The Chronicle of Higher Education is a tabloid that few outside the academy will have heard of, and fewer insider the academy actually read than might be indicated by its ubiquity in campus administrative offices. It becomes relevant to many new or nearing completion PhDs because it contains employment ads. While the image conjured up… [Read more…]
August 27, 2011
I have been waiting to see how long it would take the mainstream press to make the obvious joke about news the New York Times recently reported, that a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable… [Read more…]
July 8, 2011
“Any doctor who saw how even experienced female athletes collapsed and were lying on the ground after the race could not support this kind of athletic competition for women.” Norwegian historian Kerstin Bornholdt cites this statement, by a German doctor, H. Franzmeyer, reacting to what he saw as the unsuitable participation by women in the… [Read more…]
April 2, 2011
Just back from the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, where I had the pleasure of being a discussant on a session organized by Sabrina Agarwal and Julie Wesp. Since my comments run to 2200 words, no way to post them and no point either– who would read them? But here are some… [Read more…]
March 10, 2011
Nature‘s editors and authors tried, they really tried, titling the report published yesterday “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits”. But from the earliest news report I can find (yesterday on Science 2.0, titled “Why Your Penis Has no Spine”) through to the raft of articles today, reporters have had their… [Read more…]
January 26, 2011
The past was not full of homogeneous towns. People in the past were not uniform in their cultures, their sexualities, or their subjective experiences. If I have one goal in my teaching– one goal in my writing– it would be to get that point across, so that finding difference in past populations would be expected,… [Read more…]
November 20, 2010
(with apologies to the popular revolt against the TSA…) 348 articles, and counting. And that’s just the English language press… Google News reports at least 74 articles in Italian and another 50 in French. That’s how much news coverage Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has received for his decision to have a statue of Mars… [Read more…]
August 28, 2010
Science News and Discovery both have publicized a new theory about Ötzi, the famous “iceman” found in the Alps, published in Antiquity. Instead of dying alone after fleeing the person who shot an arrow in his shoulder, researchers now suggest that the body was found downhill from its original burial site, on a formal stone… [Read more…]
July 30, 2010
“She peeks out of the picture as a short, spry-looking woman with slightly graying hair”. This is how the AP described the widely reported reconstruction based on the 10,000 year old skeleton of a woman, recovered by archaeologists in northeastern Yucatan, Mexico. As I read the multiple news stories and blog posts inspired by the… [Read more…]
July 7, 2010
Prehistoric man apparently boasted a rock-hard body, including an overdeveloped right arm that would make Popeye jealous. Olive Oyl,your hero is waiting… The best line in this New York Daily News story is this: Simply put, the Neanderthal body was brimming with natural steroids. Really? add a gratuitous reference to “girlie-men”, and the story itself… [Read more…]
May 4, 2012
2