May 23, 2008
No matter how cutesy the acronim SAD is. Joseph reports on a study that links SAD to serotonin. But serotonin itself may not be necessary to understand how SAD works, though an intimate link between serotonin and melatonin (the former is the biochemical precursor of the latter) suggests that…
May 22, 2008
When nobody around you seems to measure up, it's time to check your yardstick.
- Bill Lemley
May 22, 2008
Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model:
Humans like to tell stories. Amongst the most captivating is the story of the global spread of modern humans from their original homeland in Africa. Traditionally this has been the preserve of anthropologists, but geneticists are starting…
May 22, 2008
Some Like It Hot! Structure Of Receptor For Hot Chili Pepper And Pain Revealed:
You can now not only feel the spicy kick of a jalapeno pepper, you can also see it in full 3D, thanks to researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Early Life Exposure To Cats May Reduce Risk Of Childhood…
May 22, 2008
Grand Rounds Volume 4, No. 35 are up on Musings of a Dinosaur
Carnival of Space #55 is up on Catholic Sensibility
The 87th Skeptics Circle is up on Action Skeptics
Carnival of the Liberals #65 is up on Neural Gourmet
This week's 172nd edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Teacher in a…
May 22, 2008
The websites/wikis of the first two conferences appear to be down. We will move all of those archives to a new site soon, and very soon the website for the third ScienceOnline conference (formerly known as Science Blogging Conference) will be filled with more information. But for now, you can…
May 22, 2008
If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in its application to the study of biological clocks. Use…
May 22, 2008
From November 01, 2005, a review of a review...
Here is a nice article in Washington Post - Ecological Niche May Dictate Sleep Habits - about the adaptive function of sleep.
It addresses some of the themes I am interested in.
First, the unfortunate fact is that sleep was initially defined by…
May 21, 2008
People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.
- Bill Vaughan
May 21, 2008
(First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,
Comparative analysis of sexual…
May 21, 2008
There are 61 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the highlights, look around for more and please comment, rate, and send trackbacks:
Adaptive Evolution and Functional Redesign of Core Metabolic Proteins in Snakes:
Adaptive evolutionary episodes in core metabolic proteins are…
May 21, 2008
I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it.
After reading…
May 20, 2008
Sometimes when I look at all my children, I say to myself, Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.
- Bessie Lillian Gordy Carter (1898-1983)
May 20, 2008
What it really means when we are talking about babies "sleeping through the night" (from September 22, 2005)
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Trixe Update is a blog that is very unusual. First, just looking technically, the posts go from top to bottom instead of the latest post being on…
May 20, 2008
Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006):
In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus…
May 19, 2008
The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.
- Woody Allen
May 19, 2008
Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait:
We advance this long tradition of surveying teachers with reports from the first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution. The survey permits a statistically valid and current portrait…
May 19, 2008
PLoS ONE just published a very exciting paper - a regulatory sequence from the genome of a preserved Tasmanian wolf was inserted into a mouse and shown to have the same function:
Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome:
There is a burgeoning repository of information available…
May 19, 2008
The fourth part of a four-part series on the topic, this one from April 02, 2006....
This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and on the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days.
I have written…
May 19, 2008
As you know, I am currently in Florida, at the 20th Anniversary meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, that is, my own society. I have not been since 2002, so I am surprised to see how many people remember may face and are happy to see me.
I am also surprised to hear how many…
May 19, 2008
Fourth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria (from April 30, 2006):
For decades, it was thought that prokaryotes did not have circadian clocks. Then, a clock was discovered in a unicellular cyanobacterium, Synechococcus (later also in Synechocystis [1] and Trichodesmium [2]) which quickly…
May 18, 2008
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
- Winston Churchill
May 18, 2008
This is the third part of the series on the topic, from April 01, 2006...
This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and in the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days.
I have covered this issue a…
May 18, 2008
The third installment in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria (from April 19, 2006):
As you probably know, my specialty are birds, so writing this series on clocks in microorganisms was quite an eye-opener for me and I have learned a lot. The previous two posts cover the clocks in the…
May 17, 2008
I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.
- Zora Neale Hurston
May 17, 2008
I just had nice seafood dinner while watching the sunset over the water with this guy, down in sunny Florida. Readers of this blog have met him before, here and here.
I also saw Erik Herzog, who is familiar to all of you from, e.g., here, here, here and here. I heard him give a presentation about…
May 17, 2008
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here…
May 17, 2008
Second post in a series of five (from April 05, 2006):
In the previous two posts, here and here, I have mentioned how the discovery of circadian clocks in Cyanobacteria changed the way we think about the origin and evolution of circadian clocks. Quite soon after the initial discovery, the team…
May 16, 2008
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
- William Shakespeare
May 16, 2008
'Mitochondrial Eve' Research: Humanity Was Genetically Divided For 100,000 Years:
The human race was divided into two separate groups within Africa for as much as half of its existence, says a Tel Aviv University mathematician. Climate change, reduction in populations and harsh conditions may have…
