I’m intrigued. And horrified. And curious. And incredulous. Twitter, that lolly-bag of random ideas, just led me to a story on the website of Cosmopolitan magazine about a new FaceBook app called “Bang with Friends”. Catchy. Think I might go…
Is there a left-wing “War on Science”? Influential American sceptic Michael Shermer devotes his latest column in Scientific American to arguing exactly this. Bloggers have already sent some considerable heat in Shermer’s direction, particularly because he implies that anti-science attitudes…
I’m just back from holidays and wading through some of the exciting science published while I was temporarily untethered from the Internet. One of the most interesting was a Science paper led by Lisa Cameron of Monash University entitled “Little…
A few weeks ago I found myself reading up about the evolution of language in preparation for a talk I gave to the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia’s conference in Perth. It turns out the evolutionary forces that shaped humanity’s capacity…
When I give talks about the relevance of evolution to modern life, I can count on one regular question interrupting an orderly transition from lecture theatre to bar. Sometimes it comes with a “bet-you-didn’t-think-of-that-one” sneer. Far more often it is…
Your ancient Greek-Latin binomial for the day is hyperemesis gravidarium. HG for short. It’s a particularly extreme form or pregnancy sickness (or morning sickness). Brought to you today by Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalised yesterday with the…
Evolutionary psychologists get a bad rap. I should not be surprised, really. They probe motivations for human behaviour that often exist far beneath conscious thought and the sanitised stories people tell themselves about why they do what they do. Some…
Family life just got even more interesting. Just in time for Christmas, too! Families bustle with the push and pull of conflict and cooperation. But just how profoundly in the end do family members effect one another in the only…
I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory,…
Sydney (CNN) — In the mid-19th Century, two devastating floods of the Yellow River, and the famine that followed, ravaged northeastern China. Outlaw bands, known as nien, attracted young men in unprecedented numbers, aggregating into militias that wrought chaos on the…