Science Art: Amerique, from the Larousse pour tous encyclopedia, 1909.
Click to embiggen This is what America meant for Claude Auge, who edited Le Larousse pour tous nouveau dictionnaire encyclopedique in 1909. Eskimos and tapirs. […]
anthropology
Science Art: Manière de pêcher la Tortüe; le Lamantin from Histoire des aventuriers flibustiers, Volume I (1744)
This engraving shows a bunch of humans spearing a sea turtle. But wait! A manatee looks on in terror, clutching her child! And thinks back […]
Science Art: Julbock, Nordisk familjebok, 1910.
This is a Julbock – a “Yule goat” – from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.
The shrunken head considered.
I never realized there was doubt about the tales of vicious headhunting tribes in South America until I read this Discovery News item. Apparently, they’ve […]
A language-killing grudge.
The Ayapaneco language is about to die out, the Guardian reports, in part because the last two speakers aren’t talking to each other: Manuel Segovia, […]
David was packing heat.
Discovery takes a peek inside a famous statue’s hand to find Michelangelo’s lost weapon of war: “Bulging with veins, the right hand is holding what […]
Cookbook ecology
“Trophic level” is a measure of how far up the food chain an animal is. It’s generally used in ecological studies to show how much […]
Oxytocin and roses….
New Scientist recently got all romantic with an intrepid researcher’s chemical expose of her big fat geek wedding: WE’D booked the venue, chosen the bridesmaids’ […]
Not the kind that belongs to a club, but the kind with a club that belongs to him…
We all want a primitive man, says the Telegraph, reporting on new evidence that modern humans got it on with Neanderthals: [Said Professor Paabo, who […]
Walk, don’t crawl.
Scientific American resets my priorities (or at least my metaphors) with anthropological research. You think in order to walk, you gotta crawl first? Not really: […]
Walking in the trees.
New Scientist goes out on a limb with a new study that hints that humans may have learned to walk up in the branches before […]
Listen to the lituus.
About two months ago, the BBC tells us, Scottish researchers used computer models to bring a lost medieval instrument back to life: Bach’s motet (a […]
Chimp tricks.
LiveScience sullies our image of chimpanzees as noble, natural creatures with evidence that these apes practice prostitution: The primates’ food-for-sex barter occurs indirectly, over the […]
Spank for a happy relationship!
New Scientist, always on the raw, throbbing edge of behavioral science, reveals the heartwarming findings about the couple that spanks together: SPANKING is stressful at […]