strange behaviors

  Fruitflies doing the business (Illustration: Aya Takahashi) By Richard Conniff It looked like a penis, only smaller Oh, and with claws on the sides.  The carcass, a monkey-like species called...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/04/11/down-there-part-1-making-sense-of-amazing-genitalia/

The great primatologist Frans de Waal died last week, of stomach cancer, to the great sadness of his many admirers, myself among them.  His radically different view of primate behavior, and his ...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/03/21/frans-de-waal-changed-how-we-think-about-animals-ourselves-included/

by Richard Conniff The PBS/Channel 13 show “The Open Mind” has just aired its interview with me about my book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. You can take check out the ...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/time-to-get-serious-about-public-health/

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed th...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/02/13/big-bad-very-very-toothy-a-sharks-tale/

By Richard Conniff This article is excerpted and adapted from “Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (The MIT Press) It’s almost impossible now, thank God, to imagine the sq...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/02/01/the-forgotten-reformer-who-made-cities-livable/

by Richard Conniff I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/01/30/watch-out-steven-curry-moths-have-hand-eye-coordination-too/

by Richard Conniff It’s a dreary Sunday dawn here in Connecticut, 38 degrees (about 3 degrees Celsius), with rain pouring down, as it has been pouring down for much of the week. In a better wor...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/01/28/pining-for-winter-in-new-england/

By Richard Conniff Fakes are surprisingly common in the history of species discovery. For all the painstaking realism of his bird paintings, for instance, James John Audubon was a gleeful produ...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2024/01/22/when-even-the-animals-are-fake-news/

By Richard Conniff/The New York Times There was a time not so long ago when preventing epidemic disease was a cause ordinary people embraced and celebrated. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt c...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/we-thought-wed-beat-these-three-diseases-nows-the-time-to-finally-stop-them/

My new book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion (MIT Press), is a 2023 selection of the Next Big Idea Club, which writes: Richard Conniff is an award-winning nonfiction writer. ...

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2023/07/05/the-next-big-idea-club-picks-ending-epidemics/