In a "statement of research" essay for a grad school, fellowship, etc. application, is it appropriate to have a short lit cited? For example: "we are becoming more aware that x is important in understanding y (Doe et al. 2010), so I will include an examination of x in my research on y and z" or "collaborators and I have used new technologies in ( Read more... )

Amazing lab-inspired Gaga costumes and hilarious lyrics. I tried to write my favorite line, but I can't chose one. They're all great.

My migratory bird day events went very well - thanks for all the ideas! The kids were very into the bird specimens - they loved touching them, and comparing how the roadrunner's feather felt with the duck feathers. Everyone was awed by the little male Broad-tailed Hummingbird specimen, with his gorgeous iridescent purple-pink throat. I had a ( Read more... )

I'm working the bird life history project I mentioned before. As I add to the dataset, I'm using the fantastic series Handbook of Birds of the World to find information on feeding and breeding behaviors. To find the relevant data, I often end up skimming longer sections of text, and stumble upon fascinating but useless (for me, right now) ( Read more... )

Fossils from Abaco were featured in a Nat Geo / Nova special on pbs a couple nights ago (here's the pbs description; you can watch it online). It was incredible to see the people I've worked with, the bones I've held in my hands, and the places I visited on national television. Only a handful of people have touched those fossils, and I am one of ( Read more... )

The World's Biggest Snake - The Top 10 Everything of 2009 - TIMEThe article talks about how when they first found the bones, they thought it was a crocodile. Yeah, Alex was the one who first realized it wasn't a crocodile, and his labmate figured out it was a snake ( Read more... )

I'm beginning to realize that perhaps my frustrations with getting my first 1st-author manuscript ready for submission aren't unique. I'm not sure why I thought they were - chalk it up to me thinking that my ability to screw up surpasses that of others ( Read more... )

Thanks for all your support lately. I'm doing well. The motivation comes and goes, but I have been reminded lately why it is that I want to do what I'm doing.

Have I mentioned that my favorite day of the week here is Friday? It's not because it's the start of the weekend, but rather because I spend all day in the prep room skinning birds with ( Read more... )

I've been working on a side project on some bird fossils from the site in the Bahamas I went to over spring break. These bones are amazing. I'm holding in my hand the ulna (wing bone) of a meadowlark that lived 2,000 years ago. I can see each point where a secondary (flight feather of the wing) attached. On many of the other bones, I can see ( Read more... )

My friends/labmates just published a paper in PNAS demonstrating, for the first published time in a non-lab setting, that wild birds recognize individual people. What's incredible is that they do so after only 2 30-second exposures to a person, and they pick the person out from among the ~15,000 people walking by their nest each day. They think ( Read more... )