PastCast – Gorilla fever
Brehms Tierleben, Small Edition 1927
The Nature PastCast is a new podcast series telling the stories behind some of the biggest papers in Nature’s archive. The latest episode is all about the gorilla:
According to the fables of early explorers, the gorilla was a terrible, man-eating monster. It was also thought to be man’s closest relative in the animal kingdom. Naturally, scientists and the public alike wanted to see these fierce beasts for themselves. But in the mid nineteenth century, as the evolution debate heated up, getting a live gorilla to Europe from Africa was extremely difficult. In 1876, the pages of Naturereport the arrival in England of a young specimen.
You can listen to the PastCast here.
nature.com blogs – a collection of blogs from editors and other staff at NPG
Last week, on Soapbox Science we hosted a three-part series from Elizabeth Iorns, a breast cancer scientist and co-founder of Science Exchange. Her posts look at the research cycle:
In the first post of this series, I describe the changes that are coming for the way scientific research is funded in the digital age. In the second part, I explore the ways in which the process of research itself is destined to undergo dramatic changes. In the final part I look at the future of research communication, exploring the impact of digital tools on scientific reputation.
This week’s best of NPG blogs includes: chimpanzee research, glaciers, water, libel reform and lots more!
Monthly Map
Kenya, Canada, Israel and the UK are all represented on the Trade Secret’s monthly map of biotech news from their June issue of Nature Biotechnology. Continue to their post for a larger version of the map.
Scitable -Nature Education’s network of science blogs
Scitable bloggers look at the importance of water in the “making” of life on Earth—and in the evolution of the planet Mars. Could Earth become just like Mars in the future if it’s unable to retain water on its surface? Could water isolated for 1.5 billion years recently discovered in Ontario, Canada, tell us about life on Earth at its very beginning?
A representation of the volume of water on Earth compared to
SciLogs.com – an NPG network of science bloggers
SciLogs.com launched a new blog about the history of science this week. To start off ScienceZest, blogger Annelie Wendeberg has a series about the history of biological warfare. It contains such gems as:
“Emperor Barbarossa poisoned water wells with human bodies in Italy. The Tartars catapulted their own dead soldiers into the besieged city of Kaffa, the Spanish mixed wine with blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French foes, the Polish fired saliva from rabid dogs into the faces of their enemies, and the British distributed blankets from smallpox patients among Native Americans.”
Journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus continues her tour de force at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It’s not all about the science at the institute she finds out: for instance anthropologists do some rock climbing in the office during their tea breaks!
As always, Malcolm Campbell has the past week’s science news curated in his weekly roundup. And all of SciLogs.com’s blog posts are here.