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My picks for the most astounding animal videos of 2011 take us on a journey around the globe. They depict diverse animals in natural habitats living their everyday lives – and they are simply stunning.

While some schoolchildren daydream about crushes during class, delicately inscribing their names in paper margins, others instead yearn to one day discover and name their own species for the cute boy at the corner desk. But they know little about the excess work involved in plant discovery

While some schoolchildren daydream about crushes during class, delicately inscribing their names in paper margins, others instead yearn to one day discover and name their own species for the cute boy at the corner desk.

A magnetic sense is now well documented in dozens of animal species. It turns out that tracking the geomagnetic field that same invisible thing that points compasses is handy for life, in lots of situations

When it comes to science, temperature matters. And when it comes to Wisconsin, things get really, really cold.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

In these hyperlinked days, one might reasonably guess that the subject of the first book of photographs may have been along the lines of the True Purpose of the Internet (ask someone who’s seen “Avenue Q” if you don’t know). Or if not that, perhaps cityscapes, or naval vessels, or still lifes, or battlefields. But no

I’ve mentioned magnetic bacteria a couple of times now, so I got quite excited when Lucas Brouwers alerted me to a recent paper in Science (ref below) that explored a whole new group of magnetic bacteria.

When I wrote my end-of-the-year update for staff, Bora Zivkovic, our chief blogs editor, reminded me that others are also interested in the goings on at Scientific American . It’s never a good idea to say no to Bora. So here s a summary of some highlights for 2011: AWARDS [More]

When I wrote my end-of-the-year update for staff, Bora Zivkovic, our chief blogs editor, reminded me that others are also interested in the goings on at Scientific American . It’s never a good idea to say no to Bora.

Click here for Part Two: Carl Zimmer Delves Beneath the Surface of Science Writing

Click here for Part Two: Carl Zimmer Delves Beneath the Surface of Science Writing

[the following is a modified repost from Myrmecos , 2010] Image by US Army Africa, used under a Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0 license [More]

On December 13, CERN will release the results of a new data analysis in the search for the Higgs boson. at the LHC. As I was reporting my article, which appeared today , on December 7 I spoke on the phone with Joe Lykken, a Fermilab staff theoretical physicist