loldarwin

You either get it or you don’t. I can’t help you. They can.

now on nature network

I’ll be mirroring “culture evolves!” over at Nature Network from today. Everything will still be here (I didn’t spend hours on that banner for nothing!) as it’s an experimental move on my part. I think that if Nature Network is successful in its bid to become the social networking site for scientists it’ll be a good thing, but for now I think it’s still being treated with caution. Lots of sign-ups and not much activity.

So go! Sign up and join groups and leave comments… and stuff. Especially you social scientists! Get in there with the crystallographers and yeast genomics people. Let there be more participants with “evolution” in their tags. Or anthropology. Or culture that isn’t in a petri dish.

Not that I have anything against petri dishes.

“smoking” rooks: more proof that corvidae will take over the world

I saw this in the Metro this morning but the Telegraph article is virtually the same:

Rooks have been spotted swooping on to the tracks at Exeter St David’s railway station in Devon and placing their wings over the smoke to collect the fumes underneath.

Hee. It’s no news that rooks, ravens and crows are the intellectual heavyweights of the bird world. Crows especially are innovative tool users. Smoking out parasites seems to be a pretty clever trick – if indeed that’s what this one is doing. Of course, it could just be a delinquent juvenile having a sneaky puff. If it starts to bring its mates along I’ll be really impressed.