(Credit: Everett Collection/Shutterstock)
Humans are sort of nature’s wimps.
Relatively speaking, our physical prowess just doesn’t match up to the rest of the animal kingdom. Our lack of brawn is a result of our our big, energy-hungry brains, an adaption that seems to have worked out pretty well, all things considered. Still, without the aid of tools and traps, creatures who call the wilderness home present a clear threat. Even when compared to our closest cousins, chimpanzee ...read more
I’ve recently been doing some of every academic’s favorite activity – marking student essays (papers).
Here’s a few observations on essays and on marking them.
1. Marking Essays is Subjective
This is a bit of a truism: it’s fairly obvious that not everyone will agree on how to grade an essay down to the exact mark. Unlike with, say, a multiple-choice exam, marking an essay is not a mechanical process. But it’s easy to forget this when the marks are there in ...read more
(Credit: Zarya Maxim Alexandrovich/Shutterstock)
Our lives are awash in tunes. Songs are blasted through the radio, piped into supermarkets, they waft through the air at public gatherings and soundtracks can make or break a blockbuster movie.
Humans seem obsessed with melody and rhythm. But when did it begin in hominin history? What purpose does it fulfill? And does music have a dark side?
The first bands started gigging at least tens of thousands of years. Archaeologists have found 40,000-yea ...read more
Well thank you for the kind words, Pietro Michelucci (founder of EyesOnALZ, a crowdsourcing platform designed to accelerate Alzheimer’s research). Pietro is one of 15 project and platform partners we’ve been working with to test and deploy a suite of new citizen science tools.
For the past two years, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, the SciStarter team has been hard at work building tools, partnerships, and methodologies to help connect millions of citizen scie ...read more
Sex appeals in advertising have a long history, but for good reason? (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Chiseled abs and bikinis can sell just about anything, right? According to the minds behind those Carl’s Jr. ads—and countless others—you’d think that’d be true.
This idea that “sex sells” has hung around for more than a century, and by this point it’s almost accepted as a doctrine. And those are exactly the types of claims researchers love putting to ...read more
This is a guest post by Jake Buehler, who just so happens to be an AAUS certified scientific diver as well as a science writer based in the Seattle area. He blogs over at Sh*t You Didn’t Know About Biology, which is full of his “unrepentantly celebratory insights into life on Earth’s under-appreciated, under-acknowledged, and utterly amazing stories.”
Summer is finally here in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are long, the weather is warm, and t ...read more
This artist’s concept shows the Milky Way and MACS 2129-1 side by side. MACS 2129-1 is only half the Milky Way’s size, but it’s three times as massive as our home galaxy. (Credit: NASA/ESA/Z.Levy/STScl)
Objects in the distant universe appear small and difficult to see – unless they’re sitting behind a cosmic magnifying glass.
That’s exactly the case for MACS 2129-1, a galaxy lensed by a massive foreground galaxy cluster. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, ast ...read more
Photo: flickr/Dallas Krentzel
Is there such a thing as an ugly penis? How about a pretty one? These researchers set out to determine what features are most important for a “good-looking” dong (with a specific application to men who had surgery to correct a penile birth defect). To do so, they had over 100 women rate photos of normal and surgically corrected penises, as well as complete a survey about which features of penile appearance were most important to them. The res ...read more
Various bird eggs on display at Natura Docet Wonderryck Twente in The Netherlands. (Rudmer Zwerver/Shutterstock)
When something is described as egg-shaped, the ubiquitous hen’s egg typically comes to mind. But for birds, eggs come in myriad shapes: owl eggs look like ping-pong balls, hummingbird eggs are shaped like jelly beans, swift eggs are pointed at one end like a pear.
So what’s the reason?
Biologists have been asking that question for quite some time, and their hypotheses ar ...read more
A close-up of moth’s eyes from order Lepidoptera. (Credit: Muhammad Naaim)
Moth eyes and lotus leaves may be important to the future of touch screens.
Researchers from the University of Central Florida and National Taiwan University designed an anti-reflective coating that was inspired by moth eyes. The coating reflects about 10 times less light than the best anti-glare technique in commercial use.
Optical Properties
The ability to see your phone’s display is a competition between ...read more
