Only me! I didn’t take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and end up on the “New York Blog” by mistake, but will in fact be posting about New York science here now and again.

The satirical news show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is taped in New York and last night New York University Professor of Anthropology Todd Disotell had a star turn (you can see it as part of the August 5th episode at www.dailyshow.com and the show will be repeated at 8 pm EST on Comedy Central). Disotell works on primate evolution and was part of a special report-type piece discussing our nearest primate relatives. The piece poked fun at scientific discussion (paper followed by a counter-paper followed by another counter-paper, “and no one will read any of them” the interviewer, John Oliver, quipped (much to my chagrin)). Both scientists played the whole thing cool, with Disotell’s wry rapping skills, I think, pretty quick off the mark.

If you’re in New York you can get Daily Show tickets for free here (there are science guests actually fairly often and these have recently included Oliver Sacks, Steven Chu, Harold Varmus and Neil deGrasse Tyson). But since you have to get tickets far in advance, it’s a lottery as to who the guest will be and you may be unlucky ; ) (as I was when I went along a while ago) and see Jake Gyllenhaal as the live interview instead. I actually missed J. Craig Venter by one night on the sister comedy show The Colbert Report (also has science guests relatively often, have included Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins, Neil deGrasse Tyson), but Jon Stewart gave us a quick repartee on geneticists during the pre-taping warm up. Of course Disotell lectures at NYU and gives seminars there for a more serious look at his work (I once saw him give a talk in a Saturday series aimed at getting high school students interested in scientific research) and I’ll comment if there’s anything like that upcoming.