The Social Nestwork

When people ask why I would choose to write a book about poisons I usually start with my brief stint as a chemistry major...

From The Nation: In the summer of 2007, while the scientist Marc Hauser was in Australia, Harvard University authorities entered his lab on the tenth floor of William James Hall, seizing computers, videotapes, unpublished manuscripts and notes. Hauser, then 47, was a professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology,...

#occupyucdavis, photograph by California Aggie by Deborah Blum One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale – as you can see on the widely used chart below – puts sweet bell peppers at the zero...

From Jurassic Park, Universal Pictures, 1993 From Wired: People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at...

From Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, illustration by Samuel Clemens From American Scientist: Perception entails not just sensing the world but also making sense of it. When you listen to orchestral music, you hear oboes, violins, timpani and so on, each playing distinct notes. But the sound...

From At the Zoo, Ryan Anderson, 2001-2006 by Nicolas Ellwanger For many years now, I have spent hours describing to friends and family members why I study primates and why it fits within the field of anthropology. Unfortunately, primatologists have the unenviable task of more eloquently answering the same...

by Justin E. H. Smith Jaron Lanier, of virtual-reality fame, was permitted to hold forth a few years ago in a Discover blog space on the topic of ‘morphing’ in molluscs. The result is messy: Lanier introduces the analogy between cephalopod intelligence and extraterrestrial intelligence three times, each time...

From Life and Health, illustration by Phil Kirkland,  1972 From The American Scholar: “Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors” and “Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads” read headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Health Blog at the end of 2008 after, in...

by Julia Galef It’s not often that you find something that’s a fallacy both logically and creatively — that is, a fallacy to which both researchers and artists are susceptible. Perhaps you’re tempted to tell me I’m committing a category mistake, that artistic fields like fiction and architecture aren’t...

Bosun Bird at anchor at the foot of Monte Darwin, in the Northwest Arm of the Beagle Channel by Nicholas Coghlan It was the late seventies and I had just graduated from University in Britain. The economy was depressed, the country was strike-bound and rainy. On the spur of the moment...

Kan B’ahlam as warrior, depicted on the Palenque Temple XVII Tablet by Gerardo Aldana One of the real challenges facing the interpretation of ancient astronomies—from non-academic ‘2012’ prophecies to the most traditional scholarship on the Dresden Codex Venus Table—is that presented by ‘patterns in randomness.’ In my opinion, the...