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jgoldman | March 11, 2011Watch this video and it might appear as if that beetle is being operated via remote control.
But wait. IT IS. The critter is a bit of a cyborg actually - part june bug, part computer. The man behind the zombie cyborg beetles is Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. I met him last week at an event on the Science of Cyborgs organized by the Science and Entertainment Exchange.
When these arthropods are in the "pupa" stage, they get implanted with electrodes designed to stimulate the…
jgoldman | March 3, 2011The narrator laureate of the science world, David Attenborough, describes the birth of a baby grey kangaroo.
Our friends at BBC Earth describe the video:
In this video a kangaroo is born, crawls up to its mother's pouch where a camera captures it's development from tiny, naked, grub-like newborn into a fully grown Joey.
It's amazing how the baby worm-like kangaroo is born automatically knowing how to get up into the mother's pouch. Incredible.
jgoldman | December 4, 2010Eric M. Johnson and I spent about 45 minutes discussing "evolutionary psychology beyond sex" last night, which you can see today on Bloggingheads "Science Saturday."
Or just watch it here:
jgoldman | November 19, 2010Nearly one-third of the world's amphibian species are at risk of extinction. The rescue project aims to save more than 20 species of frogs in Panama, one of the world's last strongholds for amphibian biodiversity. While the global amphibian crisis is the result of habitat loss, climate change and pollution, chytridiomycosis is likely at least partly responsible for the disappearances of 94 of the 120 frog species thought to have gone extinct since 1980.
Read more about the Panamanian Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, and check out their blog, here.
(h/t Smithsonian Institution)
jgoldman | October 7, 2010I showed this video today as an intro to my 8-week "mini-course" on Canine Cognition.
In it, narrator John Lithgow presents two slightly different versions of the dog domestication story. The first version is essentially the Belyaev story: young wolves would be adopted into the camps of early humans. Only those who were most tame would breed with eachother, and over many generations, the domestic dog would emerge. The second is the version in which wolves "chose" to be domesticated - they noticed a lot of tasty trash around human encampments, and if they were unafraid enough to hang around,…
jgoldman | September 16, 2010Figure 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 | September 6, 2010
New-born twin giant pandas made their media debut at a zoo in Japan on Friday. The twins, one male and one female, were born on August 11 to mother Rauhin and father Eimei, by artificial insemination. (video via BBC News)
jgoldman | August 4, 2010Several weeks ago, BBC Earth contacted me to let me know about this awesome new website they were building: Life Is.
The website, created by Firefly Interactive and The Brooklyn Brothers, will showcase some of the best images, videos and stories that the BBC Earth Natural History Unit has accrued in over 50 years of expeditions.
From the recent Life to the ground-breaking Life on Earth, BBC Earth has been at the forefront of our desire to discover more about our planet. The site, Life Is, fully compliments this back catalogue of programming enabling the viewer to see the content as it was…
jgoldman | May 17, 2010This past weekend, I was searching around the interwebz looking for something interesting to write about for Monday Pets. Lately, Monday Pets has been somewhat cat- and dog-heavy, so I was looking for something a bit different. I asked on twitter if there were any requests or recommendations. Friend of the blog Dave Munger responded: "What about snakes?"
What about snakes indeed? There are many parallels between myself and Indiana Jones, but one big one is that we both hate snakes. Another similarity is whenever I travel by plane, I leave a series of red dashes to mark my path. We both look…