Correlation does not mean causation. But after yesterday’s rant about our ice machine being broken for over a month and a half, look what...

I was a teenage dilettante. And an undergraduate dilettante. And in grad school. When I took my first post-doc, I realized that I had so...

Yesterday , I described the return of my old nemesis, the ice machine. Now it has been joined by another enemy from my past: the Manuscript ...

Warning: This post contains strong language. Four letter words. Curses! Swearing! Set the wayback machine, Sherman. Back to the very early...

A black brachyuran photographed down at the seawall in the Ala Moana State Recreation Area on my first day in Honolulu at the Crustacean S...

You’ll find my name in the July issue of Bay Nature if you look very, very closely. I just received my copy, which I requested as “payme...

As we’ve started to probe the cognitive abilities of animals, it’s been tough to come up with tests that show what a particular species can ...

For students and post-docs in particular, head over to BioData Blogs to read my guest post, “ Why your mentor sucks (and how to fix it) .” ...

Why do zebras look like this? You know. All stripey . One theory for this “Notice me!” pattern was picked up by naval officials: that t...

A rich noble once commissioned a famous artist to paint him a picture of a crane. The artist agreed, though he set a rather steep price, eve...

The Scientist is sponsoring a contest for online science resources called the Labby Awards . They have an award for video, and an award for...

There are many reasons to argue for open access of scientific research. But this is not the best one: It’s your taxes that fund the resear...

Two harlequin shrimp ( Hymenocera picta ) that I snapped before the banquet at the recent Crustacean Society meeting at the Waikiki Aquariu...

Outline slides are a waste of time. By definition , they contain no information that will not be found somewhere else in the talk. Worse, pe...

Physicist Michio Kaku may miss the mark here (edited down; full quote here ): The United States has the worst educational system known to ...

“ How did this paper get published?” This is a common refrain in conferences, journal clubs, and science blogs. You look at a paper and t...

I’ve just takes some of my best blog posts on presentations, reorganized them into themes instead of “What I happened to feel like writing a...

Last week , I blogged from The Crustacean Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii . Given the long plane flights, and that I paid for the enti...

Dr. Micro O likes Comic Sans and Wikipedia . Hey, neither of those are crimes. DrugMonkey asks what people think retraction means . I m...

Caves seem to be dead ends of the most literal sort. Not so. Caves are bubbling cauldrons of evolutionary experimentation, and pose wonderfu...