Your ancient Greek-Latin binomial for the day is hyperemesis gravidarium. HG for short. It’s a particularly extreme form or pregnancy sickness (or morning sickness). Brought to you today by Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalised yesterday with the…
Evolutionary psychologists get a bad rap. I should not be surprised, really. They probe motivations for human behaviour that often exist far beneath conscious thought and the sanitised stories people tell themselves about why they do what they do. Some…
Family life just got even more interesting. Just in time for Christmas, too! Families bustle with the push and pull of conflict and cooperation. But just how profoundly in the end do family members effect one another in the only…
I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory,…
Sydney (CNN) — In the mid-19th Century, two devastating floods of the Yellow River, and the famine that followed, ravaged northeastern China. Outlaw bands, known as nien, attracted young men in unprecedented numbers, aggregating into militias that wrought chaos on the…
I am unexpectedly moved this morning by the news that Mitch Lucker has died following a Halloween motorcycle accident. Mitch Lucker (1984-2012) performing with Suicide Silence Supkowski on Flickr Mitch was the “vocalist” for the American metal band…
Why do humans tend to live such a long time? Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, can last into their mid forties in the wild. Yet somewhere in the last six million years, human lifespans have lengthened dramatically, so that living…
Watching the US Presidential election from afar feels a bit like watching reality television. It seems interminable and very little of what the characters say seems to make sense. On that front, at least, Tuesday night’s second debate between Barack…
I couldn’t help but be captivated by Prime Minister Gillard’s speech against the motion to remove Peter Slipper as Speaker of the Federal Parliament yesterday. Like the majority of people I tend to follow on social media, I…
I should admit straight up that I’m no fan of cats. Like any zoologist I treasure the rare glimpses I have had of lions, leopards, serval and even ocelot. But I have never understood the devotion of so many seemingly-rational…