My thanks to Nova for becoming my first blog sponsor. I’ve always been leery of the random scattershot of ads you see on many blogs, and so I was relieved that I wound up with a better fit. (Full disclosure: I wrote the companion book to the big series on evolution that the Nova/WGBH team put together a couple years back.) I checked out their ScienceNow link, and they’ve got some cool items over there, including some clips of their show.
Category: Blog
The Guardian has a long but disjointed report about the dispute over Homo floresiensis. Articles like these rarely give a very good picture of scientific disputes, since all parties involved only get a couple catchy quotes apiece. I’ve been particularly puzzled by Teuku Jacob, the elderly Indonesian paleoanthropologist who sparked the controversy by taking possession of the bones and locking them away from the Indonesian and Australian researchers who found them. So I was pleased when my brother, a linguistic anthropologist who does research in Indonesia, passed on this link to a translation of a long essay by Jacob. My brother promises me that the translation is accurate. There’s a fair bit of science here, although Jacob isn’t averse to calling his Australian rivals “latter-day conquistadors.”
Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygensprobe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of course, the really exciting stuff for us bio-freaks will come in a few months.
Continue reading “Like the Elections, Except in Outer Space”
Scrape off those stickers! AP reports that a judge has ruled that those goofy “Evolution is just a theory” stickers must be taken off of textbooks in Georgia. Now, how about those “Continental drift is just a theory” stickers on the geology textbooks?
More to read: The Tangled Bank–The Tangled Bank is a semi-regular banquet of posts from various blogs on biology. Thanks to the powers that be for including one of mine in the latest issue. Go read it for the rest, which are fascinating.