There are camels, at least seven of them, in one of the vacant lots adjacent to the Institute. These (the lots, not the camels) are gener...

People of higher educational attainment live longer. This is widely known. Somewhat less widely known is just how far up the attainment lad...

Last September, a group of scientists in Italy got some strange results that made headlines around the world. Their results suggested that...

A group of academics (psychologists, ethicist, biologists etc.) have recently endorsed a statement arguing that dolphins and whales do des...

I am supervising/mentoring/collaborating with two post-doctoral researchers (a.k.a. postdocs), and greatly enjoying the process. They are...

Certain relatives of mine cling to the fantasy that I will be able to decide where I get a job, so as to live within a few miles of them. W...

Round about this time of year I usually start making a list in my head of all the reasons I should probably not live in northern Germany ...

When I was but a lad, my siblings and I used to accuse my father of knowing everything, a charge he would always deny, observing that even...

Projections of future carbon-dioxide emissions are complicated. How will energy consumption habits change as societies get richer or more ur...

I don't have a taxonomic specialization, and I'm happy with that. I've worked with or dug deeply in to the literature on hardwoo...

One of our laws in the U.S. requires that federal paperwork that people have to fill out be a bit longer than necessary in order to in...

Arabadopsis Bufo Caenorhabditis Drosophila Escherichia Felis Gallus Hydra I J Klebsiella Loligo Mus Neurospora ...

They say that the distance in inches between an alligator's eyes and its nostrils is equal to the length of the whole animal in feet. Th...

I'm writing a paper with two of my students. Well, I'm writing it with one of them and another one did a lot of work on the st...

Retirement communities are, by design, fairly sterile places. Much of south Florida is covered in huge gated spreads of nearly identic...

When I start working on a project, it is always interesting and exciting, otherwise I wouldn't start working on it. Developing ideas is ...

Different fields of science often don't talk to each other, even when coming at the same problem from different angles. A stark example ...

The field of life-history evolution, into which the stuff I do roughly fits, spends a lot of time thinking about optimality. What is the opt...

Rostock Zoo, Oct, 2011 I like zoo photography. Click the caiman to see the slideshow.

The Rostock main train station (Hauptbahnhof, Hbf) is an easy walk from our building, even when bedangled with a laptop bag, poster tube and...