pharyngula

Probably because he's already at Skepticon, and I'm not. (via Arthropoda)

(via Ark in Space)

And seeing nothing there! (via RedBubble)

I approve this plan. A number of researchers have gotten together and worked out a grand strategy for sequencing the genomes of a collection of cephalopods. This involves surveying the phylogeny of cephalopods and trying to pick species to sample that adequately cover the diversity of the group,…

(via NatGeo)

(via Redbubble)

(via NatGeo)

(via NatGeo)

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter…

I've got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they've just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of…

(via DivePhotoGuide)

(via ECOMAR)

Oh, boy. Jonathan Wells explains why some of us reject the outrageous interpretations made from the ENCODE work claiming 80%+ functionality of the genome. It was really an effort to get past this sentence. Some historical context might help. Bwahahahahaha! First sentence, he makes a joke. Wells is…

Wouldn't it be cool to have transparent skin?

I can take it no more. I wanted to dig deeper into the good stuff done by the ENCODE consortium, and have been working my way through some of the papers (not an easy thing, either: I have a very high workload this term), but then I saw this declaration from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On…

Yeah, sorry, but at the vertex of all those slimy tentacular columns lies this hard, knife-edged, pointy, shiny, muscular beak. (via Naturetrek)

Beneath the mysterious waters of the Sea of Japan, strange symbolic artworks have been spontaneously appearing — intricate mandalas, six feet in diameter, dot the sandy bottom. What could they mean? Perhaps the aliens have been making these all along, at the same time they've been sending secret…

Sometimes they are polite requests, but they smell fishy. My dad is a christian who says he would be willing to read a book on evolution that includes a comprehensive list of dig sites and photos of transitional forms. Can you recommend something? I replied. I was not kind. He's lying to you.…

Our rebuttal to claims about the adaptive significance of the female orgasm has been published, as Zietsch & Santtila's study is not evidence against the by-product theory of female orgasm. I blogged about this a while back, and also dealt with some counter-arguments, and Elisabeth Lloyd…

Nice name: the Resurrection Plant. Also nice that it looks rather Cthulhoid.

I know it's early, but I expect it to be the best thing for a few days yet. David Byrne writes about his love affair with sound, and I came away from it feeling like I'd both learned something new and that it fit well with other ideas I already had — it was a revelation to see how well music and…

(via PopSci, submitted by one of my students)

(via The Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods.)

(via Sonoran Desert Plant)

I am getting quite impressed with the progress being made in organ reconstruction. New techniques have allowed amazing improvements in bioengineering that allow whole complex organs to be grown in a dish and then surgically reimplanted — and much of this research is being driven by our military…

Now he's got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he's a terrible scientist. I'm no big fan of evolutionary psychology,…