Still Alive, Not Blogging Enough

I tend to blog in spurts. When I have nothing interesting to say (or lack the motivation to put together one of the 'BIG POSTS' I have waiting in the queue) I don't try to fill my blog with, well, filler posts. That's just the way I am. Inspiration tends to come in one big surge, at which point I'll write a bunch of entries in a matter of days. That's why this blog has laid dormant for nearly a week while the rest of the ScienceBlogs army trudges onward.

Despite what I said above, I felt a bit of an obligation to post something, regardless of how filler-esque it seems. So, I give you a neat award presented to scientists for communicating their work to the general public. This year's Communicator Award was given to Friedemann Schrenk, an evolutionary biologist and paleoanthropologist at Frankfurt University. It's nice to see someone rewarded for sharing the evolution knowledge. Mad props Dr. Schrenk.

Via the same news source I got that previous story, I learned of the research of David Berlinsky. No, not that David Berlinski. This Berlinksy studies reproductive physiology in fish. He is working toward determining how black sea bass change sexes so that fisheries can better manage the sex ratios in their stocks. You see, these fish are born as females, and in the wild change to males after about 2-5 years. In captivity, they change to males almost immediately, and the fish farmers lose all of their females (it's a total sausage fest up in there). Not all sex determination is as easy as X and Y.