A new prize from AAAS recognizes one of the most important things a scientist can do:
AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science
Nomination Deadline: 15 October
Continue reading “A Prize For Young Scientists Who Reach Out”
Category: Blog
As I hoped, Marlene Zuk, a biologist at UC Riverside, has chimed in with her own thoughts on Friday’s post on the meaning(lessness) of sexual displays. Check it out!
Originally published August 1, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
I hope you enjoyed Sex Week (in a purely intellectual way, of course). I’m now off to a confab called SciFoo, which I’ve heard a lot about over the years and am now finally able to attend. Each year, Google and O’Reilly Media bring together a motley crew of scientists, writers, and others, and basically tell them to make up a conference on the spot. There are a whole bunch of people on the attendee list that I’ve waited years to meet in person, so it will definitely be worth the trip to California. But if there are any SciFoo vets out there with advice for making the most of the experience, I’d love to hear it.
I will try to report on my experience, either in a measured reflection next week, or in a torrent of half-baked tweets.
Originally published July 30, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
[This is the last post for Sex Week]
The animal kingdom is filled with wild extravagances, and a lot of them have something to do with sex. Hermit Fiddler crabs wave their claws, swordtail fish flash their swordtails, manakins leap and buzz their wings. Darwin considered these displays so important and so puzzling (“the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick!” he wrote to a colleague), that he dedicated half of a book to the subject.
Continue reading “The End of Sex Week: Darwin, Sex, and Dada”
[This is my third post of Sex Week]
Here’s a song for the male water strider, from the days when Rod Stewart could do no wrong:
In my first two posts for Sex Week, I wrote about the delights of courtship: the alluring, informative fragrance of yeast and the seductive buzz of electric fish. These signals stir the opposite sex into action–to creep towards a fellow fungus, or to head-butt a prospective mate. But in many species, the actual consummation that all that courtship leads up to does not turn out to be a blissful union. Instead, some males will use all kinds of force and subterfuge to prolong their mating and raise the odds that their sperm fertilize their mate’s eggs. And the females? In some species, they very often just want to get away.