Frans de Waal on Political Apes, Science Communication, and Building a Cooperative Society
Portrait of de Waal by Nathaniel Gold “It’s the animal in us,” we often hear when we’ve been bad. But why not when we’re good? This is the question that has driven Frans de Waal for the past 30 years. From his pioneering research on alliance formation in Chimpanzee Politics , to reconciliation behavior in Peacemaking Among Primates and Good Natured , to the implications for human life and thought in Primates and Philosophers, de Waal has been seeking to understand the roots of moral behavior in the most political of animals.
Pepperoni Pizza Puffs
If I ask my kids what they want for dinner, there's a ninety percent chance they will say pizza. They love it, as most kids do. I guess I have an affection for it too, but we don't indulge too often. If I had to choose a favorite pizza, it would be the Hawaiian, but no one else in my household appreciates its flavors like I do, too bad for them. So when my kids came home from school and I had this afternoon snack waiting for them, they were pretty excited to be having pizza at 3 PM. Okay, so was I, can you blame me?
Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body: Galleries: Media: Autopsy
WARNING: Some people may find images from actual postmortem dissections disturbing. Viewer discretion advised. Videos on this page require either QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player. Postmortem dissection, or autopsy, was among the first scientific methods to be used in the investigation of violent or suspicious death. Autopsy remains the core practice of forensic medicine. The postmortem examiner surveys the body's surface, opens it up with surgical instruments, removes parts for microscopic inspection and toxicological analysis, and makes a report that attempts to reconstruct the cause, manner and mechanism of death.
- StumbleUpon
When I began as a film critic, Jean-Luc Godard was widely thought to have reinvented the cinema with "Breathless" (1960). Now he is almost 80 and has made what is said to be his last film, and he's still at the job, reinventing. If only he had stopped while he was ahead.
Nucleus Medical Media: Medical Video, Animation & Illustration
Nucleus Medical Media Disclaimer of Medical and Legal Liability Nucleus Medical Media ("Nucleus") does not dispense medical or legal advice, and the text, illustrations, photographs, animations and other information ("Content") available on this web site is for general information purposes only. As with any medical or legal issue, it is up to you to consult a physician or attorney for professional advice.
The Unselfish Gene
The Idea in Brief Executives, like most other people, have long believed that human beings are interested only in advancing their material interests. However, recent research in evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics suggests that people behave far less selfishly than most assume. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have even found neural and, possibly, genetic evidence of a human predisposition to cooperate.
Jungle Survival: Finding Water"
Because jungles are so wet, collecting rainwater is probably the easiest part of survival. Leaves on the rainforest floor are large because of the limited amount of sunlight they get. The larger the leaf, the more of the sun's rays it can soak up. Large leaves are useful in collecting dew and rainwater. If you have a container to store water, simply angle a leaf into it overnight or during a rainstorm and you have some fresh drinking water in no time.
Mutated DNA Causes No-Fingerprint Disease
Almost every person is born with fingerprints, and everyone's are unique. But people with a rare disease known as adermatoglyphia do not have fingerprints from birth. Affecting only four known extended families worldwide, the condition is also called immigration-delay disease, since a lack of fingerprints makes it difficult for people to cross international borders. In an effort to find the cause of the disease, dermatologist Eli Sprecher sequenced the DNA of 16 members of one family with adermatoglyphia in Switzerland . Seven had normal fingerprints, and the other nine did not. After investigating a number of genes to find evidence of mutation, the researchers came up empty-handed—until a grad student finally found the culprit, a smaller version of a gene called SMARCAD1. ( Get a genetics overview. )
Creative Scan-and-Draw Color-Changing Pen Design
Any artist or designer who works with color knows that the best inspiration and perfect coloration can often be found in real-life objects all around us. What if you could take your trusty drawing pen and simply scan any color you want and then turn around and draw with it? This innovative pen design by Jin Sun Park allows you to do just that. Next step? A complete texture selector and replicator?
We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants
In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003. They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwestern, and at one point one of them expressed some serious frustration at the fact that so many of the science and business students in his introductory calculus courses simply wanted to “learn” a disparate set of techniques, rather than understand calculus. The reality of course is that the vast majority of people who ever encounter calculus aim to learn it for reasons of utility, not so that they can grok the fundamental theorem of calculus. With the proliferation of tools such as Mathematica and powerful portable calculators fewer and fewer people are getting their hands dirty with calculus in an analytic sense, and more often see it as simply a “requirement” which they have to pass.
Snares And Traps
Disclaimer: Traps are presented for information purposes only, they are dangerous, some lethally so. Using them is also illegal in all likelihood. Don't use them except in a survival situation.
Scientists unveil tools for rewriting the code of life
MIT and Harvard researchers have developed technologies that could be used to rewrite the genetic code of a living cell, allowing them to make large-scale edits to the cell’s genome. Such technology could enable scientists to design cells that build proteins not found in nature, or engineer bacteria that are resistant to any type of viral infection. The technology, described in the July 15 issue of Science, can overwrite specific DNA sequences throughout the genome, similar to the find-and-replace function in word-processing programs. Using this approach, the researchers can make hundreds of targeted edits to the genome of E. coli, apparently without disrupting the cells’ function. “We did get some skepticism from biologists early on,” says Peter Carr, senior research staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory (and formerly of the MIT Media Lab), who is one of the paper’s lead authors. DNA consists of long strings of “letters” that code for specific amino acids.
