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From ScienceDaily: Brain size and complexity vary enormously across vertebrates, but it is not clear how these differences came about. Humans and frogs, for example, have been evolving separately for 350 million years and have very different brain abilities. Yet scientists have shown that they use a remarkably similar repertoire of genes to build organs in the body. The key lays in the process that Blencowe’s group studies, known as alternative splicing (AS), whereby gene products are assembled into proteins, which are the building blocks of life. During AS, gene fragments — called exons — are shuffled to make different protein shapes. It’s like LEGO, where some fragments can be missing from the final protein shape. AS enables cells to Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Giant ‘sea scorpion’ fossil discovered The fossil of a previously unknown species of ‘sea scorpion’, measuring over 1.5 meters long, has been discovered in Iowa, USA, and described in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. Dating back 460 million years, it is the oldest known species of eurypterid (sea scorpion) – extinct monster-like predators that swam the seas in ancient times and are related to modern arachnids. Lead author, James Lamsdell from Yale University, USA, said: “The new species is incredibly bizarre. The shape of the paddle – the leg which it would use to swim – is unique, as is the shape of the head. It’s also big – over a meter and a half long!” Read More ›

Further to the recent announcement of philosopher of biology Will Provine’s passing, here were many fields to which he contributed. With a colleague, he did a most interesting study of evolutionary biologists, 78% of whom he described as pure naturalist atheists like himself. Some of his many reflections on the true meaning of the Darwinism he espoused: Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate Read More ›

Here: Pioneer behind controversial PubPeer site reveals his identity Since launching in 2012, the website PubPeer has become a hub for post-publication peer review — often via anonymous posts. More than 35,000 comments have been posted so far and in the process the site has become a vehicle for making allegations of misconduct, and has even attracted a lawsuit. One of the site’s previously anonymous founders has now revealed his identity — Brandon Stell, a neuroscientist at the French national science organization CNRS in Paris. … Will you ever require commenters to be open about their identities? I can’t see that ever happening, but I don’t want to talk in definitives. In an ideal world, we would all be very Read More ›

In, where else, the New York Times: An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape. But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works.More. Unless it is happening most of the time. Presumably, the spinmistress heard about this: only one-third of published psychology research is reliable Sure,  and that guy Read More ›

From the BBC: What is our Universe made of? Billions of dark matter particles pass through us every second. “They are in your office, in your room, everywhere,” says Frenk. “They are crossing through your bodies at a rate of billions per second and you feel nothing.” There have been some false alarms along the way In theory we should be able to spot the little flashes of gamma rays from these collisions. The trouble is, lots of other things are also passing through, including radiation in the form of cosmic rays, and this swamps the signal from the dark matter. Hence the underground experiments: the rocks above block most radiation, but allow dark matter through. So far, most physicists Read More ›

From BioTechniques: A molecular motor that transports damaged DNA is also necessary for its repair. Double-strand breaks in DNA are a source of stress and sometimes death for cells. But the breaks can be fixed if they find their way to repair sites within the cell. In yeast, one of the main repair sites resides on the nuclear envelope where a set of proteins, including nuclear pore subcomplex Nup84, serves as a molecular hospital of sorts. The kinesin-14 motor protein complex, a “DNA ambulance,” moves the breaks to repair sites, according to a new study in Nature Communications (1). “To think of motor proteins moving DNA inside cells-it was very surprising,” said corresponding author Karim Mekhail at the University of Read More ›

The BBC, having announced that chimps have “entered the Stone Age” (because they smash stuff with rocks, as do birds), has also announced that humans are unique super-predators. Actually, the point made is mostly a sensible one (for once): The analysis of global data details the ruthlessness of our hunting practices and the impacts we have on prey. It shows how humans typically take out adult fish populations at 14 times the rate that marine animals do themselves. And on land, we kill top carnivores, such as bears, wolves and lions, at nine times their own self-predation rate. But perhaps the most striking observation, say authors Chris Darimont and colleagues, is the way human beings focus so heavily on taking Read More ›

From Nature: Quantum ‘spookiness’ passes toughest test yet It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world. … In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: Read More ›

From the Economist: In the fourth of our series of articles on scientific mysteries we ask why, a mere 542m years ago, animal life suddenly took off Oh, we mean Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, about the Cambrian explosion of life forms over half a billion years ago. Just look at how Darwin’s Econo followers handle the question: There is, however, one other thought—that the Cambrian explosion is not the fundamental mystery it seems to be. The true mystery, rather, is the Ediacaran, whose animals really did appear out of nowhere, and then vanished for reasons unknown before the Cambrian got going. The fossil record is full of sudden cast changes like this. They are known as mass extinctions. … Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We don’t know whether the crows have cumulative technological culture, and one of the reasons is that we don’t know how they learn,” said Logan. “There’s a hypothesis that says in order for cumulative technological culture to occur you need to copy the actions of another individual. And we don’t know whether the crows are paying attention to the actions of others when they learn from someone else.” … Logan and colleagues found that the crows don’t imitate or copy actions at all. “So there goes that theory,” she said. “Assuming how they learn in a non-tool context carries over to a tool context, they wouldn’t copy the actions of individuals they see cutting up Pandanus leaves to Read More ›

As usual, we close off our religion coverage for the week with inspirational messages from the new atheists. As many new atheists appear to have gone to relationship counselling (possibly why they are no longer threatening to sue each other or creating scenes in elevators for a global public?),  we are once again proud to serve our house product (; ) Richard Dawkins. We understand that the lost messiah portrait of Dawkins has been found: Hallelujah, the lost painting is found! I am so delighted. https://t.co/9aHaASQuNA — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 7, 2015 Meanwhile, the second Volume of his autobiography is virtually in hand, https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/635868366679359493 Today arrived my first advance copy of the 2nd volume of my autobiography, UK Edition. Read More ›

… it turns out that he mainly means the ones from religious families: TPP’s basic philosophy was that while you are entitled to your beliefs you are not entitled to avoid discomforting or contradictory ideas, you are not entitled to a free-pass when it comes to a critical analysis of beliefs like yours (individuals were never picked on). After all this is about education. These days parents and students still want the higher education passport, a degree, to jobs and careers, but the current attitude is that when parents present you with a narrow-minded, anti-science, parochial, self-satisified, entitled little twerp, the twerp is to be returned in the same condition, which seems totally antithetic to higher education. Apparently though business Read More ›

From Science: Feature: Why big societies need big gods, by Lizzie Wade, Science’s Latin American correspondent: Although much of Egyptian cosmology is alien today, some is strikingly familiar: The gods of today’s major religions are also moralizing gods, who encourage virtue and punish selfish and cruel people after death. But for most of human history, moralizing gods have been the exception. If today’s hunter-gatherers are any guide, for thousands of years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly indifferent to the human realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly. The theory introduced (and contested by other researchers) is that the idea of powerful and moral gods tracked the growth of large societies: Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and Read More ›

First, only one-third of published psychology research is reliable. How do we respond? We sort of knew that but, from the Conversation: What does it mean if the majority of what’s published in journals can’t be reproduced? Publishing together as the Open Science Collaboration and coordinated by social psychologist Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, research teams from around the world each ran a replication of a study published in three top psychology journals – Psychological Science; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. To ensure the replication was as exact as possible, research teams obtained study materials from the original authors, and worked closely with these authors whenever they Read More ›