Geico’s “so easy a caveman can do it” advertising campaign incorrectly minimized the intelligence of Neanderthals. (Credit: Shutterstock)
(This post originally appeared in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work.)
For the last dozen years or so, Geico Insurance has run commercials featuring Neanderthals in modern contexts. The story line varies, but the take-home point does not: Switching to ...read more
The TeamIndus rover. (Credit: TeamIndus)
A team of undergraduate engineers from the University of California-San Diego hopes to be the first to brew beer in space.
They are one of 25 teams competing for a spot aboard India’s TeamIndus lunar lander mission, which itself is vying for a $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE. Inspired by home brewing projects, the young engineers want to study how yeast behaves in outer space.
Beer Blast-off
Their experiment consists of a soda-can sized ...read more
Pilots from Weather Modification, Inc., prepare the cloud seeding aircraft with seeding flares. (Credit: Derek Blestrud, Idaho Power Company)
“Make mud, not war.” That was the slogan of the American 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squad, the first military force to engage in weather warfare.
Throughout the Vietnam War, they flew 2,602 missions, releasing silver iodide, a compound that seeded clouds and exacerbated monsoons—or so the thinking went. Dubbed “Operation Popeye&r ...read more
After a late dinner, a jungle-dwelling whip spider can’t rely on an Uber driver to get her home. She has to find the way herself, in the pitch-black, picking her way over thick undergrowth to reach the tree she lives on. It’s a trick she can even manage when plucked from her home tree and tossed into the forest at random, up to 10 meters away. Now scientists think whip spiders don’t use her eyes for this homing feat—they use their feet.
Whip spiders hunt b ...read more
(Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech)
Extraterrestrial objects are constantly bombarding Earth; thankfully the vast majority are microscopic.
Thanks to the planet’s atmosphere, we live largely unaware of this celestial fusillade, which averages about 100 tons a day and mostly burns up long before hitting the ground. From the few that do make impact, researchers can gather clues about the composition of our solar system, with the goal of understanding how planets and other b ...read more
“I am fearful this will affect the Arctic in ways that we have not seen yet” — Margot Wallström, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden
Donald J. Trump walks out of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn in as America’s 45th President. (Source: White House Facebook page)
Note: I’ve written this from Tromsø, Norway, where I’m covering the Arctic Frontiers conference. A version of this commentary is also scheduled to be published in the Norwegian newspaper Da ...read more
A train carries human visitors to the futuristic amusement park of “Westworld” populated by robot hosts. Credit: HBO
Nobody would accuse the HBO show “Westworld” of being a sunny science fiction tale about artificial intelligence. The show features humanlike robot “hosts” who live, die, and live again to serve the fantasies of human guests visiting a Western-themed amusement park. But the dark premise of “Westworld” is still&n ...read more
By: Russ Campbell
I grew up in Fishtown, Philadelphia, an inner city grid of red-brick row homes, corner bars, candy shops, and barely-breathing factories. Fishtown was not known for its wildlife. There were birds. A wide variety, if two counts as a wide variety: big birds (pigeons) and small birds (sparrows). There were cats and an occasional dog that escaped out of someone’s yard.
On rare occasions, I’d see a squirrel scampering about on the telephone pole in my backyard. This was ...read more
Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933 at Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo, three years before his death. Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons.
While I have mixed feelings about de-extinction, particularly for animals that have been out of the picture for thousands of years (I’m looking at you, woolly mammoth), I’d argue the species with the strongest case for giving it a shot would be Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Tas ...read more
