Slugs have sex. You probably already knew that. And if you read my last post on banana slugs’ strange sexual appetites, you had the rare opportunity to see a slug penis. So you already know what the organ looks like.
Limax maximus, the leopard slug. (And my hand for scale).
Except you don’t! That was a trick statement. You know what a banana slug’s penis looks like. What about the penis of Limax maxiumus, the leopard slug? Can you picture it?
I’m going to bet 99% of you are picturing something that looks nothing like the real thing. Because the real thing looks nothing like a penis. It looks like a canoe paddle. It looks like a tiny, translucent flower. It looks like a spaceship. In other words, it looks decidedly un-phallic. Continue reading →
I shouldn’t say this. In fact, as someone who covers the field of archaeology for a living, I probably shouldn’t even be thinking this. But I find myself wondering increasingly whether it’s time for some dirt archaeologists to relinquish one of their great pleasures, namely the beloved rite of summer: field season.
I say this as someone who loves the field, albeit in the hit-and-run way that journalists favor. Each summer I look forward to stuffing faded jeans, t-shirts and a couple of pounds of steno pads into an old canvas duffle bag—the bag my husband bought at an army surplus store in Edmonton for $3 in the 1970s—and catching a plane somewhere, nervous, expectant, thrilled to be heading off. Continue reading →
There are a lot of ways to follow the progress of the Curiosity rover as it probes the geological history of Mars. But you could do worse than following one of her drivers, Scott Maxwell, on twitter (@marsroverdriver). Sure, his tweeted celebration of Curiosity’s successful touchdown late Sunday night — “Hey, I still have a job Monday. : D” is a long way from “One small step for a man…” But it’s eloquence of another kind — immediate, funny, and as playfully enthusiastic as a Labrador puppy with a new ball.
During the cold war, we had fighter pilot astronauts. In today’s networked, virtualized world, maybe it’s fitting that our front-line space explorers are Earth-bound joystick jockeys instead. Whatever might be missing in terms of square-jawed swagger is more than compensated for by a knack for humor and emotional presence not often associated with the rocket men of old.
I emailed and tweeted with Maxwell for a story earlier this year, not about the adventures to come with the new probe, but about life at the controls of the previous two. As the Curiosity teams go about testing their systems and preparing to roll out across the Martian surface, it seems like a good time to cast an eye back to some of the successes and heartbreaks of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Continue reading →
I know I’m supposed to be thinking about science, but I can’t stop thinking about bikes. Last month, I was in Copenhagen, and being on a bike there seemed like more fun than it was anywhere else.
Part of it was the bike—the family we exchanged houses with had a cargo trike, complete with a skull design on the cover. Part of it was how protected riding felt—most streets had a bike lane, about as wide as a sidewalk and slightly raised or separated in some other way from the cars.
But if I had to pick just one thing that changed my biking worldview, it was the left turn. Continue reading →
Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make a rogue telephone which he connects to the 1920’s phone lines via a bullwhip wrapped in copper wire; and who leaves school to find an education and thereafter calls himself, after the cooch dancer, Little Egypt.
Various blind young people around the country who, helped by Little Egypt, create a sneaky, free party line through they can talk to each other, usually about sex. Continue reading →
I was wrong. It looks like you can expect a penis every Friday, thanks to the wild popularity of LWON’s Penis Fridays. This week, guest poster Erik Vance tackled dolphin penises. No, he didn’t. But he explained them to us.
In the winter of 1996, I was inducted into the research team at Marine World Africa USA’s Marine Research Center like everybody else – with a clipboard. On it was a list of dolphin behaviors that I would spend the next three months watching. Maternal, aggressive, sexual, feeding, sleeping, etcetera. Of course, my first question was obvious.
“Uh, how do you know if it’s sexual?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” was all I got in return.
So we set to work. The tank I was watching was populated by four adolescent males: Avalon, Norman, Brisbee, and Liberty. It started the first day, just after feeding. The boys were tumbling around, wrestling and nipping at each other when suddenly, what can only be described as a cross between a pink cigar and the baby creature from Alien emerged from Avalon’s pelvis. Continue reading →
On April 17, 1997, Bill and Hillary Clinton organized a one-day meeting with a long and lofty title: The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children.
The meeting featured eight-minute presentations from experts in public policy, education and child development, and one neuroscientist. They discussed, among other things, how 6-month-old infants learn to discriminate the sounds of their native language, and how, if a kitten’s eye is patched during early development — and therefore deprived of light inputs — it will go permanently blind in that eye, even after the patch comes off. The First Lady gave the gist of the meeting in her opening remarks: The first three years of life, she reportedly said, “can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves.”
Behind the hyperbole of that statement is an important idea based in solid science. The first few years of life are a “critical period” for brain development, during which experiences — strong parental attachments, exposure to written and spoken language, social interactions — sculpt brain circuits in a way that’s difficult to un-sculpt. When a developing brain isn’t adequately stimulated, as often happens to children living in poverty, for example, or in the foster care system, this deprivation can lead to problems in cognition, attention and social behaviors. Continue reading →
