By Samuel Arbesman

Scientific jargon has always entertained me. I’ve been thinking about anatomical terms as places (or just strange-sounding terms) for quite some time, possibly even since high school; when I first heard of Bowman’s Capsule in biology class I didn’t think of the kidneys, I thought of 2001: A Space Odyssey. About a year ago, I realized that I had accumulated enough to make a list of anatomical vacation destinations, which I then sent to the Science Creative Quarterly, an online magazine, where a fairly comprehensive list is located.

Then, …

By Susan Reslewic, Ph.D.
Noted for its diverse immigrant population and panoramic vistas of the Manhattan skyline, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood has served as set for historic moments since the birth of the United States. In August 1776, Sunset Park’s topography challenged the Redcoats’ advance against the Rebels in the Battle of Brooklyn. Almost two hundred years later, in 1958, the neighborhood shuttled Elvis Presley from the Brooklyn Army Terminal to his military post in Germany. And just a few months ago, that same Brooklyn Army Terminal became host …

By Meredith Barrett

We can get very useful information from the lemurs when we have them in hand. For the larger lemurs, we need to capture them with a dart gun (more on that later), but for the smaller lemurs, such as mouse lemurs, we can use small traps that don’t hurt the little guys. Put a little piece of banana in there and the mouse lemurs love it.

During the evaluation, I’ll note a lot of information about the individual, such as age, sex, any abnormal behavior, and general coat, eye …

By Meredith Barrett
Mouse lemurs aren’t the only animals that I’m concerned about out here. Expanding human populations, which pushes the boundary into preserved areas for resource extraction, hunting, subsistence agriculture and cattle grazing, could lead to potentially huge impacts on the conservation and health of wildlife populations. Where humans go, their domesticated animals typically follow, and where domestic animals go, their parasites are sure to tag along. We can simply look to human history to see the implications of animal domestication. One of the major transitions in lifestyle occurred about …

I caught Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, on last night’s Colbert Report. The interview, spurred by Obama’s figurative fist-pound to science, “We will restore science to its rightful place,” was brief but poignant. Mooney intelligently discusses how difficult the last eight years have been for scientists with the Bush administration “systematically undermining scientific knowledge on a lot of different issues that had that had a lot of policy implications: global warming, stem cell research”; clouding issues like global warming, and preventing scientists from speaking to the …

By DNLee

Chubby Squirrel in a Crab Apple Tree on my campus.
Squirrel Appreciation Day was a few days ago. I didn’t know this fact at the time of my wordless wednesday preparation. Surely I would have prepareda two-for-one post. But anyway, I decided I could still celebrate squirrel appreciation post-hoc and share some really great photos and videos with you over the next couple of days.
Squirrel Appreciation Day is celebrated every January 21 since 2001, thanks to Christy Hargove of Asheville, North Carolina. (Interestingly, there is also a National …

By DNLee
This is my second post in honor of Squirrel Appreciation Day. When I first asked myself,“What wild animals live in big cities?” Squirrels (and birds) were the first animals that came to mind.
Squirrels are rodents, so that means they are cousins to chipmunks, mice, rats, voles, and beavers. They are members of the Sciuridae family, which means ‘bushy tail.’ This is a perfect way to describe the many members of the squirrel family, which include tree squirrels, ground squirrels, even chipmunks and groundhogs. But my focus here is the …

At 1:00 PM on New Year’s Day, hundreds of people gathered on the beach at Coney Island, NY, and splashed in the Atlantic Ocean despite the below-freezing temperature. It was time for the Coney Island Polar Bear Club annual New Year’s plunge. The crowd was diverse: tattooed grandmothers, rosy-cheeked children, nearly-naked frat boys, a scientist from Rockefeller University, a six-fingered Coney Island USA employee on his break from the Freak Show; the director of the New York Aquarium where many animals frolic happily in cold weather and water; a polar-bear …

Hair can be considered in two separate sections, the root and the shaft. The hair root is located inside of the follicle and exists below the portion of the skin while the shaft is the portion of hair that extends out from the skin. The root of the hair receives nutrients from the blood through the dermal papilla. The nutrients that are supplied to the root of the hair through the dermal papilla, combined with oil from the sebaceous gland, can contribute to hair’s strength. This strength of the hair …

It has taken me several weeks to post this reply, which Dr. Christakis sent almost immediately after I sent him my email (see previous entry entitled “An Email to Dr. Nicholas Christakis“). During this time I’ve had the opportunity to learn and think more about Dr. Christakis’ work, and was not shocked to discover that my knee jerk response to his NEJM article on the spread of obesity through social networks was premature. However, I was far from alone in this reaction.