This column was first published at The Conversation on 22 August 2016. It became highly relevant again in late 2018, when ARC Discovery and DECRA funding announcements were put on old by Education Minister Dan Tehan, who wanted a “public…
I find myself thinking a lot about sex robots these days. In this, I am far from alone. Over the last few years, the dolls and toys that people keep in the very darkest recesses of their closets have found…
In light of Brexit, and the United States election campaign that gave us President-elect Donald J Trump, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” its 2016 word of the year. In keeping with the disdain for veracity that it embodies, the word…
I wrote the following in 2012, about a year after my mother, Patricia (Patti) Elaine Brooks died. I revisited it today, on the fifth anniversary of her departure, and it seemed a worthwhile time to share it. Perhaps because I…
How do sex differences arise? Few questions animate as much disagreement and contention, in everyday society and in academic study. For as long as the question has been asked, the answers have fallen between two extremes: sex differences arise innately,…
As if it weren’t hard enough. Being assessed and judged all the time, on our looks, our deeds, our works, the contents of our refrigerators. We are also judged by the company we keep, and in ways that leave me…
Move over Nate Silver! The statistician and author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t may have called 49 out of 50 states right in the 2012 US Presidential election. But today…
Today, millions of very nervous adults are furtively checking sites like “Have I been Pwned” to check if their account details at Ashley Madison have been leaked. Others are checking if their partners or acquaintances had accounts. The hacking and…
What gets you out of bed in the morning? Before morning has broken, and some time before blackbird has spoken, songbirds rise for sex. And a clever new experiment reveals just how important it is for male songbirds not to…
By any metric, Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons article in Science, a copy of his address as 1968 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rates among the most important in the history of ecology.…