One of the things you have to do when you're on sabbatical in a city like London, is make sure you take advantage of your travel opportunities. For my family,… Read the rest of the article: How not to go crazy traveling with young children

In light of World AIDS Day, I'd thought I'd post a little bit about Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's a student run… Read the rest of the article: Students doing right by making medicine accessible to the developing world.

This poster and the two others below (after the jump) are things of beauty. Best of all, if you think the trilogy posters are awesome, then you could easily spend… Read the rest of the article: Star Wars posters by Tom Whalen

If a Society for the Preservation of Unicorns1 were to put out commentary or a press release about important but largely unreported UN biodiversity meetings, I'd imagine it would go… Read the rest of the article: The Nagoya Protocol: the first step towards saving the endangered Unicorn?

LATEST: The Candy Hierarchy has been updated for 2012. With Halloween approaching, I thought it would be amusing to write a bit about candy, or more specifically, a system that… Read the rest of the article: The Candy Hierarchy

So this Nagoya COP10 conference is coming up in a week, and at these events what tends to happen is that all the delegates will receive a "swag bag' of… Read the rest of the article: My virtual swag bag for biodiversity and Nagoya COP10 includes Zhu Zhu pets.

Not much information about it, except that the furry stuff does appear to be hair. Current hypotheses involve something to do with a lion hairball that may have been blown… Read the rest of the article: Do you know what this is? (Pretty sure it's not a Tribble)

This is a continuation from this post about crowd sourcing humour writing. There were many great suggestions, some of which were almost complete pieces in themselves (especially this one from… Read the rest of the article: Chapter Titles from my Unicorn Physics Textbook

Phylomon cards: "EUROPEAN HONEY BEE, I CHOOSE YOU!" I had a great experience here at Boing Boing, and want to send on a big thanks to Mark, Cory, Xeni, David,… Read the rest of the article: Thanks for reading and "May the scientific method always be with you."

Continuing from: Nagoya COP10 Primer #1: with references to Star Wars Nagoya COP10 Primer #2: with a reference to Kevin Bacon Nagoya COP10 sidebar: UNFCCC YOU! Nagoya COP10 Primer #3:… Read the rest of the article: Nagoya COP10 Primer #4: with reference to Twitter

Plate 73 of the John Reeves Collection of Zoological Drawings from Canton, China, 1774-1856. (© The Natural History Museum, London). Reeves was an English tea inspector, but also amassed a… Read the rest of the article: Art, nature, the history of science, and whoa, aren't these beautiful?

Photo: Tom Goskar. Used with permission. So far, it's been a very interesting experience in the month and a bit into my sabbatical at London's Natural History Museum. First off,… Read the rest of the article: Why natural history museum collections rock!

Take a look at this art project entitled, "Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven" In the sought-after London boroughs of Chelsea and Islington, inner city birds often have to… Read the rest of the article: Chic apartments for London birds

Illustrations by James Hance, used with permission. I'm surprised I didn't catch this earlier, but James Hance has recently released a series of lovely images. Here, he re-imagines Han Solo… Read the rest of the article: Chewbacca, Han Solo and R2D2 drawn as if part of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh

(Continuing on from previous primers: 1. Star Wars | 2. Kevin Bacon) O.K. now on to business… Here are the Convention on Biological Diversity's three basic objectives: 1. The conservation… Read the rest of the article: Nagoya COP10 Primer #3: with a small reference to LOL cats

In case you missed it, here is the set up. And from the comments from that previous post, there were many great titles. Some lend themselves more to an essay… Read the rest of the article: Can crowdsourcing produce funny humor pieces? The next step

A couple years ago The Science Creative Quarterly started asking for phylogenetic haiku: or poetry of the 5-7-5 form that focused on a specific organism. We actually have hundreds of… Read the rest of the article: Neglected organisms haiku

When I meet other scientist types, this can be one of the most interesting questions to throw out there. We can use mine as an example. I did my grad… Read the rest of the article: Question: How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked?

To promote a student conference, here is a little video I made recently: p.s. If you're a student and at the University of British Columbia, you should totally check out… Read the rest of the article: How to get a lecture hall full of people to make Chewbacca sounds

Just so that we don't forget that in the area of biodiversity, microbes do indeed rule the Earth, Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science does a great job… Read the rest of the article: Hail the mighty microbe! Bacteria on hand at the Deepwater