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How to make a tadpole

I've been tinkering with a lovely software tool, the 3D Virtual Embryo, which you can down download from ANISEED (Ascidian Network of In Situ Expression and Embryological Data). Yes, you: it's free, it runs under Java, and you can get the source and versions compiled for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It contains a set of data on ascidian development—cell shapes, gene expression, proteins, etc., all rendered in 3 dimensions and color, and with the user able to interact with the data, spinning it around and highlighting and annotating. It's beautiful! Unfortunately, as I was experimenting with…

Another reason why bans on symbols lead to bad policy

As much as I oppose Holocaust denial, fascism, and neo-Nazis, you might recall that I am very much in favor of free speech. Indeed, I tend to take as broad an interpretation of the First Amendment as possible, and remain very grateful to our Founding Fathers for enshrining this freedom in the Constitution, where it's much more difficult to tamper with. But what happens when a distinctly anti-freedom of speech ban is enshrined in a nation's Constitution? This is what: A Stuttgart court fined a German company that specializes in anti-fascist paraphernalia adorned with swastikas for using the…

Reading Between the Lines

Steve Schoenbaum writes: "Inside the Outbreaks", Mark Pendergrast's wonderful history of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), can be read on many levels. I confess that as a former EIS officer (1967-1969), personally familiar with most of the "elite medical detectives" of the first few decades, I tended to read it "between the lines". I found myself recalling many personal incidents, interactions with others, and themes mentioned but not necessarily fully developed in the book. I'd like to consider a couple of those here: Early on in "Inside the Outbreaks…

Guest post by Daniel Vorhaus and Lawrence Moore: what happens when a personal genomics company goes bankrupt?

In this series of three guest posts, lawyers Daniel Vorhaus and Lawrence Moore of the excellent Genomics Law Report provide insight into the intriguing question of what happens to customers' genetic data in the event that a personal genomics company goes out of business. Part II and III of this series will be posted over the next two days. What Happens if a DTC Genomics Company Goes Belly Up? Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics companies are not immune to the current recession. When TruGenetics, a new player in the DTC genomics space, announced in June that it would be handing out 10,000…

Where to look for regulatory variants

One of the major challenges of the personal genomic era will be knowing exactly which (if any) of the millions of genetic variants present in your genome are likely to actually have an impact on your health. Such predictions are particularly problematic for regulatory variants - genetic changes that alter the expression levels of genes, rather than the sequence of the protein they encode. A paper out in PLoS Genetics this week goes some way towards solving this problem by giving researchers a much better idea of exactly where they need to look for these variants. The paper The paper draws on…

Oxonians March in Support of Animal Research Once Again

When I first arrived in Oxford, about two and a half years ago, I found myself face to face with a very vocal and determined animal rights movement. Thriving on misinformation and intimidation--through their visible rallies and underhanded techniques of arson, grave robbing, and constant threats--they had stalled construction on Oxford's new animal research building (a building designed to even further ensure humane conditions for research animals). And, they had effectively silenced the scientific community and the much larger portion of the population that supports animal research. Then…

What Is Psychopathology? Examining the Changing Status of ADHD

Despite the fact that my research lies at the intersection between cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, I am also quite interested in the evolution of our understanding of psychopathology. The ultimate goal of the study of psychopathology is to ground such disorders in brain and body. But our understanding of some pathologies are simply not there yet (though some of our therapeutic interventions still prove effective even if we don't quite understand the etiology of a given disease or disorder). The main conflict in the field that characterizes the study of psychopathology is…

In Defense of Evolutionary Psychology: Why They're Asking The Wrong Questions

Evolutionary Psychology suffers from a PR problem, which can be mostly blamed on ignorant (even if well-intentioned) members of the population who don't know what they're talking about. Evolutionary psychology attempts to describe the evolution of the mind and of behavior and, well, everyone has a mind, and everyone can observe behavior. This makes people think that they are experts. Anybody who has ever had a child knows everything there is to know about child development. Anybody who has ever owned a dog becomes an expert on canine behavior. Study after study demonstrates the fact that…

I like this hypothesis

But we have to be clear that it is only a hypothesis at this point. I was reading about domestication syndrome (DS) -- selecting animals for domestication has a whole collection of secondary traits that come along for the ride, in addition to tameness. We are selecting for animals that tolerate the presence of humans, but in addition, we get these other traits, like floppy ears, patchy coat color, shortened faces, etc.; the best known work in this area is by Belyaev (YouTube documentary to get you up to speed) who selected silver foxes for domesticity, and got friendly foxes who also had all…

Neutral Expectations

Last week, I linked to an article in Seed about synonymous mutations with deleterious effects in humans. It's heavy with errors, but I didn't linger too much on them. Larry Moran, on the other hand, got a bit more riled up than I did, and John Logsdon (whose blog has the potential to be something cool) agrees with Larry. And I agree with both of them. The issue here is with the neutral theory, which Larry describes quite well (see also the coverage in this primer to population genetics). Many people misinterpret the neutral theory and think that it claims that all mutations in some class (non…

Dark Energy Considered Harmful

Simon White has written a treatise published on astro-ph (arXiv:0704.2291v1) where he argues that Dark Energy, or, more specifically, the current bandwagon of interest in Dark Energy, is potentially harmful for astronomy. Despite the fact that I'm deeply interested in cosmology and Dark Energy, despite the fact that those subjects are my favorite topics for public-outreach lectures, and despite the fact that I was there as one of the major contributors tot he 1998 discovery of the acceleration of the Universe's expansion and hence Dark Energy, I agree with almost everything Simon White has to…

ORBIT Bracket : Science Showdown 2007, Round 2 Results

There is a loud and painful screech of microphone feedback. As it fades out, there is a series of loud, reverberating thumping noises, followed by: ANNOUNCER: ....um, hello? Is this on? The announcer, a small, hunched, elderly old man, continues to speak timidly into the microphone. ANNOUNCER: Um, hello, well, er, yes, um, hello, everybody. Welcome to the, er, second round results of the Orbit Bracket of the, um... The announcer pats down his jacket pockets, pulls out a small calendar, glances at it through the bottom of his bi-focals, and puts it away. ANNOUNCER: 2007, yes, 2007 Spring…

Hemichordate evo-devo

Every biology student gets introduced to the chordates with a list of their distinctive characteristics: they have a notochord, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, gill slits, and a post-anal tail. The embryonic stage in which we express all of these features is called the pharyngula stage—it's often also the only stage at which we have them. We terrestrial vertebrates seal off those pharyngeal openings as we develop, while sea squirts throw away their brains as an adult. The chordate phylum has all four of those traits, but there is another extremely interesting phylum that has some of them, the…

The Human Langauge Gene in Song Birds

A recent paper in PLoS Biology examines the role of the so called "language gene" in neural development related to vocalization. It was previously found that FOXP2 gene is up-regulated in a certain area of the brain that is important for neural plasticity related to vocalization. The present study reduces the levels of expression of FOXP2 gene using "FOXP2 Knockdown" individuals (individuals with a somewhat broken FOXP2 gene) in this area prior to an important stage in brain development that is related to vocalization. The effect on learning vocalization, is negative. This experiment was…

Microsoft Clambake vs. Ubuntu Zesty Zebra

Last night, before going to bed, I was reading the latest story on King Research's survey of IT professionals regarding their stand on Vista. Ninety percent of the 961 surveyed claim to have serious concerns about migration to Vista, and over half have no plans to make the migration at all. I started to think, as I dozed off, that we are observing the process of niche differentiation happing at an accelerated pace facilitated, in part, by cross-platform software.. But boy, was I sleepy. I had the strangest dream.... .... "The concerns about Vista specified by participants were…

Halloween is a counterfeit holy day dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of Lucifer, the Antichrist and the Spirit of Belial, whoever that is.

"The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include: Sex with demons Orgies between animals and humans Animal and human sacrifices Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies Revel nights Conjuring of demons and casting of spells Release of "time-released" curses against the innocent and the ignorant." Those are the words of Christian Writer Kimberly Daniels, in a piece produced for the Christian Broadcasting Network (hat tip: Pharyngula…

Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims

Repost Life Science Teachers: Take special note! This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component. What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text. We start with the…

Animal rights terrorists firebomb a researcher's house

It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable. Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent: SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…

Chapter 6: Difficulties with Theory

Up until now, our route into the theory of evolution by natural selection has been all downhill. One thing has led effortlessly to another, with Darwin giving the occasional nudge to steer things in the right direction. Not any more. If it's human interest you're after -- doubt, sweat, anxiety -- then chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Difficulties on Theory', is the one you've been waiting for. I obviously wasn't going to admit it, but after chapters 4 and 5, I was beginning to fear that we'd peaked with the struggle of chapter 3. But this chapter is full of gems, both in the science, and in the…

Wells: “Darwinism is Doomed” because we keep making progress

There are days when I simply cannot believe how dishonest the scoundrels at the Discovery Institute can be. This is one of them. I just read an essay by Jonathan Wells that is an appalling piece of anti-scientific propaganda, an extremely squirrely twisting of some science news. It's called "Why Darwinism is doomed", and trust me, if you read it, your opinion of Wells will drop another notch. And here you thought it was already in the gutter! First, here's the science news that was published in Nature back in August, and which has set Wells off. The research is the result of the ability to…

The kudzu of quackademic medicine infiltrates the University of Florida

One of the themes of this blog since the very beginning of this blog is the threat to scientific medicine represented by a phenomenon that I like to call quackademic medicine. Although I did not coin the term, I frequently use the term and have done my best to popularize it among skeptics to describe the infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine, be it in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying prescientific magic like homeopathy or "energy medicine," or even the offering of such services under the auspices of an academic medical center, thus putting the…

Notch

One of my favorite signal transduction pathways (what? You didn't know that true nerds had favorite molecular pathways?) is the one mediated by the receptor Notch. Notch is one of those genes in the metazoan toolkit that keeps popping up in all kinds of different contexts—it's the adjustable wrench of the toolbox, something that handles a general problem very well and therefore gets reused over and over again, and the list of places where it is expressed in Drosophila is impressive. The general problem that Notch solves is the resolution of a binary decision in cell fate, one where a few…

Family and Academia

So a theme of my blog has been the conflicts between being a scientist and having a life. In my immediate environment, I'm surrounded by postdocs in their early to mid-30s, struggling to get their career going and thinking about starting a family. In some respects I'm lucky -- I'm male, and my wife is not an academic. I will never face the stress of pregnancy + facing the trials and tribulations of academia. But that is not to say that being a father and a postdoc/junior faculty will be easy. We are planning to have children eventually, however the longer we delay the hard it will be. This…

The last intelligent creationist

Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet: I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988 It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a branching tree, and it got me thinking about terribly popular misconceptions about evolution that were started by smart people, and a doozy came to mind. A whole collection of doozies, actually, from one single terribly clever person. You've all heard the stupid creationist objection to evolution — "if…

Xena, Warrior Scientist!

I freely admit it. I routinely destroy my neoencephalon by watching all manner of crap on television. I am not one of those overweening snobs who daintily curl an upper lip as I sneer, "I never watch television." I love popular culture, and frankly, find a dose of mindless television to be relaxing, and occasionally thought-provoking. Warning: This is recycled bonobo scat from the long defunct Refuge, ca. Nov. 5, 2005. Such occurred recently when I watched the imaginatively titled, "Vampire Bats" featuring the unconquerable Lucy Lawless. Although I was not a devotee, I enjoyed watching…

When Women Get Together Outside The Kitchen, It Must Be To Plot Against Men

I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…

Fundamentalism, blind spots, and anti-authoritarianism

At the core of my disagreement with Sam Harris (and with our own Jason Rosenhouse) is the role of religion in making religious authoritarianism bad. I argue that authoritarianism (and extremism in general) is the issue, while others think that religion should be the focus. To bolster my argument, I've been quoting Reinhold Niebuhr's comment that "Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people." I found that quotation in an interview with Chris Hedges. Hedges wrote War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, in which his discussion of war's place in society verged on the…

Species Recovery

Reposted from the old TfK. In the last weeks, there have been a bunch of stories about endangered species recovery and possible changes to the Endangered Species Act. I blogged on some of the issues raised before (and before that). The fundamental problem in many cases is that the ESA is not perfect. Western governors seem to have their own ideas: The most controversial proposal is change the law so it requires the use of "best science" rather than "best available science" to determine if a species is endangered. If the current research weren't conclusive, then more studies would have to be…

Was Spinosaurus really the biggest predatory dinosaur?

After the success of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the minds behind the franchise were in a bit of a fix. Tyrannosaurus and "Velociraptor"* had the run of the fictional islands for the past two movies; something new was needed to up the ante. The decision was made to make Spinosaurus the new villain in Jurassic Park III, the strange theropod being said to possess an 8-foot-long skull and stretch 60 feet from the tip of its crocodile-like snout to the end of its tail by the creative team. As if this weren't enough, the writers of the film had Spinosaurus kick the tar of of Tyrannosaurus,…

Fake Forces - sometimes they are Fantastic

What is a fake force? A fake force is one of those forces that introductory texts tell you aren't real - like centrifugal force. They aren't real in the sense that they are due to one of the fundamental interactions. Basically, introductory texts (and even blogs like this one - not a bad summary of real vs. fake forces) attack the centrifugal force. This is because it is so common for students to want to use these faux forces in the wrong way. Better to just not use them at all. Anyway, there are times when faux forces are awesome. Just to be clear, a faux force is needed to use normal…

Sunday Sacrilege: The active hand

The more skilled the slave, the more likely they are to break free. Where faith enlists knowledge to glorify itself, it opens itself to destruction from within. I was watching an old documentary, and one of my favorites, The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski, and one episode, The Grain in the Stone, caught my attention in particular. The whole series is about how humans developed this peculiar method called science, and it does not take the glib way out of starting with Bacon and talking about the usual superficial outline of hypothesis, experiment, and revision that you get in a basic science…

Interaction between light and matter - no room for the photon

One of the fundamental aspects of physics is the study of light and how that interacts with matter. I have been putting off this post - mainly because I am not a quantum mechanic (I am a classical mechanic). There are lots of things that could be done in this post, but I am going to try and keep it limited (and maybe come back to the interesting points later). Also, most of my posts are aimed at the intro-college level or advanced high school level. This will be a little higher. If you are in high school, there is still a lot of stuff for you here. Let me summarize where I am going to…

Smart Mice

I've got a new article in Nature this week on the growing number of learning and memory enhanced strains of mice, and what these smart rodents can teach us about the human mind. I also discuss Luria's The Mind of A Mnemonist and the stunning research demonstrating that the cognitive deficits of many neurodevelopmental disorders, including Neuroï¬bromatosis, Down's Syndrome and Fragile X, have actually proven to be reversible, at least in mouse models. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the lede: Ten years ago, Princeton researcher Joe Tsien eased a brown mouse, tail first, into a…

The Autistic Surfer

In the latest issue of Outside Magazine, I profile Clay Marzo, a rising star on the pro surfing circuit. In December 2007, Clay was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. What's so intriguing about Clay's story is that his Asperger's isn't a hindrance or handicap. Instead, it's a crucial part of his success, allowing Clay to focus, for hours at a time, on nothing but the physics of waves and the mechanics of surfing: Clay Marzo has been waiting all morning for waves. He's standing with his surfboard next to a NO TRESPASSING sign on the edge of a pineapple field, looking…

Misframing science, misunderstanding climate change

Yesterday I pointed out that Drew Ryun, like his father, is less willing to consider the science of global warming than Newt Gingrich, of all people. He responds today without actually linking to me, a violation of 'netiquette which is unfortunate for his readers, especially since he seems to misquote me. It's worth looking at what he says to improve how we understand science in general, and climate science in particular. He claims: It is the tactic of the global warming crowd to run around and say, “Look at the consensus of the science community! Global warming is a fact!!” Again, I know…

What (not) to do when the system is broken.

When I was a kid, my mother went back to school with the intention of getting the physics training she needed to pursue her dream of a career in astronomy. Part of this journey, of course, required that she be plunged into the life of a graduate student. It wasn't any prettier then than it is now. While my mom was in the thick of the horrors visited upon graduate students, she was a little bit freaked out by coverage of a parole hearing for one Theodore Streleski, an erstwhile math graduate student at Stanford who killed his advisor with a ball peen hammer. Streleski actually refused…

Sunday Sacrilege: The Joke

There's a time to take religion seriously, and a time to laugh at it. Sometimes we have to do both at the same time. When you read the works of apologists for religion, there's a common theme: they are all very serious. Religion is important. Faith is about a relationship with the greatest being in the universe. We need God to find purpose in our lives. Religion is about community and bringing people together. Rituals are tools to cope with the great events in life, from birth to death. It's all true, of course, in the sense that believers really do believe that their God matters, and…

Avengers and literary truth

Not to dredge up old fights, but a topic we discussed on the blog back in 2009 has cropped up in a couple of recent essays. The issue is whether there is a form of truth that literature can convey, perhaps even a level of literary truth which cannot be conveyed through other means. The topic came up originally in the context of ways we might interpret religious texts, but it applies more generally. So, in this week's New York Times book review section, we have an exchange between the editors and reviewer Mohsin Hamid in which Hamid explains: Iâm a political animal. How the pack hunts,…

Al Qaeda isn't Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor is incredibly evil, and incredibly powerful. He's a technological genius, and from his research he created an astonishing pile of wealth. He's so rich, and so powerful, that he can divert resources from his research labs to produce weapons with which to wage war on Superman. Luthor's labs produce technologies beyond that available to militaries, technology that makes weapons capable of destroying or disabling the unstoppable, unkillable man. Absent superpowers, nothing short of Luthor's research labs and financial power could conceivably match an entity like Superman. Many…

The 500 K salary cap

Obama Calls for 'Common Sense' on Executive Pay: resident Obama announced on Wednesday a salary cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive the largest amounts of money under the $700 billion federal bailout, calling the step an expression not only of fairness but of "basic common sense." The restrictions, however, allow an exception for restricted stock. ... "That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And…

Pufferfish and ancestral genomes

The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species. Tetraodon has about the same number of genes as we do, 20,…

Stanley the barnacle

I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there's a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (called cirri) and wave them about in the water to catch small particles of food. They're very pretty, but also very skittish: a shadow passing over, a splash, the klunk of a rock sending vibrations through the substrate, and they instantly withdraw their limbs and slam the plate-like doors to their…

Around the Web: Big Deals 'R Us, or, Libraries in the lobster pot

So what do I mean by Big Deals. In the world of academic libraries, a Big Deal is when we subscribe to the electronic versions of all (or almost all) of a journal publisher's offerings. Usually for it to qualify as a Big Deal, the publisher in question is going to be one of the larger ones out there, like Elsevier or Springer or even a big society publisher like IEEE or the American Chemical Society. The whole idea of the Big Deal is that we should theoretically get a better price for a large volume commitment than for paying on an individual basis for just the ones we think we really want.…

Daily Rhythms in Cnidaria

The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock - at least they have clock genes, thought to have arived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.[continued under the fold] It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya - Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals - originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock…

Science reporting and personal bad habits

One of my healthier, but alas more expensive habits, is that I walk a mile or so several times a week to my neighborhood shopping area and visit one or another bookstore. I live in a college town, so my neighborhood shopping area has some of the best bookstores anywhere. Not just a university bookstore (which, like many, is part of the Barnes and Noble College Division and not independent), but also what I consider the best independent bookstore anywhere. Since the Reveres try not to reveal any of our locations, I don't get to give it a plug except to say it has the name of a prestigious…

Thinking about confidence intervals

Like David Rind over at Evidence in Medicine I'm a consumer of statistics, not a statistician. However as an epidemiologist my viewpoint is sometimes a bit different from a clinician's. As a pragmatic consumer, Rind resists being pegged as a frequentist or a Bayesian or any other dogmatic statistical school, which is wise. Let the record show most practicing statisticians are similarly pragmatic, as was the great R. A. Fisher, who thought there was a place for different viewpoints in different contexts, even though Fisher was famous for his argumentative and contentious manner (people are…

Lawsuits challenge EPA’s approval of new herbicide

Despite substantial public opposition and the “grave concerns” of about 50 members of Congress and significant unanswered questions about human and environmental health impacts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved a new herbicide called Enlist Duo for use on genetically engineered corn and soybeans in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. EPA, which says it has approved Enlist Duo “to manage the problem of resistant weeds” is now considering approving Enlist Duo for use in ten more states: Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi,…

XDR-TB travels around the globe, update: broader implications of one man's jaunt

I blogged earlier about the Georgia man who globe-trotted while infected with XDR-TB. I wrote that post late Tuesday evening, and since then, a number of other details about his case have come to light--and they're not encouraging. In fact, this serves as a nice example of a convergence of a number of areas I've written about before--obviously, the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the terrible position it leaves us in, the politics and policies of quarantine/isolation (and how they'd be enforced), and the global spread of infectious disease, so I figured this would warrant another…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 30 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Performance of Humans vs. Exploration Algorithms on the Tower of London Test: The Tower of London Test (TOL) used to assess executive functions was inspired in Artificial Intelligence tasks used to test…

Daily Rhythms in Cnidaria

The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock - at least they have clock genes, thought to have arived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.[continued under the fold] It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya - Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals - originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock…