'Odds and ends' Category
Dinosauria News
A cluster of interesting dino news has hit the internet over the past week or so, so I thought it’d be a good time to gather things up in one place…
Don’t fear the frame…
Every now and again, some argument will get started in the blogosphere that is so pointless, so utterly self-defeating that it makes you question whether folks are really thinking at all.The tempest in the teapot du jour is about “Framing” science….
So I guess this means I need to start eating more broccoli…
These things are always non-scientific, and this one’s more than a little macabre, but I figured — hey, what hat I got to lose?You’ll die from an Unlikely Illness (like the plague).You will unfortunately succumb to a random and unlikely disease. Only to find out after death that eating more broccoli would have cured you.’How will you die?’
Spear-wielding killer chimps are hunting other primates!
No, it’s not a scene from Planet of the Apes, and it’s not the nightmare you’ll have after spending too much time in your zoo’s primate house. It’s actually the results of research described in a paper recently published in Current Biology. The paper by Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani describes the behavior of a troop of savannah chimps in the Fongoli area of southeast Senegal, in western Africa. The Fongoli chimps make wooden spears in a four- or five-step process, then use the spears to hunt down bushbabies…
Episode 1 — What is “science?”
It’s always a good idea to start at the beginning, so I thought the first “real” podcast episode ought to cover some of the basics. This week’s episode tries to answer two basic questions — what is science, and how do you tell the difference between “science” and “not science?”
