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Adam & Eve: Behind the Myth
In a paper published in 1987 in the leading science journal Nature, researchers claimed to have identified a female from whom all humans alive today are descended, dubbed “mitochondrial Eve”; nearly...
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Natural selection: different modes
I mentioned “directional selection” in an earlier post and someone asked about it, so I decided to take the opportunity to explain the process of natural selection in a bit more detail. I think...
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Natural selection: selection mechanisms, sex, and the brain
This is second part in my series on natural selection. In the first part, I discussed different modes of selection; in this post, I’ll explain an important mechanism of natural selection which...
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Social wasps are specialists at recognizing faces
There’s lots of evidence that humans have a specialized mechanism for identifying and responding to faces; for example, people with a condition called prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing faces...
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Natural selection: On fitness
For the third part in my series about natural selection I’d like to address the concept of fitness. Thanks to the phrase “survival of the fittest”, fitness is quite a prominent idea in the popular...
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Why do men and women want different things?
Regular readers will probably have realized from the links I share (or from my twitter stream) that sexism and gender issues are subjects which matter to me. Unfortunately, a lot of my discussions...
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Hsp90: translating environmental stress into evolutionary change
In the 1990s, Suzanne Rutherford and Susan Lindquist were studying fruit flies with a mutated version of the Hsp90 gene and found that the absence of this single gene led to a wide range of...
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One year on!
Today officially marks the first anniversary of Inspiring Science, and it’s been a great year! I think I managed to make some progress towards the goals I outlined in my first post. Over the course...
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Found while foraging (January 28, 2013)
January has been a busy month. In addition to writing here, I worked on some websites for my family and submitted entries to a couple of science writing competitions for the first time! I’ve also...
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These feet were made for walking
While popular imagination may be fascinated by when our ancestors first began to walk upright, scientific debate has focused on whether these early humans were still skilled climbers. A group of...
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Some exciting news!
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll soon be writing for a second blog in addition to Inspiring Science! The Scitable blog network, part of Nature Education’s online collaborative learning space, will...
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Do species really exist?
I mentioned a while ago that I’d been invited to write about evolution for Nature’s Scitable blog network. The network finally relaunched this week and my new group blog, Accumulating Glitches, went...
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Found while foraging (May 28, 2013)
It’s time for another Found while foraging! I’m going to do things slightly differently this time. Instead of just sharing various tidbits I’ve come across online since last time, I’m going to focus...
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The viruses that made us
Viruses make their living by breaking into cells and using the machinery and energy in the cell to reproduce. Once inside, some viruses immediately hijack the cell and make copies of themselves which...
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Kickstarter campaign: The Universe Verse
Last week I got an email from James Dunbar, an author and illustrator, asking me to promote the Kickstarter campaign for his new book, The Universe Verse. It’s a series of three rhyming “graphic...
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Music, Memory, and Voices
Humans are remarkably talented musicians. We can recognize a tune despite changes like being slowed down or sped up or even if all of the notes are shifted to a higher or lower pitch. Though these may...
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Talkin’’bout Evolution
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to write anything for Inspiring Science this week, so instead I decided to link to a few of my recent posts on Accumulating Glitches instead. I wrote two posts,...
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Dying for sex
Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy to attend to Inspiring Science this week. Rather than putting out a rushed post, I decided to republish this piece which I originally wrote for Accumulating Glitches...
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Beacon: mantis shrimp and more…
Here’s a taste of what I’ve been writing on Beacon so far. It’s been enormously fun so far, and the focus is a bit different from what I post on here. I’ve got lots of other great story ideas coming up...
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Speciation in Reverse
I don’t usually advertise my Accumulating Glitches posts on here, but I decided to make an exception for today’s post. It’s about a relatively straightforward study that raises a host of interesting...
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