Search Content

Displaying results 7301 - 7350 of 87947

WSJ reviews "brain fitness" products

"Brain fitness" is all the rage lately -- the idea that by "exercising" your brain, you can keep your mental ability at high levels even as you age. The good news is that there's more science to back up this fad than in other recent gimmicks such as the Mozart Effect. The bad news is that "training your brain" takes a bit more work than popping a CD in the car stereo -- and the science to back it up is far from conclusive. Undaunted, the Wall Street Journal had a panel of reviewers test six "brain fitness" products. Some of them even sound like they might be rather fun. The article,…

Casual Fridays: TK-421, why can't you spin that woman in reverse?

Last week we asked our readers about an illusion (created by Nobuyuki Kayahara) that's been circulated very widely recently: While the illusion can't actually determine whether you're "right-brained" or "left-brained," we were curious about what actually affects people's perception of the illusion. Over 1,600 readers took our online survey about the illusion. What's interesting about the illusion is that it's ambiguous -- it can appear to be spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise. Here's how our readers saw it: So roughly two-thirds of viewers initially saw it spinning clockwise…

The Center for Science and Democracy

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the launch of a new initiative from the Union of Concerned Scientists - The Center for Science and Democracy. The UCS itself was founded in the late 1960's in response to the Cold War nuclear arms race. Graduate students and faculty at MIT decided that someone needed to advocate for "greater emphasis on applying scientific research to pressing environmental and social problems rather than military programs." That goal seems even more important in today's political climate, though the issue today is not between environment/society vs military, but…

Bad Science: Genetic Signatures of Centenarians

Source. A newsworthy study about a genetic signature of centenarians published in Science has not stood up to scrutiny by the blogosphere and peer scientists and has now been formally retracted by the authors. Until recently, such retractions - whether by Editors or by the authors themselves - have been quite rare. With the blogosphere and 24/7 news media becoming more and more prominent, I suspect that we may begin to see more examples. Ultimately, it is a healthy process and good for science. Below is an excerpt, with my emphasis, from their Letter to Editor in Science: ...we discovered…

Geek the Vote

Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is: ...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided] The site is here. This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…

Crowd-sourcing your medical care

The work up of "fever of unknown origin" (FUO) is a classic exercise in internal medicine. Originally defined as a temperature greater than 38.3°C (101°F) on several occasions for more than three weeks with no diagnosis after one week of inpatient study, the definition has shifted. This reflects the dramatic increase in the sophistication of outpatient work ups in the fifty or so years since the term was formally defined. About a third of cases turn out to be infection, another third cancer, a smaller percentage so-called collagen vascular diseases such as lupus. A significant percentage…

Is the Ocean a Mirror? or Why is the Ocean Blue?

Did you actually make it through that?? Did you catch the strange reason why the sea is blue? Apparently the ocean is a mirror (not entirely false) that reflects the blue sky, hence it is blue (not entirely true). Some hypothesize that the ocean is blue because it reflects the blue sky, but this would only be visible at relatively low angles of observation and on flat water. So why is the ocean blue? Water itself isn't blue, right? The most widely-held hypothesis is that blue wavelengths of light penetrates deeper while red wavelengths are rapidly absorbed by the water molecules and…

Bush in Kansas

A month ago, Democracy Corps released a survey showing that Democrats were showing remarkable strength in the most competetive 49 House races. On a conference call announcing the results, James Carville quipped that Dick Cheney must be coming out to stump for Jim Ryun in Kansas because that's the only place he could go. Now the President is on his way (perhaps already on the ground. I won't be attending the event (it didn't seem worth trying to get the Ryun people to give me press credentials), so I'm glad to see that Joel Mathis is live-blogging events inside the Expocenter, and WIBW will…

Ironic Thoughts

I know, I know, you're probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition. If so, then feel free to skip this post. I've got a new article in the latest Seed (it's a particularly good issue, I think, although it's not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking: The game only has one rule, and it's a simple one: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head. You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in…

Ask Dr. Boris Behncke your Etna & Italian volcanoes questions!

The first Q&A with Dr. Jonathan Castro was such a success, I'm going to try to make this a regular feature. On that note, Eruptions reader Dr. Boris Behncke has volunteered to be the second geologist to take the plunge. Here is a little about Boris and his work: I've studied geology first in Bochum, Germany, then finished my Master's in Kiel, Germany (in 1996), before hopping south to Catania, where I did my Ph.D. in 2001. I live in Sicily since early 1997, but first visited the Italian volcanoes in 1989, and happen to be at Etna when it produced a spectacular eruption just on schedule.…

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad. I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…

Oh, goody. NCCAM has a blog.

Oh, goody. I don't know how I've missed this, given that it's been in existence now for over a month now, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I'm not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Just search this blog for "NCCAM" if you don't believe me. I've explained the reasons many times, but the CliffsNotes version is that NCCAM is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, dedicated as it is to the study of modalities that are at best highly implausible and at…

"Darwinism": A "marketing problem"?

Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…

PNAS: Darren Anderson, Start-Up Chief Technology Officer

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I was the founding president of a start-up / spin-off company out of the University of Toronto. The company was originally called Northern Nanotechnologies, and is now called Vive Nano. My current job is…

ChatRoulette

Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, takes on ChatRoulette, that strange new site that connects you, via webcam, with a stream of strangers: The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it "the Holy Grail of all Internet fun." Everyone seemed to agree that it…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How A Brain Chemical Changes Locusts From Harmless Grasshoppers To Swarming Pests: Scientists have uncovered the underlying biological reason why locusts form migrating swarms. Their findings, reported in today's edition of Science, could be used in the future to prevent the plagues which devastate crops (notably in developing countries), affecting the livelihood of one in ten people across the globe. Many New Species Discovered In Hidden Mozambique Oasis With Help Of Google Earth: Space may be the final frontier, but scientists who recently discovered a hidden forest in Mozambique show the…

A morning of email

I realized this morning that I had no meetings scheduled for today. HOORAY!!! In addition, my department (recently renamed a School) is all in an uproar because our academic advisory council is arriving tomorrow, and our open house to the university is Friday. So I decided that I could take the day at home to catch up on all the email I've been ignoring avoiding unable to get to recently. Here's a sampling of my inbox (currently at 400 messages): umpteen million tables-of-contents for journals I want to read but don't have time to. I try and scroll through the email TOCs when they arrive…

"Post Modern" biology?

I wonder, do readers know much about "Post Modern" biology? Radio Open Source contacted me about this topic...the thing is that I don't usually pay much attention to the "overthrow" of the "orthodox" doctrine because I don't think these "doctrines" are really adhered to in the same way that Marxism or Christianity are. Science is about change, falsification is a feature and not a bug! Myself, contravention of standard orthodoxy is cool, that means the low hanging fruit might still be around. Epigenetics and phenotypic plasticity seem to be well acknowledged phenomena which might be…

Making the most of Molecule of the Month with Molecule World

We've been fans of the Molecule of the Month series by David Goodsell, for many years. Not only is Dr. Goodsell a talented artist but he writes very clear descriptions of the ways molecules like proteins, RNA, and DNA work together and function inside a cell. To learn about proteins and their activities, I like to go directly to the Molecule of the Month page, where I can find a list of articles organized by molecule type and name.  Many of these articles can also be downloaded in a PDF format. A really nice of his articles is that he includes PDB IDs for all the structures he discusses.  The…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bacteria Use Radioactive Uranium To Convert Water Molecules To Useable Energy: Researchers report in this week's Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth's surface. Think that's weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. The Neurobiology Behind Why Eating Feels So Good: The need to eat is triggered by the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin is produced in the gut and triggers the brain to promote eating, but it remains to be determined precisely how ghrelin affects different parts of the brain. A new…

ICD: the most important classification you've never heard of

Some of the most boring sounding parts of epidemiology are also the most important. Take the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), now in its tenth revision (ICD-10). This is a standard way to code disease diagnoses that has its origins as far back as the 1850s. It was taken over as an official function of the World Health Organization (WHO) on its founding in 1948. By then it was already in its sixth revision. Versions of ICD9 and ICD10 are used for epidemiology, national health planning and health care management, where your insurance reimbursements are governed by ICD codes. It's…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Flies Don't Buzz About Aimlessly: Have you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the University of California and Andy Reynolds at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom have been pondering this very question. Fruit flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Sex Ends As Seasons Shift And Kisspeptin Levels Plummet: A hormone implicated in the onset of human puberty also appears to control reproductive activity in seasonally breeding rodents, report Indiana University Bloomington and University of California at Berkeley scientists in the March 2007 issue of Endocrinology. The paper is now accessible online via the journal's rapid electronic publication service. The researchers present evidence that kisspeptin, a recently discovered neuropeptide encoded by the KiSS-1 gene, mediates the decline of male Siberian hamsters' libido and reproduction as…

High dose nutritional supplements and cancer risk

Regular readers know I don't have strong feelings about nutritional supplements and herbal medicine, unlike some of my medical blogger colleagues. I don't recommend or use them but for the most part it's not a subject that really gets me going, probably because I don't know enough about abuses. A lot of regular medical practice is not that soundly based, either, and some of it is pretty harmful. That's also not a subject that gets me going. The one prejudice I do have I got from my physician and surgeon father. His diet advice was "everything in moderation." That goes for nutritional…

Season Extension and Fall Gardening Class

Just to let you know, I'm going to be starting another class this coming week, beginning on Tuesday - this one helping people get started with fall gardening and season extension. If you are like most folks, you probably start out enthusiastic about your garden, but around the middle of the summer, you get focused on harvesting, or overwhelmed and let the cool season garden peter out. And that's a mistake, because with very simple and cheap methods of season extension and a little attention right about now (for those as northerly as me, a bit later for folks south of me in this hemisphere…

Friday Blog Roundup

Promoting public health depends on having good information. Much of the information we rely on comes from studies published in journals, but we often learn of these studies from news outlets that present distorted pictures of the findings. Going straight to the source limits that distortion but can be difficult for a number of reasons. Several blog posts this week offer helpful guides to accessing, understanding, and contextualizing academic research for public health. Iâm going to devote this weekâs blog roundup to these posts (and to a few timely posts linking science and pop culture).…

Giant owls vs solenodons

Here's something you don't see very often... This illustration (by Peter Trusler) shows the large Pleistocene Cuban owl Ornimegalonyx oteroi battling with a solenodon. Ornimegalonyx has been mentioned here a few times before (use the search bar), but nothing substantive, sorry. Most sources mention O. oteroi as if it's the only named species of Ornimegalonyx. Actually, Arredondo (1982) named three additional ones: O. minor, O. gigas and O. acevedoi. And, by the way, the Ornimegalonyx owls weren't the only big owls on Pleistocene Cuba - there was also a particularly big eagle owl (Bubo…

My picks from ScienceDaily

HIV/AIDS Pandemic Began Around 1900, Earlier Than Previously Thought; Urbanization In Africa Marked Outbreak: New research indicates that the most pervasive global strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924, suggesting that growing urbanization in colonial Africa set the stage for the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Specific Gene Found In Adolescent Men With Delinquent Peers: Birds of a feather flock together, according to the old adage, and adolescent males who possess a certain type of variation in a specific gene are more likely to flock to delinquent peers, according to a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Humanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution: Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth's history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13). Want Sustainable Fishing? Keep Only Small Fish, And Let The Big Ones Go: Scientists at the University of Toronto analysed Canadian fisheries data to determine the effect of the "keep the large ones" policy that is typical of fisheries.…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo: Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi's horses are a horse species native to China and Mongolia that was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Lizards Pull A Wheelie: Why bother running on hind legs when the four you've been given work perfectly well? This is the question that puzzles Christofer Clemente. For birds…

Winter is coming

Winter will be here soon, I hear rumours it has already come to parts of the south and west, and it definitely arrived in Iceland. Iceland in winter requires some effort, but we have come up with some useful things to get through the winter, and I don't mean just the pickled whale blubber, rotten shark and broiled seal flippers. The traditional winter clothing is "lopi", which is coarse water resistant wool from the Icelandic sheep, renowned for its ability to survive bad weather, and for being stupid enough to be out in such weather in the first place. handknit lopi - expensive, but…

Puget Sound scientists: be a Biotech Expo mentor and help students

Every year students in the Puget Sound area gather together at the Biotech Expo to celebrate the life sciences and compete for prizes. Although their projects are diverse in nature, they compete in categories like research, art, journalism, drama, music, and others, all the students learn about science as part of their work. You can help a high school student learn about science by being a mentor for the Biotech Expo. It is especially helpful to students if they can bounce questions off of a real-live person who works in a scientific field. The Northwest Association for Biomedical…

February Pieces Of My Mind #2

Nalin Pekgul: "Us Muslim immigrants used to invite Jehovah's Witnesses to practise our Swedish". Movie: Sweden, Heaven and Hell. Hilariously over the top Italian exploitation mockumentary about late-60s Sweden that manages to tell volumes about Italy instead. Narration similar to the closing voice-over in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Relentless blonde breast flaunting throughout. Grade: Recommended. Movie: The Danish Girl. Transgender journey in 1920s Copenhagen and Paris. Main character's self-absorption and sudden unwillingness to doink A. Vikander get kind of old. Grade: OK. Imagine…

Swedish Heritage Board: "We Have Abandoned All Scientific Ambition"

In today's paper issue of main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter is a news item headlined "Hobby Researcher Gives New Signs to Stones" (currently not available on-line, but here's another relevant piece). It relays a few statements from museologist Ewa Bergdahl of the Swedish National Heritage Board regarding the Ales stenar visitor's sign debacle. Bergdahl is head of the Heritage Tourism unit. --There isn't just one single truth. This place is so incredibly more complex than previously believed, says Ewa Bergdahl, unit director at the National Heritage Board. [...] The Heritage Board has long…

On line surveillance of emerging infectious disease?

Enough monkeys banging on keyboards over enough time should produce, through random chance alone, sensible prose now and then. But if the monkeys are bloggers and reporters and other people, the noise they generate would become merely pseudo-sensible because of (highly unlikely) chance events, but it should actually contain some information. With a little tweaking and a lot of filtering and analysis, it is possible to monitor the chatter for signs of emerging infectious diseases and quite possibly get on top of some of these events faster than otherwise possible. In one of the most…

PLoS supports scientists

I have to give a huge round of applause to PLoS, specifically, PLoS ONE, and their handling of the XMRV fiasco. Some of you might remember, early 2010 PLoS published the very first 'Umm... XMRV isnt there...' paper, Failure to Detect the Novel Retrovirus XMRV in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. To a scientist, it was interesting, but not that big of a deal. People publish conflicting findings all the time. Eventually we get to the bottom of it. Whatever. Its annoying when you are in it, but its kinda funny to outside observing scientists. The reaction from the initial studys principle…

Atheism gets some face time in Canada

The cover of the latest issue of Maclean's magazine, which is the Canadian equivalent of Time or Newsweek, asks "Is God poison?" The secondary headline to the feature, which is online, says "a new movement blames God for every social problem from Darfur to child abuse." Well, I don't know if it does all that, but at least the magazine is finally paying attention to the rise of what, for lack of a better term, is being called "new atheism." The piece starts off well enough, if rather belatedly, by reviewing the recent crop of books extolling the problems with religion (Dawkin's The God…

ON STEM CELL BILLS, BUSH & CO. WIN THE BATTLE OF THE VISUAL: SC Proponents Worked PR Wonders to Get This Far, But the Power of the Bully Pulpit Is Hard to Beat; Embryo Research is Transformed Visually Into Research on "Young Humans"

I'm sorting through all the news coverage this week, and will be having posts forthcoming summarizing the major frames and narratives that appeared in Editorials, Op-Eds, soundbites, and news coverage, but to start, the most stunning outcome from yesterday's veto was to witness the clear dominance that Bush & Co. displayed when it came to visual framing. The battle over visuals is important. While the press tends to contextualize the issue and is more favorable ground for getting pro-research interpretations into coverage, the majority of Americans are going to rely on TV reports,…

Superfetation in cute, cuddly, badgers

I used to work on Eurasian badgers, Meles meles, a fascinating mustelid carnivore that is relatively easy to observe in the wild. My work was in cranial morphometrics - measuring skulls and detecting differences - and I was more interested in variation in sexual dimorphism than anything else (though I wrote two papers on the possible menas by which the species colonized Ireland). The following press release by the University of Chicago Press caught my eye. In a fascinating new study forthcoming from The Quarterly Review of Biology, biologists from the University of Oxford explore a rare…

Science on the Campaign Trail

A really great Issues in Science and Technology article by Sheril and our ScienceDebate2008 colleague (and CEO) Shawn Otto is now available online here. It is a look back at the unprecedented ScienceDebate initiative and the not inconsiderable impact it had on the campaign--despite numerous hurdles, including an uninterested media and candidates who were not exactly jumping to debate science policy. An excerpt: Although the candidates still refused to debate, instead attending yet another faith forum at Saddleback Church in California, Science Debate 2008 was able to obtain written answers…

Massive amounts of meta

As I approach my one year anniversary of blogging here on ScienceBlogs.com, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of blogging. Being here on Sb has done a lot of good for me, from speaking engagements to opportunities to write academic & popular articles, but I have also been thinking of what my "next step" should be. Coincidentally, last night a number of bloggers posted some unrelated articles that corresponded to my own questions and concerns about science blogging. At the World's Fair, Benjamin considers the failure of blogging to initiate…

The Australian has another go at bloggers

The punditariat at the Australian has lashed out at bloggers yet again (see here and here for previous examples). This time it's David Burchell, whose thesis is that all bloggers provide is a "vast outpouring of pseudo-expertise and vituperation". Naturally bloggers have responded, with Gary Sauer-Thompson writing There is no attempt by Burchell to engage with any Australian political blogger. All are condemned and tossed into the waste bin without any argument. Burchell's position is one in which the reasoned arguments of Australian political bloggers on public issues is characterised by…

23andMe gets scooped on hair curl genes

Medland et al. (2009). Common Variants in the Trichohyalin Gene Are Associated with Straight Hair in Europeans. The American Journal of Human Genetics DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.10.009 A couple of weeks ago I reported on a presentation by 23andMe's Nick Eriksson at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Honolulu, in which Eriksson presented data on a series of genome-wide association studies performed by the company using genetic and trait data from its customers. Along with genetic analysis of a variety of other traits (such as asparagus anosmia and photic sneeze) Eriksson…

Public Comments Open on Draft NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research

About a week ago, the NIH announced its draft guidelines covering the funding of human embryonic stem cell research. You can read the draft guidelines here and my post on the topic here. As these are draft guidelines, they are open to a month-long period of public comment before the final guidelines are released, and an online system for accepting comments has just been opened up. Comments must be received by 11:00 pm EST on May 26, 2009, and you can enter your comments here. Below, I have pasted the comments I submitted: To Whom It May Concern: These comments are in response to the Draft…

Science: It's a girl thing. Excuse me while I die inside.

Yet another well-meaning yet soul-crushingly misdirected initiative from the public purse, this time as the European Commission engages in a cack-handed attempt to convince the high-heeled, lipstick stained people they've conflated with women in general that science is a Girl Thing.   It seems to assume that it's impossible for women to be interested in chemistry unless it's in the context of cosmetics, or biology except insomuch as fashion.  If you can stomach it, here's a the video in all its garish horror -  Science: It's a girl thing (now removed in shame by the makers - mirror below). It…

The Multi-dimensioned Mind, The Inexperienced God

[Repost from gregladen.com] New findings reported by Harvard researchers in the journal Science suggest that the mind is typically viewed as having multiple dimensions that relate to specific important characteristics of individuals. This study has implications for how individuals develop ethical or moral stands on topics such as abortion, and how individuals view god, life, and death. The study was based an online survey (n= 2,000+). The results suggest that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: One is "agency," or the individual's ability for self-control, morality…

Death by supplements

The annoying death crud that has gripped me continues apace. Fortunately, I happen to have a rather interesting guest blog post that I've had lying around a while, and now seems like the perfect time to use it. It comes from Dr. Arnon Krongrad, an expert in prostate cancer and minimally invasive surgery. I'm publishing it because he has a rather interesting observation about the use of supplements and how it may contribute to the development of aggressive prostate cancer. Here is Dr. Krongrad's contribution: What would you pay to have erections? Would you pay with your life? A report from…

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm Walt Crawford. This is another blog in ScienceBlogs' new Information Science channel. As with the pioneers, John Dupuis and Christina Pikas, it's not a new blog. And as with those two--both of whose blogs I've followed for years--I was pleasantly surprised when ScienceBlogs contacted me, in the person of Erin Johnson. I was maybe a little more surprised, since I'm neither a science librarian nor, technically, a librarian at all. (I don't have an ML[I]S and am exceedingly unlikely to get one at this point, barring an honorary degree.) I've been hanging around library and information…

Hype, hype, hype

Update: The paper this post discusses is available online and is open access. It can be found here. A new ScienceDaily piece reports on new molecular clock data that suggests modern birds have an "ancient origin" about 100 million years ago. My first thought upon reading the brief article was "This is news?" yet the details of what the paper actually says is going to be important in any discussion of the results. I haven't read the actual paper yet, but article notes that the authors are referring to the diversification of modern birds, or Neornithes (see comments below, & thank you to…

Podcast vs. Lecture. Let the battle begin

I found this link on twitter from New Scientist. 'iTunes university' better than the real thing This pretty much sums it up: "Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person." The article also mentions a research study by McKinney that gave half of a class of 64 podcast lectures instead of a traditional lecture. Looking at the details, it doesn't seem like too convincing of a study.…