Travels of a Fish Nut

I can’t remember the first time I heard about the Lord Howe Island stick insect, and I can’t say my interest has been much more than in passing. They would pique my interest when I saw them in the news, only to fade back into the vast and ever growing pile of ‘oh, interesting’. Then, at the beginning of November, I actually got to come face to face with one of these creatures and it was so incredible I decided to find out more. This is what I’ve learned… Lord Howe Island stick insects are - I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn - found on Lord Howe Island. This is a small crescent-shaped island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. I didn’t realise until researching this piece that the island is actually inhabited. It has a population of 382 people according to the 2011 census . The Lord Howe Island stick insect ( Dryococelus australis ), or LHISI as it’s known to friends, was first described by Xavier Montrouzier in 1855 from specimens collected by the HMS Hera...

I was perusing the news over lunch today when this article caught my eye (I can't imagine why!), I had a read and my eyes began to involuntarily roll. This was another of those terrible evo-psych papers I've written about in the past , wasn’t it? After having read the paper the article is based on, and after rescuing my eyes after they fell out of my head and onto the floor from rolling so much, I regret to inform you that yes, it is. The basic set up for the research is that they have a series of photos of men and they ask people to judge the strength of the man in the photo based on the physique of his torso and rate his attractiveness. (I'll get to the 'why' later). The first thing to note is that it's all a bit of a mess. I will try and be brief with the explanation of the method as I know it's incredibly tedious to read, but it really has to be seen to be believed. They have two separate sets of photos, both taken from prior research. The f...

A year ago today I stepped foot on the campus at Curtin university for the first time. I don't know where the time has gone - how can it really be a year?! It's been a pleasant surprise - especially given how my last attempt at a PhD went - to realise how much I'm enjoying myself. I'm making slow but steady progress; I even have data which is quite incredible! All this means that I have some idea of what I'm actually doing and to preempt the traditional 'what are you working on?' questions when I next come home I thought I'd take the time to explain just that. I'm working on two projects which I've nicknamed 'fisheries' and 'fossils' as I'm really unimaginative. In this post I'll talk about the fisheries project as it's the one I've been working on most so far and I've written a lot more than I expected so think this is better off as a two-parter.  'Fisheries' The 'fisheries' proje...

Summary of the Bristol Festival of Ideas/MRC ICU talk by Carol Brayne , Director of the Cambridge Institute for Public Health titled “ Challenging the ‘Dementia Tsunami’ “.  It’s pretty much common knowledge that life expectancy is increasing. This is in large part due to improvements in child health which means that more and more children survive into adulthood. But even for those who reached adulthood, living into dotage was an uncommon occurrence until relatively recently. Unfortunately, by fixing the health problems of the young we are finding that there are a myriad of health problems in the old - you win some, you lose some.

Has human evolution been influenced by our tendency to fight? If you’ve read the science headlines in recent days you would be forgiven for thinking so. Headlines such as “ The human face developed over 5m years of fisticuffs, scientists claim ” and “ Male faces 'buttressed against punches' by evolution ” have been proclaiming to the world that violence has literally shaped the evolution of our faces. But has it really?