A year ago the European Union launched a campaign to attract more young women into the scientific professions. In Europe, women lag behind men in science and engineering, making up only a third of science researchers. But the video the EU made was laughable.
You may recall.

Read Open Culture long enough, and sooner or later you’ll encounter “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman, the Canadian MC whose rhyming subjects of choice include evolution, The Canterbury Tales, and British versus Canadian English.

Mother’s Day can elicit complicated emotions in the human animal. Not so Mother Hamster. While you were out to brunch, she was matter-of-factly devouring the runtiest of her litter. And not because he failed to present her with a bouquet and flowery card.

So much has been written about hand-written letters, mostly lamenting their death.

The Earth is losing life forms at a disturbing rate. The biologist Edward O. Wilson has estimated that at least 27,000 species per year are disappearing from our planet. That’s an average of 74 species a day, or three every hour.

Once upon a time, the larvae of the Caddis Fly were considered pretty unassuming creatures, freshwater dwellers whose appeal was limited to trout and trout fishermen. That is until French artist Hubert Duprat came along with an aesthetic offer they couldn’t refuse.

edX announced today what looks like a promising new open course — Introduction to Biology: The Secret of Life. Hosted by professor Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, this course will give students a grounding in “topics taught in the MIT introductory biology courses and many biology courses across the world.

Ornithologists and bird watchers rejoice. After a dozen years, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library has fully digitized its nearly 150,000 audio recordings (a total running time of 7,513 hours), representing close to 9,000 different species, such as the very unsettling-sounding Barred Owl (above).

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has, over the past decade or so, grown closely associated in the public mind with atheism, and specifically with the cause of taking down creationism.

Every day, inside our body, there is a war going on. Microscopic invaders of one kind or another try to make a meal of us, and our immune system fights back, seeking out the invaders and destroying them.