It’s Cloudina hartmannae! The genus is named for the legendary paleontologist Preston Cloud Jr. (1912–1991), a pioneer in the study of the Precambrian, while the species is named for the polychaete specialist Olga Hartman (1900–1974). As Andrew H. Knoll writes in Life on a Young…
A well-rounded selection of articles this week, with research findings from evolution, climate change, and education. Enjoy! Exquisitely Detailed 520 Million-Year-Old Fossil Shows Individual Nerves, The Washington Post, March 1, 2016 — Submitted by regular reader Steve Bowden,…
Again with the enigmatic fossils from the Ediacaran! Well, I guess that it’s true what they say: you can take the boy out of the Ediacaran, but you can’t take the Ediacaran out of the boy. (Isn’t that what they say?) In any case, fame and fortune—for suitably small values of fame and fortune—will…
NCSE is pleased to congratulate Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") for receiving the National NASA Space Grant Distinguished Service Award for 2016. The award "was established to recognize individuals whose life and career have had a long[-]lasting impact in a science, engineering or education field…
If you’re a member of NCSE (and if you’re not, why not? You can join our mission here), you recently found in your mailbox the entirely redesigned Reports of the National Center for Science Education (affectionately known as RNCSE). I thought you might like to know the…
Over a recent weekend I was reading Paul Fatout’s Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Lexicographer (1951), a rather dated but still readable biography of the American journalist remembered for his macabre short stories and the compilation of satirical definitions acknowledged in Fatout’s…
Have you ever heard about ocean acidification? I first learned about this problem a few years ago from a marine biologist friend of mine, who told me she was starting to see damage to the shells of some of the smaller organisms she surveys. Since then, of course, I feel like I hear about it all…
NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education is now available on-line. The issue — volume 36, number 1 — is the first issue in the newsletter's new, streamlined, and full-color format. Featured are "Willing to Fight,"…
In November 2009, the climate research community was hit by a hurricane: a cache of thousands of personal e-mails was released, with passages wrenched out of context to make climate science seem petty, insular, and unscientific. At Penn State, where I was in my second year as a Ph.D. student, “…