Happy Friday everyone! Meet Tabitha, she’s a 6 year old first grader from Nebraska, and cousin of our friend Theo Jass. Tabitha loves sea turtles. Recently, she even received a sea turtle tracker for her birthday that allows her to track the movements of a rescued sea turtle that is now in the wild. Needless … Continue reading
This past weekend I traveled to the 43rd Annual Benthic Ecology Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. This years event was hosted by the University of North Florida. If you haven’t heard of them before, check them out. They have a nice new biological sciences building and they are doing some cool research! This was my first … Continue reading
When you were little, did you ever do that thing where you cut a worm in half because someone told you two new worms would grow from the parts? I did that thing. And it was the first of many somewhat morbid scientific disappointments in my childhood. It’s half true – the head half might … Continue reading
Recently I have been exploring the topic of science writing and communication, through a class on science comm, this blog, and through reading tons of papers (because you know, grad student). Throughout my adventures I have discovered something very interesting. Often I will read a paper inside of my own field, tangentially related to my … Continue reading
[Full Disclosure: I wrote this article for the express purpose of sharing this gifset: Cosmos with Carl Sagan] It is unsurprising that the recent creation/evolution debate stirred up some voracious animosities both in real life, and in comments on our very own blog. Discussions about the nature of science are rarely brought to center stage … Continue reading
An article posted late last night on the NYT website reports that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, an independent Australian government agency whose purpose is to protect the Great Barrier Reef, has approved the dumping of 3 million cubic tons of sediment and dredging mud within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (a UNESCO … Continue reading
Everyone’s familiar with the ‘shading effect’ that occurs on solar energy schemes. If a tree or high rise building casts a shadow on your photovoltaic cell’s glass face, that means your system isn’t generating as much energy as it could, because it’s not catching as much sunlight as it could. But did you know that … Continue reading
Second smartest only to our trans-dimensional mouse overlords, that is. If you don’t know what I am talking about please catch up on your classic sci-fi literature here. It has long been a popular opinion that dolphins are some of the smartest creatures on the planet. They have brains larger than those of humans, they … Continue reading
3 days ago I was in Boston. It was roughly 0 degrees Fahrenheit and 2 feet of snow had just fallen while I was asleep. Today it is above 50 degrees in Boston and it is raining. Conversely, in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio the high today is -5 and Ohio State is shut down … Continue reading
A Nobel Prize winning biologist has announced a boycott of high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell. When a Nobel Prize winner says something like that, people listen. The question is really whether or not that stance is well founded. Randy Shekman, the Nobel winner in question, is the editor of an open access … Continue reading
UNder the C 