cwilcox | January 14, 2011Last night was the first night of Science Online 2011. The food and keynote were fantastic, but the real party was back at the hotel afterwards for the Open Mic Night! At the request of many, here are the lyrics to the song I sang:
Extinctionʼs A Bitch(to the tune of ʻBitchʼ by Meredith Brooks)
Biodiversity
all kinds of creatures from the mountains to the seas
all arising through a process of selection thatʼs been altering their genes
for a million centuries
Evolutionʼs what I mean
Itʼs changing organisms gene by gene by gene
so theyʼre stronger or theyʼre faster or theyʼre smarter,…
cwilcox | January 7, 2011
Photo by Sara LeeAnn Banevedes
I don't think Brian Alexander is a bad guy or a misogynist. He writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC, so sure, his job is all about selling sex stories to the public. He even wrote a book about American sexuality. But I don't personally think he has a burning hatred for women, or views them as objects placed on this Earth for the sexual satisfaction of men. However, I very easily could, given how he chose to report on a recent study published in Science about men's physiological responses to the chemicals present in women's tears. The headline alone was…
cwilcox | January 7, 2011When the deadline for Open Lab rolled around way back at the beginning of December, there were close to 900 science blog posts in the running for the coveted 50 slots. Over the past couple months, Jason and his team of reviewers have whittled down those submissions, til only 1/18th remain. Yes, that's right, the time has come and the posts to be published in Open Lab 2010 have been revealed!
There is some incredible blogging in there, including posts by some of my favorite writers, like Ed Yong, Brian Switek and Jason Goldman, just to name a few. Each and every post included is definitely…
cwilcox | December 25, 2010Tis the season! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the sunny isle of Oahu!
For more pics, check out my Facebook Album!Hale is the hawaiian term for a house or dwelling.
cwilcox | December 9, 2010Most animals reproduce sexually. This means that every individual has to find another individual to mate with - and they have to convince that other that they're worthy of the privilege. More often than not when it comes to picking that special someone, it's the girls that get to be choosy. Females spend a lot more energy per offspring than males from the get-go due to the size of our eggs (let alone most child rearing responsibilities), so as a gender, females want to make sure they don't waste their efforts. To ensure top notch kids, females choose the best male they can find. It's no…
cwilcox | December 4, 2010So, I've been totally MIA lately. I want to apologize - I had two major grant application deadlined and my qualifying exams (to keep me in my PhD program) which, with their powers combined, totally ate up my free time. But that's all done, so I'm back, and will be blogging again soon!
cwilcox | November 8, 2010When I first read Brian Switek's blog, I had no idea he was going to write a book. It was long before PepsiGate and before I was even a scibling. Back then, his blog, Laelaps, was still on ScienceBlogs, which is how I happened to stumble across it. I loved it from the first post I read, and instantly added to my Google Reader. His posts were (are!) entertaining, intriguing and well researched. He was among a small handful of science bloggers that I decided I wanted to emulate.
So of course, when I found out he was writing a book, I couldn't help but be excited about it. When the package…
cwilcox | November 5, 2010It's official! The results are in, and thanks to all of you, I came in first place in the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship!
I know I owe a lot of people thanks (all 135,000 some odd of you!), but first and foremost I'd like to thank PZ Myers. Without his support, the outcome would have been very different. So thank you, PZ! Expect some nice things from Hawaii in the mail soon.
As for the rest of you - PZ's hordes, my tweeps, facebook friends, blog followers, and reddit users - I don't know how to thank you. The outpouring of support from the science community has been overwhelming, and I feel…
cwilcox | November 3, 2010I couldn't help but be intrigued that my stiffest competition for winning the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship was a makeup blogger. What is it about cosmetics that is so appealing? Why do people wear makeup, and what might have caused early man to play around with blush and lipstick? Well, like everything else in life, a lot can be explained by science.
Makeup has been around for centuries. The earliest records of makeup use date back to around 3000 BC when ancient Egyptians used soot and other natural products to create their signature look. Evidence suggests that the origins of makeup may go…
cwilcox | November 1, 2010One of the toughest concepts to grasp about evolution is its lack of direction. Take the classic image of the evolution of man, from knuckle-walking ape to strong, smart hunter:
We view this as the natural progression of life. Truth is, there was no guarantee that some big brained primates in Africa would end up like we are now. It wasn't inevitable that we grew taller, less hairy, and smarter than our relatives. And it certainly wasn't guaranteed that single celled bacteria-like critters ended up joining forces into multicellular organisms, eventually leading to big brained primates!…
cwilcox | October 29, 2010So the BBC Earth facebook page has put up a photo album of animal factoids under the Halloween inspired theme of "Trick or Treat?" The idea is that you have to guess whether an animal fact is true or not, then you click to the next photo to see if you were right. Those who have read this blog will immediately understand my frustration when I saw this one:
No, no, no, no, no! Not you, BBC! How many times do I have to explain how sharks do get cancer? That the myth that they don't is a ecologically damaging falsehood causing the slaughter of millions of sharks every year for quack medical…
cwilcox | October 27, 2010Every year, CollegeScholarships.Org offers a $10,000 scholarship for a student blogger. Students can nominate themselves or other blogging students by sending in a why not? and threw my hat into the ring. Well guess what? I made the initial cut, and got chosen as a finalist! But to actually get the scholarship, I need your help. The winner is chosen by popularity, so I need votes, and a lot of them. Please check out the nominees, and if you feel like I'm the best, click the button to go to the voting page and vote for me, Christie Wilcox!
Here's the essay I submitted to get to this stage:…
cwilcox | October 21, 2010Ok, you caught me! This post wasn't originally one of my Evolution series. It was written long before, and published in The Open Laboratory 2008. But it IS a post about evolution, and this week is all about evolution on Observations of a Nerd, so I say it counts!
It seems that you can't have a conversation about evolution that doesn't end with everyone involved feeling frustrated. You can't even mention the word 'evolution' without bringing up a political philippic, religious rant or scientific squabble. Unfortunately, this keeps everyone from the conversations that really matter - of course…
cwilcox | October 20, 2010This is a repost, leading up to another post in the Evolution series. Watching Speciation Occur is the second in my Evolution series which started with The Curious Case of DogsWe saw that the littlest differences can lead to dramatic variations when we looked at the wide variety in dogs. But despite their differences, all breeds of dogs are still the same species as each other and their ancestor. How do species split? What causes speciation? And what evidence do we have that speciation has ever occurred?
Critics of evolution often fall back on the maxim that no one has ever seen one species…
cwilcox | October 19, 2010I'm going to be coming out with a new post in my Evolution series later this week, but in the meantime, for those of you haven't seen them, I'm reposting my first two Evolution posts, beginning with the one that started the series: The Curious Case of Dogs.
Man's best friend is much more than a household companion - for centuries, artificial selection in dogs has made them prime examples of the possibilities of evolution. A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin recognized how the incredibly diverse dogs supported his revolutionary theory in his famous book On The Origin Of Species. At the…
cwilcox | October 17, 2010On November 7th, National Geographic Channel airs the first of a seven-hour spectacle called Great Migrations. The series takes us on the paths of the world's most epic wanderers, from the small and delicate butterflies which travel thousands of miles from Mexico to Canada and back again to the yearly gauntlet of the massive herds of Africa. Here's the trailer:
Having gotten a sneak peak at the upcoming series, I can say with 100% certainty that has outdone my highest expectations, and, I believe, will be seen as one of the best nature mini-series of the year. In the new tradition of…
cwilcox | October 14, 2010So, I may be mostly a lab grunt. But where I work there are all kinds of cool things going on. Like the group that's studying this gorgeous beauty:
cwilcox | October 1, 2010Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are...
Engineering
Acevedo-Whitehouse, K., Rocha-Gosselin, A., & Gendron, D. (2010). A novel non-invasive tool for disease surveillance of free-ranging whales and its relevance to conservation programs Animal Conservation, 13 (2), 217-225 DOI:…
cwilcox | September 29, 2010Recently, I got this e-mail forwarded to me. It started out with the headerWorld shame coast in COSTA RICA
Followed by images like these: and it concluded with the message:Please distribute widely.
The Turtle eggs are stolen to be sold.
The planet is thankful for the forwarding of this email.
The e-mail isn't an isolated incident. A quick internet search will immediately bring up sites like this one, heralding the extinction of sea turtles in Costa Rica due to the illegal harvest of their eggs.
Look, I know it looks bad. Yes, the photos are real and of people taking thousands of sea turtle…
cwilcox | September 28, 2010Tonight's Nat Geo special about the Gulf Oil Spill and its lasting impacts looked interesting enough. Then I recognized the talking lab rat in it: Brian Zielinski, a classmate of mine from undergrad at Eckerd College. So cool, Brian!
But the gulf oil mutagenic? That is not cool.
*Oh, and as my dear friend Allie just pointed out, one of my old professors is in it, too. Hello Dr. Jonathan Cohen! How did I miss that the first time around?