Science & Society

Helen Fisher On Who We Love And How Science Can Help Us Find Our Soulmate

I recently spoke to biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher about her groundbreaking work on the chemical basis of our personality and its influence on who we fall in love with.  As it turns out, science can shed a lot of light on a topic previously do ...

Article - Stephanie Pulford - Feb 14 2009 - 10:45am

The African Tortoise Effect

Shortly after the Second World War, the famous naturalist, Gerald Durrell, was collecting animals in Cameroon.  While he generally got on well with the locals wherever he went, one frustration he encountered was that villagers might again and again offer h ...

Blog Post - Erinaceus Europaeus - Feb 14 2009 - 4:21pm

Blogging The AAAS Meeting In Chicago

AAAS bills its annual meeting as 'the world's largest general science conference', which sounds just narrow enough to be true and since I am a patron member and we're a science community (indeed, we are the world's largest independ ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Dec 5 2018 - 12:56pm

Blogging The AAAS Meeting In Chicago Day 2

The interesting thing about being in a meeting like this is seeing some outstanding science and then seeing something that makes you wonder if people really know what they are doing.   Day 2 was when some of the more outrageous stuff, and therefore more ou ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Feb 17 2009 - 5:34pm

Blogging The AAAS Meeting In Chicago Day 3

Want to know if your discipline is in over-hype freefall?   Look at all the empty seats in your session.   For "The Science of Kissing" session I talked about yesterday it was standing room only, even if most people there wondered how much of it ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Feb 17 2009 - 5:41pm

What Is Academic Freedom?

Time to put New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish in his place, again. Fish is a rather interesting kind of animal: an academic through and through (he is, after all a professor of law at Florida International University and dean emeritus of the College ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Feb 17 2009 - 11:35am

Playboy, Barbie And The Average Woman

Can you connect the dots? Playboy playmates, Barbie, and Wired Magazine. Give up? Wired featured a charticle in the February issue on the BMI of Playmates, starting back in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe to the recent January 2009 cover girl, versus those of the ...

Article - Becky Jungbauer - Feb 18 2009 - 5:05pm

Natural World: A Farm For The Future?

Last night, I watched on BBC Television Natural World, 2008-2009- 14. A Farm for the Future in which Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that natu ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Feb 21 2009 - 12:55pm

R-Rated Movies Linked To Smoking In Kids

A new study says that kids who are allowed to watch R-rated movies are much more likely to believe it's easy to get a cigarette than those who aren't allowed to watch such films.  The researchers found that parental permission to watch R-rated mo ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 23 2009 - 12:37am

Does Sex Sell? It Does If You Read This Article Just Because Of The Headline

Do sexy images sell products?  Like anything in marketing, it depends on if it works, says a new study in Journal of Consumer Research, but the common belief is that it doesn't work all that great for women.   The researchers say there may be ways to ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 23 2009 - 7:21pm