I’ve been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too–even if I don’t quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay…

As with so many things in the human experience, great or small, we are not quite alone when it comes to trend-following–as I explain in my latest column for Forbes. Check it out.

Per usual, here are some of the sources I used for the piece:

Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups [free pdf]

Continue reading “Everybody’s Doing It” →

Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we’re all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren’t particularly long (plus it’s tiny–the size of a sesame seed.)

It may not seem like much, but it poses a fascinating riddle. It belongs to a family of daddy longlegs called Petallidae. Below is a map of where other species of Petallidae can be found. They seem to be scattered randomly across the world.

Continue reading “The Mystery of the Wandering Daddy Longlegs” →

As I’ve mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at “From A to Zimmer.” Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don’t overlap. But Ben’s latest entry–on very, very long words, has prompted me to pose a question of my own here.

In his post, “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism!”, Ben points out that a lot of the longest words are, as he puts it, “stunt words.” They’re cobbled together from prefixes and suffixes, but never actually used in real life. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism is a case in point–a word that is used to describe long words.

Continue reading “I see your hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism and raise you a ribulosebisphosphatecarboxylaseoxygenase” →

Here’s the latest addition to the Loom’s science tattoo collection: from a food scientist, the molecule capsaicin, which makes chiles spicy.

To see all the new tattoos, check out my Flickr set. And keep them coming–either in the comment thread here, or emailed directly to me.

If you crave more science tattoos–not just on the body, but of the body, check out an awesome collection of anatomical tattoos. (Thanks to Steve)

Continue reading “The Ink Keeps Spilling” →

I’ve got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about some of the early material in the article back in 2004 here. For a good summary of the qualms many scientists have about the power of current models, check out this recent review in the journal Bioscience: pdf.

[Update: If for some reason you have trouble reading my article on my web site, the link to the story at Science is here.]

Continue reading “Forecasting Extinction” →