Saturn!
My Grandpa-in-law gave me a hand-me-down Celestron telescope a few months ago, and despite the city lights of Toronto, I've been able to spot a few things up there in them thar heavens.

My wife and I finally went out and got an adaptor to hook our camera up to the telescope, and this picture of Saturn is the result. It's not the nicest photo of Saturn on the internet, but ours and I love it.

Riskin's Business: Lost Keys (5:23)
What happens in your brain when you can't find your keys? I talk with cognitive scientist Grayden Solman, who explains how it's possible for your brain to know you've found your keys before you know where they are.

In a study, Solman had subjects play a video game kind of like Mahjong, where they click and drag shapes out of a pile while they look for a target shape. In some trials, a subject picked up the target they were looking for, but tossed it aside and kept looking, not realizing they'd handled the target shape. Solman found in those cases that the speed with which a subject continued looking was less than their speed before they made the mistake. That suggests that part of the brain saw it go by, and slowed things down to give the other parts of the brain time to realize it.

In other words, your brain can know things that you don't realize you know.

Solman's research was published in the journal Cognition.

My 5th time on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Sasquatches, Snub-nosed monkeys, and Hectocotyli.

My 4th time on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Quantum physics, Nobel prizes in literature, and of course... Sneaker Males.

Video of me catching Chinese Bats
One of the first segments we showed on Daily Planet this season was the China Bat trip. You can see it here!

We hiked up a zillion steps to the top of this mountain, past the Buddhist temples, and into a cave that had a bunch of bats in it. At night, we set a net across the cave mouth and caught bats as they emerged. The largest of the bats we caught that night were these guys, Chinese fishing bats, Myotis ricketti. They have big feet, similar to those of Noctilio, which they use to gaffe fish.

For some reason, all the bats of this species that we caught seemed to be balding on top. I don't know whether that's just normal for this species, or if there's some kind of weird balding disease in that particular cave.

New Season of Daily Planet
This should give you a taste for what the show's going to be like this season.

Jinan, China
I'm in Jinan, China for a Daily Planet segment on bats. We're vising the lab of Rolf Müller. So far we've seen plenty of bat species, of which I've been able to identify two: The Chinese fishing bat Myotis ricketti, and the least horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pumilus. Those make species number 106 and 107 on my life list. We should be showing footage from this trip in the first week of Daily Planet's new season, which starts August 29th.

New Job!
Started my new job today... August 29th will be my first full show.

Belize 2011
I just got back from a week in Belize, chasing bats with a bunch of my colleagues.

I was on Craig Ferguson Again!
We talked about things like Walrus penises. You know, Science!

I was there to promote a new Animal Planet show called Killer Outbreaks, about viruses and bacteria and the scientists that keep them at bay.