find some connections between the two stories! As he mentions on his blog, we didn't once mention synthetic Neandertals…
Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father. His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
Johnson and Horgan are back on this week's Science Saturday diavlog on Bloggingheads.tv: From BHTV: In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson explain how the latest Jarmusch film, "The Limits of Control," conveys a message of significance for struggling science journalists everywhere. They also discuss how neural implants might improve your sex life, whether it's time to declare defeat in the war on cancer, and whether human civilization is going to be crushed by food shortages.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts: Jake on genetics and obesity Razib on obesity and heritability
Razib and I have a discussion up at Bloggingheads.tv about genetics and behavior as well as a brief discussion of neuroeconomics. Check it out below the fold:
In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson discuss a recent debate about the identity of humanity's closest living relatives, an anthropological case study in the link between technology and violence, and the dizzying complexity of the mathematics of the financial crisis. And just in case you'd forgotten that John and George aren't fanatics about the Internet Age, they made sure to squeeze in a bit of curmudgeonly ranting against Twitter.
Maybe not nearly as long as many anthropologists believe. That's the thesis of Gregory Cochran's controversial book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, which Gregory discusses with ScienceBlogger Razib Khan of Gene Expression in this week's Science Saturday. They also talk about how the evolution of lactose tolerance might explain why Indo-European languages are widespread, whether the invention of helmets changed our skulls, and the way in which survivors of the Black Plague were doubly lucky.
This week, our regularly scheduled "Science Saturday" feature has become "Science Monday" due to some technical difficulties during our most recent upgrade. But the video is now up and features some of our very own bloggers, Janet (AKA Dr. Freeride) from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Peter Lipson (AKA Dr. Pal) who contributes to Denialism Blog and regularly hosts thrilling podcasts. This week, Janet and Dr. Pal explore the ethics behind different issues in medicine and science such as conscience clauses (for example, in which pharmacists can withhold prescriptions from consumers), the…
This week's Bloggingheads.tv episode features philosopher Joshua Knobe and psychologist Elizabeth Spelke discussing the cognitive abilities of infants. Here are some more clips of the "diavlog" in addition to the one you can view on the ScienceBlogs home page. What do you think of this week's Bloggingheads feature?
The advent of the science blogger is changing the way people talk about science. But along with new modes of communication and new rhetoric come new questions and opinions about how this evolution is affecting the scientific process. ScienceBlogger Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock posted his views about why both scientists and science journalists sometimes rant about science bloggers, and why this is a good thing.
Today on ScienceBlogs.com, you will notice a new feature on the site. Instead of The Buzz, we have an embedded video from Bloggingheads.tv. This feature will appear every Saturday and can be viewed subsequently here on Page 3.14, the editorial blog of ScienceBlogs.com. This week, John Horgan from the Stevens Center for Science Writings and George Johnson, author of Fire in the Mind and The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments discuss recent attempts of scientists to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology to display graphic images on a computer screen directly from the visual cortex…