Apparently I am the last person on the planet NOT to have heard of this guy. Apparently AR people don’t like him, which might incline me in his favor if it were not for all the @#$%^&* CELEBRITIES who endorse him. But– what’s all this about being out in front of your dog? It may …
Decreasing Speciation?
Reid sent me this article by science writer Carl Zimmer (he’s good– Darren quotes his book on primitive whales and whale evo elsewhere). It is an interesting article, but I have some reservations. I wrote to Reid: “Interesting, and I like Zimmer, but I have my doubts. Not that the effect mentioned by Zimmer doesn’t …
Re- filling the Sea
Kazakhstan is, succesfully, beginning to re- fill their portion of the Aral Sea. “Now, thanks to a new 8-mile-wide dam and other projects by the Kazakh government and the World Bank, the northern part of the Aral is filling again with fresh water. That in turn is restoring hope and a modest degree of prosperity …
“Crotalia”
Chas has survived a rattler bite. He got it in the territory of the alpha Enviro– not here, where he also visited, though our five species make us a slightly lesser province of Crotalia…
Good News for Scavengers
Via Pluvialis: India has banned the chemical that was more than decimating its vultures and making the Towers of Silence very nasty and even more silent. I wrote about the problem here in The Atlantic a few years ago…
Botox Injections Lighten Depression
A preliminary study shows that botox injections to erase “frown lines” may actually alleviate depression. If there was ever a city newspaper appropriate to carry this story it is the LA Times. A study of ten women had positive results and researchers are calling for full protocol clinical trials. I really liked the subtitle in …
A Posse of Scientists
The LA Times has an interesting piece on how the police in Mammoth Lakes, California have enlisted some physical anthropologists using cutting edge analysis techniques to try to solve a murder. I was particularly intrigued by the study of trace elements in the teeth to figure out diet, and the use of oxygen isotopes to …
Brazilian Stonehenge
A 2000 year-old site in the northern Amazon Basin in Brazil has large stone structures that seem to follow astronomical alignments. In the shorthand way that news organizations have it is now the Brazilian Stonehenge. Amazonian archaeology is in the midst of revolution that is well described in Charles Mann’s 1491. The earliest European explorers …
Those Aggressive Brits
The BBC tells us that a study of skeletons recovered from Neolithic sites in Britain shows that 5% of them display evidence of blunt force trauma to the cranium. I theorize that the advent of agriculture during the Neolithic allowed the brewing of beer which led to this sad situation. It seems the roots of …
Interpretations of Flores Fossil Questioned
The famous “Hobbit” fossil from the Indonesian island of Flores, was a sensation when it was announced last year. This 18,000 year old specimen was thought to represent a subspecies (or possibly separate species) of humans of diminutive size. Now some scientists believe that this may represent only a single microcephalic individual coming from a …