Tag: evolution

The ebb and flow of curvy cars

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/04/Curvy-Cars.mp3[/podcast] In the 1940s and 1950s, cars had curves. From the 1960s through the 1980s, they tended to have sharp angles. But since then, they’ve tended more toward the curvy again…although I’m seeing signs of angularity one more. Have you ever wondered why? A German researcher at the University of Bamberg with the unlikely-yet-oddly-appropriate name …

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A half-billion years of irritation

Just a couple of years ago, I wrote a column about the advent of tearless onions that included some background on why onions make us cry in the first place. Ordinarily I wouldn’t revisit a topic quite so soon, but you know how it is with science: things change fast, and just this week there …

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Social contagions

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/01/Social-Contagions.mp3[/podcast] Parents (I don’t think I’m giving away any parental secrets here) worry about peer pressure–not least because parents remember how much their behavior was influenced by peers when they were young. The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing. As the …

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Arachnophobia

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/09/Arachnophobia.mp3[/podcast] “The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout. Down came the rain, and washed the spider out…” At which point a large percentage of us screamed and ran the other way, because surveys show that one fifth of men and a third of women are frightened of arachnids. It makes sense, right? Spiders can be …

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A universal theory of humour

[podcast]https://www.edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/A Universal Theory of Humour.mp3[/podcast] I am a very funny man. I have been told so, so it must be true. You can tell how funny I am by reading my very funny writing. Like this paragraph. This paragraph is very funny. It must be because I am a very funny man. I have been …

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Male managers as animal show-offs

I’ve been a freelance writer for 15 years now, so the world of office politics is something I know about only through second-hand accounts and television shows. I say that just so you know I can’t personally vouch for the accuracy of the study that caught my eye this week. The study, authored by Jeffrey …

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The early Earth may have been purple…

…not green. Chlorophyll, it seems, may have been a relative latecomer.

Neanderthals revisited

If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, and stupid. Allow me to set the record straight: Neanderthals were none of the above. Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 350,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander …

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Neanderthals

If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, incapable of nobility and the higher emotions, and stupid, to boot. Of course, if we said this about any existing group of humans–expatriate Texans, for instance–we would be accused of being racist. Neanderthals, alas, cannot seek redress for libel, …

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Taxonomy

  When people think of science, they think of physics or chemistry or astronomy, of particle accelerators, of racks of test tubes or giant telescopes. They don’t think of taxonomy; yet this less-than-glamorous science is at the heart of modern biology. Taxonomy is not, as you might suppose, the scientific study of taxes. Instead it’s …

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