Study Offers an Insight Into Dinosaur Colors

Posted on January 27, 2010May 13, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, January 27, 2010

What color were dinosaurs? Well, at least one of them had a feathered mohawk tail in a subdued palette of chestnut and white stripes.

That is what a team of Chinese and British scientists reported Wednesday in Nature, providing the first clear evidence of dinosaur colors from studies of 125-million-year-old fossils of a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx.

“We might be able to start painting a picture in color of what these things looked like,” said Lawrence M. Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University, who was not involved in the study.

Continue reading “Study Offers an Insight Into Dinosaur Colors” →

Justice, Empathy, and Chimpanzees: A Talk With Frans de Waal

Posted on January 26, 2010July 2, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

I’ve been following the research of primatologist Frans de Waal on peacemaking among primates for a long time. Earlier this month I finally got to meet him in New York, where we had a conversation about his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

I’ve embedded the first of a series of excerpts you can watch on YouTube. You can find all the excerpts here.

Kevin Bacon Meets The Sharks of the Caribbean

Posted on January 25, 2010July 2, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

If you’ve never played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, take a trip to the Oracle of Bacon, where you can see how far any actor is from Bacon in the Hollywood movie network.

And once you’ve played that game, check out my new article at Yale Environment 360 to see how ecosystems are a lot like Hollywood, at least when it comes to networking.

For more on ecological network theory, check out Jordi Bascompte’s web site.

Infecting Big Think

Posted on January 25, 2010July 2, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Here’s a talk I just gave on Big Think–about viruses, synthetic biology, and tapeworms that carry my name. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d like, but I hope the words make up for it.

Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works

Posted on January 25, 2010May 28, 2020 by admin

Yale Environment 360, January 25, 2010

Link

Ecologists who want to save the world’s biodiversity could learn a lot from Kevin Bacon.

One evening in 1994, three college students in Pennsylvania were watching Bacon in the eminently forgettable basketball movie The Air Up There. They started thinking about all the movies Bacon had starred in, and all the actors he had worked with, and all the actors those actors had worked with. The students came up with a game they called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, counting the steps from Bacon to any actor in Hollywood. In general, it takes remarkably few steps to reach him.

Continue reading “Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works” →