Other Sea Critters
jgoldman | March 22, 2011I've got a new piece over at the Scientific American Guest Blog:
On Friday, March 11, Japan was rocked by an earthquake. People were displaced, a nuclear reactor was in trouble, and the world watched as a tsunami flooded Japan, threatened the islands of the Pacific, and ultimately hit the western coasts of North and South America. Chris Rowan pointed out that "Very little of the devastation resulting from this earthquake was from the initial shaking. This is partly because of Japan's stringent building codes. But mainly because any damage from the seismic waves that sent skyscrapers in Tokyo…
jgoldman | October 19, 2010Check out this awesome David Attenborough video:
So far the readers of this fair blog have managed to fully fund two Donors Choose science education requests. We can do better. Do you like the stuff that you read here? Do you like David Attenborough? Consider donating to this project.
Mr. T teaches at a "high poverty" high school in Los Angeles. He writes:
I teach Biology and freshman science in an inner city/urban public school where over 50% of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Daily life is often a challenge for many students, so textbook learning due to lack of…
jgoldman | October 1, 2010Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you.
Andrew Thaler (twitter, blog) is pursuing a doctorate in the marine biology at the Duke University Marine Lab. He is especially interested in population genetics in hydrothermal vent communities. He is…
jgoldman | September 16, 2010
Figure 1: Deep sea coral. Click to awesomely embiggen!
Another awesome exclusive video from our friends over at BBC Life Is. This month, the theme is corals, and the video (behind the fold, since it takes up a decent amount of bandwidth) features an interesting new attempt in Fiji to restore coral reefs.
They write:
Home to a quarter of the planet's marine life, wonderfully weird-looking, and of course brilliantly colourful, coral reefs are often hailed as one of the greatest of the ocean's wonders.
Despite being the home to so much amazing underwater life, almost unbelievably reefs only…
jgoldman | August 17, 2010This post considering the evolutionary origins of numerical cognition, specifically in terms of the approximation of large numbers, is meant as a companion to this week's series on the developmental origins of numerical cognition and developmental dyscalculia, at Child's Play.
What are the origins of number representation in the mind? Are there any innate building blocks that contribute to our understanding of mathematics and number, or must everything be learned?
Number is an important domain of human knowledge. Many decisions in life are based on quantitative evidence, sometimes with life…
jgoldman | July 30, 2010Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you.
Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the…
jgoldman | June 23, 2010Well, sort of. Ready for the new SETI blog here at Scienceblogs? They launched today.
I don't know if we have to look to the skies to find aliens. We've got some pretty strange terrestrial life around here:
(via @sfriedscientist of Southern Fried Science)
jgoldman | June 22, 2010This is just cool. No behavior, no cognition, no neuroscience. Just animal awesomeness.
Amazing time-lapse video of a twelve-foot spider crab molting. Watch til the end.
From Neatorama, via @kzelnio (of Deep Sea News)
jgoldman | June 4, 2010
Figure 1: Great White Shark, Carcharodon carcharias.
I saw this clip on the news last night, but when I went to look for the video online, it hadn't been uploaded yet. How awesome to find it this morning, already blogged by my friends at LAist!
This video was caught at Will Rogers State Beach in Malibu. Great whites are known to frequent these waters during the summer, so this isn't much of a surprise, but how cool to see the video of them breaching like that!!? At least one of the sharks caught on video has been confirmed by experts at the local non-profit Shark Research Committee to be a…
jgoldman | April 28, 2010Say you're visiting Los Angeles and you have a sudden craving for Chinese food. Since you are only visiting, you might not be aware that nothing is open past, like, 10pm (not even coffee houses), but you get in your rental car and go driving around in search of your Chinese feast anyway. You try hitting up Panda Express, but no such luck. Of course they're closed. You try the neighborhood Chinese restaurant: closed as well. You get back in the car, and think to yourself "maybe the OTHER Panda Express will be open", but alas, it is not. You are ready to return to the hotel and just go to sleep…
jgoldman | April 23, 2010It's amazing how much you can learn about an animal's mind by a simply watching it.
Video 1: Gratuitous video of octopuses never hurt anyone. Maybe this will sate the Pharyngulites.
In the late 1980s, a researcher named Jennifer A. Mather wondered about octopuses' use of spatial memory. This researcher and some volunteers did some skin-diving near Bermuda and observed octopuses going out in search of food. They noticed that sometimes after catching a tasty bit of chow, the octopuses ate out, but sometimes they'd take their snack to go and eat at home. And not only that, but it turned out…