Fake Banner
Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of...

How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from...

Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became...

Ground-Nesting Bee Populations Don't Get Publicity But They're Everywhere

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Fred Phillipspicture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Atreyee Bhattacharya
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
Tangential Science: It isn't necessarily science, but it's still funny.

1. Want a business card made out of meat and lasers? You're in luck! Meat Cards is having a contest to win one. All you have to do is recreate a classic Frank Frazetta poster and you can win, you guessed it, a meat card, which is basically beef jerky with laser writing on it.   I kind of wish I had thought of this first.


Drosophila can't catch a break.  Even Nature, which never runs a press release about one of its studies without putting 'prestigious' in front of its name, fell prey to a glaring error regarding the little critter, as seen on the cover of Nature Methods.

The problem?  The cover attached, presumably, to "Tools for Drosophila" article is  not actually Drosophila.
If you happen to be in the San Francisco metropolitan area the week of August 16th, 2009 and can't get enough science, I'll be emcee'ing a symposium on communicating science to the public at the 90th Annual Meeting of the AAAS pacific region.
Here's a 15 minute video of Scientific Blogging featured writer Jane Poynter talking about her 2 years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2, along with what she is doing to save Biosphere 1 (errrr, that would be Earth).

stop hammertime

I was outside the target demographic of this dance (though I can moonwalk like no one's business) but if I were going to pick up a retro dance, this would be a cool one.

Darwin didn't miss much, I think we all agree, and came up with a lot given the limited science of his day.   One thing he missed, that by this time tomorrow will be the source of outrageous titles from every schlock science publication in existence, was that sexual selection that goes on even after actual sex.

Confusing?  It's not so difficult to understand.   Some female critters are trampy and have sex with more than one guy, for example (what, you think other parts of the animal kingdom don't have Jenna Jameson?)  so there's sperm competition but there are also other factors having to do with the internal workings of the female body (i.e. that magical place), so let's catalog a few of post-copulatory sexual selection's greatest hits: