A great list from Swarthmore College:
Here is the exhibit I want my zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, to feature at the entrance:
Bronze replicas of a fish (in artificial pond), an early amphibian, an early mammal, an early primate, and several lineages of hominids, all arranged on top of bronze phylogentic “tree” inlaid [...]
Nancy Shute in USNews:
If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help [...]
Awww. The BBC Meads Anuta, where “Harmony thrives in Pacific Isolation“. I can’t believe we’re seeing “Noble Savage” rhetoric in 2008.
When I asked Joseph what the biggest changes have been in the last 20 years he said “young people playing ukuleles”.
Was this a problem? I asked rather jokingly.
“Well,” he [...]
Today’s PRS.B sees the publication of a supertree of 600 Dinosaur species. Awesome. ScienceDaily has more information here. Here’s a picture of it (note: a full version is available here):
The abstract says:
The observed diversity of dinosaurs reached its highest peak during the mid- and Late Cretaceous, the 50Myr that [...]
…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern [...]
In today’s, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution:
Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we speak today. [...]
Scientific American covers the human diaspora in a nice broad-brush overview:
Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans—a few hundred or even several thousand—crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return.
The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once [...]
….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their [...]
