Evolution
Malaria parasite present as early as 100 million years ago? Hung on ever since?
Evolution: Clocks vs. rocks – if clocks win, what does it mean for plants?
Late Cretaceous fossil find is 60 million year old shrew-like mammal
Apparently, archaeopteryx has been restored as “first bird” again. Maybe.
Why spiders know what you are doing and you don’t know how they do
How woodpeckers avoid brain injury
Cells as not just a bag of chemicals
Here.
Are Darwin’s American tribe having a collective nutout or what?
Evolution book sale from Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press
Here. About their usefulness, we don’t know. But maybe it’s now within budget.
An interesting PLOS paper in information evolution in animals
Here. Author summary: Intelligent behavior encompasses appropriate navigation in complex environments that is achieved through the integration of sensorial information and memory of past events to create purposeful movement. This behavior is often described as “complex”, but universal ways to quantify such a notion do not exist. Promising candidates for measures of functional complexity are based on information theory, but fail to take into account the important role that memory plays in complex navigation. Here, we study a different information-theoretic measure called “integrated information”, and investigate its ability to reflect the complexity of navigation that uses both sensory data and memory. We suggest that measures based on the integrated-information concept correlate better with fitness than other standard measures when memory Read More ›
Mysteries of the deep sea: Gigantic cells play host to multicellular organisms
A 4-minute teaser of the Programming of Life vid
Here, 4 min, if you can’t make time for the 45 min version: Follow UD News at Twitter!