Link: Interview with Annalisa Heppner
Secrets of the Dead on PBS is a series that shows some strong documentaries from a range of sources, mostly about archaeology or history. The site has a blog...
Secrets of the Dead on PBS is a series that shows some strong documentaries from a range of sources, mostly about archaeology or history. The site has a blog...
The College of Life Sciences here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has a very strong department of Life Sciences Communication, with some world-leading...
I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to the genetic ties between today’s people and ancient populations. Just last month, I wrote a lot about the relat...
Many people know the story that Carl Sagan was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The story has given rise to ...
Brian Switek comments on this week’s “Megalodon” program on Discovery, which lured viewers with the idea that a prehistoric gigantic shark might still be cir...
The New York Times joins the Neandertal anti-defamation league with an editorial by David Frayer: “Whore You Calling a Neanderthal?”.
NOVA on American PBS stations has produced a new documentary about Neandertals: “Decoding Neanderthals”. They have just announced that it will be broadcast J...
Reading items on my desktop, I found a rant I had written a while back. I generally don’t post rants, but a decent amount of time has passed…
Holly Dunsworth comments on an NPR report on personal genomics: “Be afraid of fear, not personal genomics”.
I was interviewed last month for the CBC radio broadcast, “Quirks and Quarks”. They have done a segment on the Denisova genome, with contributions from David...
Popular Science writer Tom Clynes gives us a long profile of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who became a lightning rod for criticism after she authored an article claim...
I really like e-books quite a lot. It’s easy to take a device like the Kindle, load up books, and read them. It holds your place for you, and multiple device...
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Last month, Virginia Gewin put an article in Nature about social media and science, which is now available online for free: “Social media: Self-reflection, o...
Slate has an editorial by Farhad Manjoo, featuring the idiocy of people who write crank letters to NPR (“We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stu...
It’s Milford Wolpoff and Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv!
I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...
It’s Kate Clancy and me on bloggingheads Science Saturday!
Martin Robbins last week posted a column with a great title: “Return to the Silence: Is theatre exposing the gutlessness of TV science?” In it, he discusses ...
JR Minkel did a story on evolved sex differences for Scientific American (“Student Surveys Contradict Claims of Evolved Sex Differences”). Personally, I neve...
Farhad Manjoo at Slate enters an essay, “This Is Not A Blog Post” hand-wringing about the convergence of blogs and magazines.
For two weeks I’ve been reading news feeds about how volcanoes killed the Neandertals. I mean, seriously:
Wired editor David Rowan wrote last week about “How to save science journalism”. It’s a long essay, discussing the problems traditional media outlets have su...
So, it’s a perfectly ordinary story about epigenetics and how the methylation of some genes may be correlated with BMI. But what I don’t understand is the he...
Re: Horse-zebra hybrids
Ally Fogg: “Why the young get a bad press” reports on research into age and media bias:
NPR has been doing a special series of reports during their “Morning Edition” program called “The Human Edge”, all about various aspects of human evolution. ...
Gretchen sends this link: MSNBC has a list of “Eight Great American Discoveries in Science”.
Bora Zivkovic on a heavily-trod topic (“Why is some coverage of scientific news in the media very poor?”) describes some of his work sifting through press co...
I got to return to bloggingheads.tv this week for Science Saturday, with a conversation between me and Christina Agapakis, of the Oscillator blog.
Time magazine has named paleoanthropologist Tim White as one of its 2010 top 100 influential people. Sean B. Carroll provides a short profile of White’s rece...
Jay Rosen offers some interesting advice about organizing a panel in the age of Twitter: “How the Backchannel Has Changed the Game for Conference Panelists”.
Matt Wedel of Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week relates an unfortunate story of his involvement in a dinosaur documentary project.
This is sort of sad: National Geographic News’ “Top Ten Archaeology” stories of 2009. The top four all involve buried treasure of some kind.
It’s a teeny little story by Ewen Calloway at New Scientist, but they’ve given it the best headline:
I’ve been annoyed about Newsweek since they changed their format earlier this year. They went from trying to be a comprehensive weekly news magazine, to a sh...
Last year, I complained that paleoanthropology had been exceptionally boring. One piece of evidence was the year-end retrospective in Discover about the top ...
I’ve just returned from a week in Leiden, the old university city of the Netherlands. I was a guest of the archaeology faculty, in particular Wil Roebroeks a...
Have department colloquia lost their relevance to academic life?
I want to point to an interview between conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt and Richard Dawkins, on the subject of Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Ea...
Today, Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv is a conversation between Razib Khan and me. We had a fun conversation about Ardipithecus and the recent study of...
UPDATE (2009-10-22): I wrote this post before the film premiered, but it’s gotten a lot of Google traffic. My notes on watching the film might be more intere...
Why is Ken Weiss invading my Newsweek?
Primate paleontologist Elwyn Simons and (many) colleagues cosigned a letter in the current Nature protesting the high price paid for the “Ida” fossil, Darwin...
Today’s Nature picks up the conference blogging story that I covered last week. An interesting perspective:
So I told you I was going to be beating the press. The Guardian’s Robin McKee picks up the story of the Les Rois “Neandertal”:
The BBC is presenting a little series called “The Incredible Human Journey,” to be aired starting May 10. Alice Roberts from Time Team travels around tracing...
From an otherwise-horrifying story about the plight of albinos in East Africa:
Our work on recent selection was featured in Discover magazine this month. I’ll link to that later. In the meantime, I’ve been getting some thoughtful letter...
This Sunday evening, at 9:00 EDT/ 8:00 CDT, the National Geographic Channel will show “The Neanderthal Code” in the US. I appear in this film, and you can se...
I’m featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she’s put together our work on recent acceleration wi...
I don’t know if it makes me edupunk, and my glasses are definitely more slide-rule-chic than steampunk, but I get some face time in this Chronicle of Higher ...