Link: On the science of science communication
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...
All posts tagged with media
Neandertal sex acts are beyond counting
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...
Quote: The Sagan effect
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 ...
Shark weak
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...
All the paleonews that's fit to print
The New York Times joins the Neandertal anti-defamation league with an editorial by David Frayer: “Whore You Calling a Neanderthal?”.
"Decoding Neanderthals" to be broadcast
NOVA on American PBS stations has produced a new documentary about Neandertals: “Decoding Neanderthals”. They have just announced that it will be broadcast J...
Cutting room floors
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…
Fearfully genetic
Holly Dunsworth comments on an NPR report on personal genomics: “Be afraid of fear, not personal genomics”.
Quirks and Quarks, Denisova edition
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...
An arsenical profile
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...
Are apps the evil twins of e-books?
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...
No echoing the echo chamber here
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Social media in science
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...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 11
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...
Milford and Razib on bloggingheads.tv
It’s Milford Wolpoff and Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv!
Kaku cockup
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...
Blogginheads: Clancy and Hawks
It’s Kate Clancy and me on bloggingheads Science Saturday!
"Gutless" TV science
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 ...
Backdrop to scientist quotes
JR Minkel did a story on evolved sex differences for Scientific American (“Student Surveys Contradict Claims of Evolved Sex Differences”). Personally, I neve...
This is a blog
Farhad Manjoo at Slate enters an essay, “This Is Not A Blog Post” hand-wringing about the convergence of blogs and magazines.
Neandertal headlines
For two weeks I’ve been reading news feeds about how volcanoes killed the Neandertals. I mean, seriously:
Saving science writing
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...
Gene expunction
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...
Mailbag: Zorse pigmentation
Re: Horse-zebra hybrids
Eating their young
Ally Fogg: “Why the young get a bad press” reports on research into age and media bias:
"Just-so stories" driving me crazy
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. ...
Mooning hominins
Gretchen sends this link: MSNBC has a list of “Eight Great American Discoveries in Science”.
Fluffing the 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...
Bloggingheads: Synthetic biology and Neandertal genomics
I got to return to bloggingheads.tv this week for Science Saturday, with a conversation between me and Christina Agapakis, of the Oscillator blog.
Tim Time
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...
Backchannel panel
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”.
Pain in the sauropod neck
Matt Wedel of Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week relates an unfortunate story of his involvement in a dinosaur documentary project.
Archaeology of bling
This is sort of sad: National Geographic News’ “Top Ten Archaeology” stories of 2009. The top four all involve buried treasure of some kind.
He ain't heavy
It’s a teeny little story by Ewen Calloway at New Scientist, but they’ve given it the best headline:
My Newsweek complaint
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...
The year's big paleoanthropology stories
Last year, I complained that paleoanthropology had been exceptionally boring. One piece of evidence was the year-end retrospective in Discover about the top ...
My Leiden adventure
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...
Colloquia and opera
Have department colloquia lost their relevance to academic life?
Dawkins and Hewitt
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...
Ardipithecus bloggingheads
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...
"Discovering Ardi"
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...
Weiss on Collins in Newsweek
Why is Ken Weiss invading my Newsweek?
Paying the price for rare fossils
Primate paleontologist Elwyn Simons and (many) colleagues cosigned a letter in the current Nature protesting the high price paid for the “Ida” fossil, Darwin...
Conference blogging, continued
Today’s Nature picks up the conference blogging story that I covered last week. An interesting perspective:
Victims of cannibalism – Neandertals or science writers?
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”:
Oase 2 forensic reconstruction
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...
Innumeracy in the NY Times
From an otherwise-horrifying story about the plight of albinos in East Africa:
Mailbag: Chance and recent selection
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...
"The Neanderthal Code"
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...
Hawks in U.S. News
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...
Hawks: the wired professor
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 ...