Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

You re reading a blog. This almost guarantees the fact that you re a staunch supporter, and fan, of open-access publishing. Many of us who publish technical research really do try to publish in open-access venues as often as possible

Paleontologist Lee Berger displays the skull and partial skeleton of a juvenile male Australopithecus sediba. Photo by Kate Wong During a recent reporting trip to South Africa for a forthcoming feature article on a new fossil human species called A ustralopithecus sediba , I asked readers to submit their questions about this dazzling find. Inquiries about the nearly two-million-year-old hominin–which has been held up as a possible ancestor of our genus, Homo –came in via Twitter, Google Plus and the comments section of this blog.

[More]

With the economic downturn and the evolution of the business world in the last 10 years, has our ability to succeed on our own changed? We continue our examination of the business book Free Agent Nation with an interview of author Daniel Pink

Kristian Carlson (right) discusses the first rib of Australopithecus sediba with colleague Brian Kuhn. Image: Kate Wong JOHANNESBURG At a tea party earlier today for a research team at the University of the Witwatersrand that has grown accustomed to making stunning discoveries of human fossils, a curious excitement erupted when Kristian Carlson unveiled a seemingly modest find: a rib bone from Australopithecus sediba . In fact, it wasn’t even an actual fossil just a resin replica

Editor's note: This essay, by renowned evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, was published in the August 1994 issue of Scientific American with the title, " Sex, Death and Kefir ." Margulis died on Tuesday in her home, according to a statement released by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was a Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences.

Starting from the behavior of small flames in the laboratory, a team of researchers has gained new insights into the titanic forces that drive Type Ia supernova explosions. These stellar explosions are important tools for studying the evolution of the universe, so a better understanding of how they behave would help answer some of the fundamental questions in astronomy.

Billions of years ago, organic chemicals in the primordial soup somehow organized themselves into the first organisms. A few years ago scientists found that something similar happens every once in awhile in the cells of all living things: bits of once-quiet stretches of

Three months ago, I received an email informing me that a high school friend, Pat, had died.

LAS VEGAS–Three-dimensional medical imaging of two baby woolly mammoths from Siberia named Lyuba and Khroma has given scientists an unprecedented view of the internal anatomy of these creatures. At the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Ethan Shirley and Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan and their colleagues presented the results of their analyses of the images. I wrote about their observations–and the intriguing new questions they raise about mammoth development and evolution– here .

The giant marabou stork found at Liang Bua is an extinct relative of the modern marabou stork from Africa shown here. Credit: Lip Kee/Flickr via Creative Commons license LAS VEGAS–A study of bird remains from the same cave that yielded bones of a mini human species called Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the hobbit has cast new light on the lost world of this enigmatic human relative. The findings hint that the hobbits’ island home was quite ecologically diverse, and raise the possibility that the tiny humans had to defend their kills from giant carnivorous birds

CT scan of baby woolly mammoth named Lyuba LAS VEGAS Computed tomography (CT) scans of two extraordinarily well-preserved baby woolly mammoths from Siberia have yielded startling new insights into these iconic Ice Age beasts. Previously examinations of the external features of the mammoths suggested that the two creatures were quite similar, exhibiting the same developmental stage and similar age at death. But the new full-body scans the first ever obtained for largely intact mammoths tell a different story.

CT scan of baby woolly mammoth named Lyuba LAS VEGAS Computed tomography (CT) scans of two extraordinarily well-preserved baby woolly mammoths from Siberia have yielded startling new insights into these iconic Ice Age beasts.

Sci saw this paper being tweeted around the internets recently, a paper on the evolution of overconfidence . It seemed like a really interesting and cool paper, and I was kind of surprised that no one had covered it

[More]