Editors' Picks

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One of my primary goals for this blog is to reinforce, strongly and frequently, the notion of neuropsychological humility – the understanding that our perceptions and memories are deeply flawed and biased. There appears to be almost no limit to the extent to which people can deceive themselves into believing bizarre things. Psychologists have documented [...]

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How The Platypus And A Quarter Of Fishes Lost Their Stomachs

The platypus is an anthology of weirdness. It has a leathery duck-like bill, a flattened tail and webbed …

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Staph Bacteria Turns the Immune System Against Itself

Staph bacteria achieve their immense success by hijacking a primary immune defense mechanism.

Thammavongsa V., Missiakas D.M. & Schneewind O. (2013). Staphylococcus aureus Degrades Neutrophil Extracellular Traps to Promote Immune Cell Death, Science, 342 (6160) 863-866. DOI: 10.1126/science.1242255

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Book review: Practical Data Analysis

Many people have drawn Venn diagrams to locate machine learning and related ideas in the intellectual landscape. Drew Conway’s diagram may have been the first. It has at least been frequently referenced. By this classification, Hector Cuesta’s new book Practical…Read more ›

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Black Fly Day

It seems, today, that there is a lot of hype about Black Friday. I'm not sure why 'cause everyone should know the real event is Black Fly Day. It's a thing, especially among entomologists. Black Fly Day is to be credited to my friend and colleague, Doug Currie: he works at the Royal Ontario Museum, studying flies in the family Simuliidae, otherwise known as Black Flies. These are infamous flies in many parts of the world, mostly because of this

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Promiscuous female chickens choose who fathers their children... after sex

Sex is not much fun for female chickens. Even though they are likely to have many partners, female chickens have little choice over with whom they mate. On top of this, male chickens are anything but picky and will copulate with whoever comes their way, including their sisters. But female chickens can still have the last squawk—instead of choosing a partner, they select the sperm that fertilises their eggs.Male and female red jungle fows (Gallus gallus)It’s easy to understand why […]

Lovlie H., Gillingham M.A.F., Worley K., Pizzari T. & Richardson D.S. (2013). Cryptic female choice favours sperm from major histocompatibility complex-dissimilar males, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280 (1769) 20131296-20131296. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1296

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Leaky mice guts, bacteria and autism (part 2)

So, leaky gut, the gut microbiota and the immune system in relation to autism then? Maybe not so 'on the fringe' as you might have thought.Readers are asked to consider this entry an extension of the post I published last year (see here) talking about some very interesting research coming out of the laboratory of Prof. Paul Patterson at CalTech. If you need any sort of background, Prof. Patterson and his team have for quite a while been investigating the concept of maternal immune activation […]

Elaine Y. Hsiao, Sara W. McBride, Sophia Hsien, Gil Sharon, Embriette R. Hyde, Tyler McCue, Julian A. Codelli, Janet Chow, Sarah E. Reisman, Joseph F. Petrosino & Paul H. Pattersons (2013). Microbiota Modulate Behavioral and Physiological Abnormalities Associated with Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.11.024

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Dispersants Used in Deepwater Horizon Clean Up Less Harmful Than Predicted

According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) around seven million liters of dispersants were used to combat oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico. Back in October, we reported on a study of the long-term Gulf oil spill effects on coastal marine life. Now, researchers from the Queen’s University at Kingston say that dispersants may not be as harmful to fish as first thought. Read more »

Adams J., Sweezey M. & Hodson P.V. (2013). Oil and oil dispersant do not cause synergistic toxicity to fish embryos., Environmental toxicology and chemistry / SETAC, PMID: 24115182

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New Way to Sustain Controlled Fusion Reactions Found

A multinational team led by Chinese researchers in collaboration with U.S. and European partners has successfully demonstrated a new method for suppressing instabilities that can cut short the life of controlled fusion reactions. Read more »

J. Li, H.Y. Guo, B.N. Wan, X.Z. Gong, Y.F. Liang, G.S. Xu, K.F. Gan, J.S. Hu, H.Q. Wang, L. Wang, L. Zeng, Y.P. Zhao, P. Denner, G.L. Jackson, A. Loarte, R. Maingi, J.E. Menard, M. Rack, X.L. Zou (2013). A long-pulse high-confinement plasma regime in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, Nature Physics, 817-821. DOI: 10.1038/nphys2795

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Leaping Land Fish Has Perfect Camouflage, Is Not a Hoax

You might never spot them if not for the jumping. On the coast of Guam, Pacific leaping blennies blend in perfectly with the rocks they live on, their limbless bodies maintaining a sleek profile. But the creatures give themselves away when they coil their tails to one side and shoot like a spring from rock to rock. These unsettling animals are fish that live on land. How they pull it off could give us hints about the evolution of our first earthbound ancestors.Terry Ord, an evolutionary […]

Courtney L. Morgans & Terry J. Ord (2013). Natural selection in novel environments: predation selects for background matching in the body colour of a land fish., Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.09.027

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The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads

Studying the ways people talk to themselves in their own minds is incredibly tricky because as soon as you ask them about it, you're likely interfering with the process you want to investigate. As William James said, some forms of introspective analysis are like "… trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."For many years Russell Hurlbert and his colleagues have used a technique that they believe offers the best way to study what they call "pristine" inner […]

Hurlburt RT, Heavey CL & Kelsey JM (2013). Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking., Consciousness and cognition, 22 (4) 1477-94. PMID: 24184987

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Atheism, Openness to Experience and Dogmatism: A Puzzling Relationship

Dogmatism has usually been related in research to low levels of openness to experience, a personality dimension associated with interest in new and non-traditional ideas. Dogmatism has mostly been studied in relation to religious beliefs but some recent research has looked at dogmatism among non-religious people. One surprising finding was that among self-identified atheists, higher levels of openness to experience were actually associated with greater dogmatism, contrary to the usual pattern. […]

Gurney, D. J., McKeown, S., Churchyard, J. & Howlett, N. (2013). Believe it or not: Exploring the relationship between dogmatism and openness within non-religious samples, Personality and Individual Differences, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2013.07.471

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‘Co-Catalyst’ System Makes Synthetic Gasoline Production Cheaper

A chemical system developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago can efficiently perform the first step in the process of producing synthetic gasoline, and other similar fuels out of CO2. Read more »

Kumar B., Asadi M., Pisasale D., Sinha-Ray S., Rosen B.A., Haasch R., Abiade J., Yarin A.L. & Salehi-Khojin A. (2013). Renewable and metal-free carbon nanofibre catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction., Nature communications, 4 2819. PMID: 24292103

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Unstable Ceria Can Convert Solar Energy Into Hydrogen

A team of scientists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has successfully increased the reactivity of the ceramic material—ceria—a million fold. One possible application is solar concentrators used to convert solar energy into hydrogen. Read more »

Vincenzo Esposito, De Wei Ni, Zeming He, Wei Zhang, Aditya Shanker Prasad, Julie A. Glasscock, Christodoulos Chatzichristodoulou, Severine Ramousse, Andreas Kaiser (2013). Enhanced mass diffusion phenomena in highly defective doped ceria, Acta Materialia, 61 (16) 6290-6300. DOI: 10.1016/j.actamat.2013.07.012

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New means to grow and coax intestinal stem cells

Near homogenous culture of intestinal stem cellsFor patients with gastrointestinal disorders, like ulcers or Crohn's disease, treatment often means quelling uncomfortable symptoms through medications or dietary changes.But what if one day treatment meant doing away with the old gut and getting a new one, free of inflamed or diseased tissues?That is where scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are hoping their new study findings […]

Yin X, Farin HF, van Es JH, Clevers H, Langer R & Karp JM (2013). Niche-independent high-purity cultures of Lgr5+ intestinal stem cells and their progeny., Nature methods, PMID: 24292484

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