The Mighty Power of Blogosaurus?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Over the past few days, I’ve been following a tale of paleontological woe with a surprisingly happy ending.

Matt Wedel, a paleontologist, has been blogging about his experience with a television show on the Discovery Channel called Clash of the Dinosaurs. It didn’t go well. The producers edited Wedel’s interviews to turn his words around 180 degrees. For example, remember that old notion of big dinosaurs having a second brain along their spinal column? Not true! Wedel explained this, but if you tune into the show, you see Wedel essentially saying, True!

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What Is the Speed of Thought?

Posted on by admin

Discover, December 16, 2009

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When Samuel Morse established the first commercial telegraph, in 1844, he dramatically changed our expectations about the pace of life. One of the first telegraph messages came from that year’s Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where the delegates had picked Senator Silas Wright as their vice presidential nominee. The president of the convention telegraphed Wright in Washington, D.C., to see if he would accept. Wright immediately wired back: No. Incredulous that a message could fly almost instantly down a wire, the delegates adjourned and sent a flesh-and-blood committee by train to confirm Wright’s response—which was, of course, the same. From such beginnings came today’s high-speed, networked society.

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#97: Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, December 16, 2009

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If alien biologists were on an expedition to Earth, it would not take long for them to realize that there are a lot more species in the tropics than there are in temperate regions. “It’s the biggest, most obvious pattern in nature,” says Len Gillman, an evolutionary ecologist at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Why that pattern exists has been a long-standing puzzle. This year, however, Gillman found a possible answer: A warm climate makes life evolve more quickly.

Gillman and his colleagues compared 130 closely related pairs of mammal species. In each case, one species lived at a higher latitude or elevation than the other.

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