This weekend I gained a grudging appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governator, not the Terminator. Having watched Arnie’s political rise and fall from afar, he always seemed an odd chimera. Lines…
- Scientia Professor of Evolution, UNSW
Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature. Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal…
The poor old placenta. It really doesn’t get much public attention. And yet it does a crucially important job - acting as the interface between the mother’s blood supply and that of her developing foetus…
Brian Mautz has had a big week. Since his paper on the importance of penis size in attractiveness judgements was published in PNAS on Tuesday morning, news outlets and blogs have proved near-insatiable…
How important is penis size? Authors from the Australian National University, Monash and La Trobe provide the most complete answer yet: the size of a flaccid penis can significantly affect how attractive…
Last week I posted a column about the rather embarrassing fuss some people made when they discovered the phenomenally successful Facebook page “I Fucking Love Science” is created and curated by a woman…
Grant-writing season is finally over for Australian academics. Actually, grant writing season is never over, but with the deadlines now having passed for the ARC Discovery grants and Discovery Early Career…
What do you know? The creative force behind science’s favourite Facebook site is … a woman. Holy mother of Christ. Just over a year ago, Elise Andrew, then a biology student at the University of Sheffield…
Some aspects of the natural world are so commonplace that we mistake them for essential truths. This is especially true of the fact that the animals we know best, including our own species, usually give…
Sometimes I think I can hear the internet as it relentlessly changes everything. This week’s tabloidisation of Fairfax is merely a symptom of the way the net has already changed the news media. So, too…
Australia’s eight-month election campaign is apparently underway. It’s a prospect that excites only those shady consultants, pollsters and party power-brokers whose livelihoods depend on running focus…
St Valentine’s day caught our household by surprise this morning. My daughter, the only family member who shows even a flicker of interest, loves what we call “Balance-time day” because it comes with free…
The most erotic thing a man can do for a woman is…. the dishes. You’ve no doubt encountered this oft-repeated claim, or one like it, before. In this case it comes from a source no less authoritative than…
I’m intrigued. And horrified. And curious. And incredulous. Twitter, that lolly-bag of random ideas, just led me to a story on the website of Cosmopolitan magazine about a new FaceBook app called “Bang…
Is there a left-wing “War on Science”? Influential American sceptic Michael Shermer devotes his latest column in Scientific American to arguing exactly this. Bloggers have already sent some considerable…
I’m just back from holidays and wading through some of the exciting science published while I was temporarily untethered from the Internet. One of the most interesting was a Science paper led by Lisa Cameron…
A few weeks ago I found myself reading up about the evolution of language in preparation for a talk I gave to the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia’s conference in Perth. It turns out the evolutionary…
When I give talks about the relevance of evolution to modern life, I can count on one regular question interrupting an orderly transition from lecture theatre to bar. Sometimes it comes with a “bet-you-didn’t-think-of-that-one…
Your ancient Greek-Latin binomial for the day is hyperemesis gravidarium. HG for short. It’s a particularly extreme form or pregnancy sickness (or morning sickness). Brought to you today by Catherine…
Evolutionary psychologists get a bad rap. I should not be surprised, really. They probe motivations for human behaviour that often exist far beneath conscious thought and the sanitised stories people tell…
Family life just got even more interesting. Just in time for Christmas, too! Families bustle with the push and pull of conflict and cooperation. But just how profoundly in the end do family members affect…
I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions…
I am unexpectedly moved this morning by the news that Mitch Lucker has died following a Halloween motorcycle accident. Mitch was the “vocalist” for the American metal band Suicide Silence. I qualify the…
Why do humans tend to live such a long time? Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, can last into their mid forties in the wild. Yet somewhere in the last six million years, human lifespans have lengthened…
Watching the US Presidential election from afar feels a bit like watching reality television. It seems interminable and very little of what the characters say seems to make sense. On that front, at least…
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