This row has been going on for twelve years. From Nature: The saga began when the paper described a method for using RNA sequences to grow tiny hexagonal crystals of palladium metal. The work hinted that RNA might have a role in producing inorganic materials in the environment. It has been cited more than 135 times. But Stefan Franzen, another chemist at NCSU, soon raised questions about the work. In a series of publications, he challenged whether the team had really seen RNA-driven action or stable palladium crystals. Franzen filed a formal complaint to NCSU, which kicked off a series of investigations. In the 2013 report, the NSF inspector-general found that the researchers had omitted experimental details and overstated the Read More ›

A friend draws attention to this paywalled paper, noting that—however it tries to wallpaper issues—at least confronts a problem: The conventional claims about how natural selection can simply “gather” information are inadequate. It’s nice wallpaper; there’s probably no wall under it. But there doesn’t need to be. One can say anything one wants about evolution these days and attribute anything at all to it. From Trends and Ecology and Evolution: The theory of evolution links random variation and selection to incremental adaptation. In a different intellectual domain, learning theory links incremental adaptation (e.g., from positive and/or negative reinforcement) to intelligent behaviour. Specifically, learning theory explains how incremental adaptation can acquire knowledge from past experience and use it to direct future Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” … The Salk team, while building a 3D reconstruction of rat hippocampus tissue (the memory center of the brain), noticed something unusual. In some cases, a single axon from one neuron formed two synapses reaching out to a single dendrite Read More ›

From BBC: The theory goes that although we sleep for fewer hours than other primates, the sleep that we have is of high quality so we do not need as much. To understand whether human sleep is unique, Samson and Nunn compared the sleep patterns of 21 primates, whose slumber patterns had already been analysed. Humans therefore have the deepest sleep of any primate As well as noting how long the animals slept for, they looked at how much time they spent in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is when we dream, and when our brain consolidates our memories into long-term storage. Humans slept the least. The sleepiest primates were grey mouse lemurs and night monkeys, which slept for 15 Read More ›

From Nature: Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago. … The process of domestication has moulded animals and their genomes to thrive in human environments. Traits that ensure survival in the wild often give way to qualities that benefit humans, such as docility and fast growth. Feralization looks, on its surface, like domestication in reverse. But closer inspection suggests that the chickens of Kauai are evolving into something quite different from their wild predecessors, gaining some traits that reflect that past, but maintaining others that Read More ›

From Salk Institute: Grafted plants’ genomes can communicate with each other Agricultural grafting dates back nearly 3,000 years. By trial and error, people from ancient China to ancient Greece realized that joining a cut branch from one plant onto the stalk of another could improve the quality of crops. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute and Cambridge University have used this ancient practice, combined with modern genetic research, to show that grafted plants can share epigenetic traits, according to a new paper published the week of January 18, 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. … “Grafting is something done often in the commercial world, and yet, we really don’t completely understand the consequences for the two Read More ›

In a few short paragraphs here.  For some reason the phrase “epic smackdown” keeps coming to mind.  

Further to Biology of the Baroque, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Steve Paulson at Nautilus, Nobelist (2004) Frank Wilczek argues that Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws. … Was beauty important to Einstein and the other founders of modern physics? Absolutely, although they didn’t always think about it explicitly. Einstein Read More ›

The documentary explores the mystery of non-adaptive order in biology and the unique challenge it presents to Darwinian evolution. More re documentary: here.

From ScienceDaily: The nest of black garden ants, Lasius niger, consists of an underground part made up of a network of galleries, and a mound of earth composed of a large number of bubble-shaped chambers closely interconnected with each other. Using 3D imaging techniques such as X-ray tomography[2] and a 3D scanner, the researchers characterized the 3D structures made by the ants as well as the construction dynamics. In addition, they analyzed the individual building behavior of the ants. In the part located above ground, the insects pile up their building materials forming pillars that encircle the chambers. The ants preferentially deposit their soil pellets in areas where other clusters of pellets have already been created. They add a pheromone Read More ›

Generally, coal is assumed to have originated in the lignin of Carboniferous forests, but now a new theory has been introduced: From The Economist: The trees of the Carboniferous were not like those of today. Moreover, which types of tree predominated varied over the vast span of time that it covered. One pertinent observation Dr Boyce and his team make is that the peak of coal formation coincided with the dominance of a group called the lycopsids. Yet lycopsid trunks were composed mostly of tissue called periderm, which corresponds to modern bark and contains little lignin. Forests that existed both before and after these lycopsid woods (but before the supposed evolution of lignin-digesting fungi) had many more lignin-rich species in Read More ›

We have had several comments lately about problems with the “captcha” function on comments.  As you might imagine, UD is inundated with spam, and the captcha function is designed to prevent the spammers from accessing the combox. We have decided, however, to ratchet back on the captcha.  Now, you will need to fill in the captcha only when you log in to your user ID.  You will not need to fill it in to post comments. We will try this for a while.  We worry that advanced spammers will take advantage of it, and if that happens we might have to change course.  But for now we will see how this works.

Yeah, we almost fell off our chairs too. Astrophysicist Thomas Kitching offers some ideas and a rationale at RealClearScience: A study that surveyed all the published cosmological literature between the years 1996 and 2008 showed that the statistics of the results were too good to be true. In fact, the statistical spread of the results was not consistent with what would be expected mathematically, which means cosmologists were in agreement with each other – but to a worrying degree. This meant that either results were being tuned somehow to reflect the status-quo, or that there may be some selection effect where only those papers that agreed with the status-quo were being accepted by journals. No kidding. Pigs fly backwards too? Read More ›

From Nature: Work that describes harm from crops was cited in Italian Senate hearing. The papers’ findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. … Cattaneo noted what looked like problems in all three papers: sections of images of electrophoresis gels appeared to have been obliterated, and some of the images in different papers appeared to be Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Tweak in gene expression may have helped humans walk upright Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama, have identified a change in gene expression between humans and primates that may have helped give us this edge when it comes to walking upright. And they did it by studying a tiny fish called the threespine stickleback that has evolved radically different skeletal structures to match environments around the world. … The threespine stickleback is remarkable in that it has evolved to have many different body structures to equip it for life in different parts of the world. … ue to changes in the regulatory DNA sequence near this Read More ›