Follow ScienceBlips on Twitter
john hawks weblog Latest Blog Posts |
Add as Favorite
Claim Blog 
|
Click on the "vote it up" button to submit a story below to our homepage.
If you're the owner of john hawks weblog, claim your blog to unlock additional tools and reports.
I was in a conversation last night about a book I had really enjoyed this year, and I remarked that I had meant to review it on the blog and hadn't done it yet. The book is Dale Guthrie's The Nature of Paleolithic Art , which I enjoyed for the text and his style of analysis, but most ...
Life Science
In a new paper, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues describe new hominin fossils from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. A good thing: It gives somebody like me a rationale for describing early hominins from the point of view of Hadar. You see, Hadar is the first sample to include a really complete ...
Life Science
Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. Now it's all packed into a single Nature Genetics paper by Marc Monot and coworkers.
I mean, there's a lot in here:
1. They used ...
Life Science
Here's the top hit for "Neanderthal" on Google News today :
Today's question:
Are there cavemen in heaven? I mean, during the course of evolution, when did they become “human beings” with “souls”?
I won't venture an answer, but you're welcome to invade his comment section....
Life Science
Six hundred dollars was more money, but it was still pretty cheap for a beautiful rosewood specimen cabinet, I'd have thought. It was full of somebody's nineteenth-century insect collection. Wait a minute -- how many nineteenth-century insect collections with 1700 specimens were there, anyway? ...
Life Science
Buckaroo Darwin , originally uploaded by John Hawks .
At the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna
Life Science
Charles Darwin
Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and Donald Reid report on the perikymata spacing of a sample of fourteen anterior teeth from Qafzeh. These are "early modern humans", among the earliest to be located outside of Africa, but their anatomical position relative to Neandertals and other groups has been ...
Life Science
Taxonomic confusion afflicts a hapless victim hunting for Homo erectus :
In the seeming middle-of-nowhere, we found a monumental, but rather neglected, concrete marker to another even earlier hominid, Meganthropus paleojavanicus , who lived there around 1.5 million years ago.
But it was ...
Life Science
A club I won't be joining, from Improbable Research :
Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™
The first member, chosen by acclamation, was psychologist Steven Pinker, whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study. From that lone, Pinkerian seed, there ...
Life Science
I haven't been blogging quite as often, but you can see I've been busy with other business:
VIENNA - A 2-year-old panda who charmed his way into the hearts of Austrians is headed to China.
Fu Long has been the star attraction at Vienna's Schoenbrunn Zoo since he was born there on Aug. 23, ...
Life Science
After reading yesterday's penguin post , one of my readers thought I'd given up the ghost on the molecular clock.
But notice the bottom line of that message: those ancient penguins didn't tell us any thing new about the rate of mitochondrial changes over 10s of thousands of years. The rate, ...
Life Science
Here's an example of a really incomprehensible press release :
Ancient penguin DNA raises doubts about accuracy of genetic dating techniques
Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic ...
Life Science
Nero Wolfe, in The Rubber Band , by Rex Stout:
What is it that he has been trying so desperately to preserve, with all his ruthless cunning? His position in society, his high repute among his fellow men, his nimbus as a master biped. Well, he will lose all that, which should be enough for ...
Life Science
I'm laughing so hard it hurts :
It's kind of embarrassing the way Australia puts itself out there as a barbecue-savvy culture, because you know what, we're crap.
The end:
[T]here might have to be a few fact-finding tours to Texas, and maybe Kansas City. I hear the barbecue is pretty good ...
Life Science
Matchmaking services go genetic:
A couple of genetic testing companies are promising to match couples based on the DNA testing, touting the benefits of biological compatibility.
The companies claim that a better biological match will mean better sex, less cheating, longer-lasting love and ...
Life Science
I really can't get over how much work went into the cichlid pigmentation paper that's out in the current Science (Roberts et al. 2009). The paper examines the genetic basis for a "orange blotched (OB)" phenotype. It's a simple kind of genetic question, and it hooks into a story that ...
Life Science
So what's the baboon DNA doing in that rare monkey species, anyway?
The researchers are looking into whether the baboon DNA has given the kipunji any survival advantages and could possibly explain why roughly 1,000 of the monkeys live in the Southern Highlands (the population having baboon ...
Life Science
On topic: A Primate of Modern Aspect reviews the anatomy of the Ardipithecus proximal femur.
Clearly, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions about bipedality in Ardi from a third trochanter and hypotrochanteric fossa if even Proconsul had similar characters.
Life Science
A little off-topic, but interesting: Chris Rowan writes about paleomagnetic reversals and crustal movements some billion years ago.
The change in inclinations through the section indicates that North America moved almost 30 degrees - around 3000 kilometres - southward in just 11 million years ...
Life Science
A new paper in Nature (Konopka et al. 2009) reports on microarray expression comparisons of human and chimpanzee-specific versions of FOXP2. The change of two amino acids in the human version has some pretty large consequences for the expression of other genes.
An accompanying essay by ...
