In the spring of 2012, botanist and graduate student Benjamin Wilder was camping on Tiburón Island, a large island in the Gulf of California whose flora he has studied for most of a decade. Wilder wanted to find out more about the evolutionary history of the plants on Tiburón, so he was looking for fossil […]
Evolution
In the fourteen years that I’ve been teaching high school biology, I’ve been asked a lot of weird questions about evolution. But, until recently, I’ve not been asked whether Charles Darwin could make you rich. Is evolution good for business? In a recent debate, Bill Nye, the popular science educator, argued it is. Actually, Nye […]
What do you do if you are trapped in a room with a chimpanzee, a macaque, and a sea lion? The answer, apparently, is pump the tunes and get the party started. This week at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (basically the US version of the Royal Society) scientists […]
The argument began, like so many arguments do, at the dinner table. My husband and I had been away for the holidays, and a few nights on an unfamiliar mattress had thrown my back into paroxysms of pain. I found this fact troubling. How is that swapping one plush, spring-loaded mattress for another could cause […]
This post — a proposal which, like Erik’s, could solve a significant world problem if only anybody would listen — originally ran on March 12, 2012. A week or so ago, I commented on an Abstruse Goose cartoon about probabilities. My brother-the-statistician commented on my comment, taking me apart – lovingly — for missing the […]
The remains of a horned lizard killed by a shrike. Wandering around New York’s American Museum of Natural History one day in May, I noticed a bird called the fiscal shrike. The small stuffed specimen, black with dashes of white on its wings, was perched on a shrub in a diorama of Kenya’s Kedong Valley. […]
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of spending a few days at a place that nurtured my interest in science. The Mountain Research Station was where I conducted my first independent research project (funded by an REU grant from the NSF). As I’ve written previously, my experience studying the evolution of an alpine plant’s […]
San Francisco is in the midst of a heat wave this week, and the ability to walk the summer streets without a parka is having a regrettable effect on our workforce. For once, the shorts-sporting tourists are properly dressed, and office workers are lingering alongside them on the downtown sidewalks, noticing that it actually feels […]
