How crazy ants live up to their name
Crazy ants (named for their strange, jerky walk) are displacing fire ants from the Southern US. Fire ants are notorious for their toxic venom, so researchers wondered how the crazy ants were able to overcome them. It turns out they’ve developed a neat behavioral trick, smearing their own formic acid venom all over their bodies […]
Back to work: Of bats and bumblebees
Well, I had a nice, relaxing, vacation in India. It was great to see friends and family after a long while, and enjoy the good food and warm weather. Now I’m back, well refreshed, and it’s time to get back to work. Right after I got back, I attended the 2014 Beckman Initiative for Macular […]
Writing, coding, and time for a vacation
I finished my last freelance story for 2013, a NationalGeographic.com article about a dinosaur fossil with a fleshy comb like that of a rooster. I also took a few lessons on CodeAcademy. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a quick primer on various programming languages, I find their lessons quite a bit of […]
Productive month
It’s been a productive first month freelancing, I got to work on lots of fun stories, mostly for NationalGeographic.com (I did some other assorted work, including for PNAS). I wrote about the fact that African elephants can apparently understand human pointing gestures, and how dogs react differently when they see other dogs’ tails wagging left […]
A break
As is probably obvious from my lack of posts, I’m taking a break (or have been taking a break) from this blog. It’s been a busy couple of months, with some ups and downs. Been reading and thinking a fair bit, about various things, but haven’t been motivated to mention particular articles/books or write down […]
Feynman explains fire
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITpDrdtGAmo[/youtube] The always enjoyable Richard Feynman explains fire. His enthusiasm and facility for explaining things in simple terms always amazes me. I guess the clip is from an old BBC TV series called “Fun to Imagine.” Apparently BBC has some of the episodes available in higher quality on their website, but unfortunately the streaming video […]
A depressing/cynical flowchart of the academic job search process
Related to my previous post on the Washington Post article, I came across a blogpost about the academic job search, with this depressing flowchart. It’s an interesting post that touches on some of the issues involved, but I can only hope things aren’t quite as bad as the flowchart indicates! (I like to think there’s […]
XKCD on physicists…
Cartoon from xkcd Several years ago, I had an Indian physicist tell me that “physicists don’t consider biology a real science,” so I couldn’t help but laugh at this cartoon. Of course, I know plenty of physicists who are perfectly willing to acknowledge the scientific value of biology, and some of them work on biophysics, […]
U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there – The Washington Post
U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there – The Washington Post. A nice article in the Washington Post by Brian Vastag, about what PhD students in most fields face in terms of job prospects. It’s the first time I’m seeing coverage in the mainstream media about what all my grad school classmates […]
Great essay about the discovery of the Higgs Boson: Natures Secrets Foretold
Tom Siegfried from Science News (where I was lucky enough to intern briefly) wrote a must-read essay about the Higgs Boson discovery. It’s the clearest and most engaging take I’ve seen on what the Higgs boson is and why finding it is such a big deal. It’s been a good day for science 🙂 Essay: […]