One of the universal aspects of living in a social arrangement with others is dealing with death. Or more specifically, dealing with the deceased. This is especially true when living close to each other as corpses tend to increase the spreading of diseases. Now imagine you live with a lot of people together, in an […]
For a long time, it has been thought that evolutionary and ecological research were quite separated from each other. After all, evolution takes place on long timescales while ecological events usually happen much faster. At least, that was the common perception. Lately, however, it has become clear that, in some cases, the relevant timescales in […]
Ecology is a rapidly changing, dynamic field of research. In recent decades, there’s been a major shift from considering ecosystems as stable and poised to seeing them as systems that are in constant flux. At least, that’s what ecologists want (us) to believe. But how much of this claimed change has been able to seep […]
Our close evolutionary cousin, the common chimpanzee, comes in four subspecies, each one named after its location along an East-West band in Africa. Yet, there are chimps outside of Africa as well. Many European zoos possess a group of chimpanzees, which often plays a part in conservation plans… Wondering how the hybrids come into play? Find out […]
Exactly one year ago, The Beast, the Bard and the Bot were born. Time for some reflection. But first, a bit of numerical material (current at the time of writing). Some Numbers Posts: 96, including this one. Total views: 19672 Max views on single day: 631 Top 5 countries providing visitors: United States (8264) United […]
If you want to make it in the academic world, you better publish. A lot. Preferably in so-called high-impact journals. Otherwise, no job and no funding (or the other way around). Hence the use of the phrase ‘publish or perish’ to capture the enormous importance of generating sufficient publications in sufficiently respectable journals. And most […]
A story of mine has been published at the e-zine Interstellar Fiction. (For the link, go to the Fiction tab.) There’s also a brief Q&A with yours truly for those interested. It’s called ‘Download’ and it’s about a man who awakes when his personality is downloaded into a new body after centuries of death/non-existence/’suspended digitization’/or […]
How do you catch a dragon? Do you go looking for a brave knight to send forth on a difficult quest? Or a legendary hunter without fear? No. You use cameras to capture their image. For more, head over to United Academics.
Being able to predict the pace of technological development could be quite useful for a lot of people. No surprise then, that several models (or ‘laws’) have been posited that aim to describe how technological progress will unfurl (the most famous one probably being Moore’s law, for those interested: original article here). However, these laws […]
When looking at mammals in general, being big correlates quite well with living long lives (barring disease, being eaten and things of that nature, of course). But, within species, it seems that the bigger individuals live less long than their smaller conspecifics. What could be going on here? And what better species to study this […]
