ResearchBlogging.org News

Krystal D’Costa selects notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the social sciences, covering anthropology, research, and philosophy. She blogs about anthropology, technology, and urban life at Anthropology in Practice. Follow her on Twitter @krystaldcosta.

Let’s get to it:

• You may have heard of Mitochondrial Eve, but have you heard of the Ancestral Mare? At Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston walks readers through the story of a recent common ancestor of horses.
• If you’re bad at music, you might also be bad at Chinese. A quick discussion at For the Ears explores why amusic people might have more difficulty with languages with small differences in pitch changes.
• Those of you with strong stomachs, an appetite for the gruesome, and a high respect for cultural differences might want to visit Body Horrors, where Rebecca Kreston has a delightfully squirmish post about a canine parasite in Northwest Kenya.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal.

• What happens when psychologists take things too literally? They put people in boxes, that’s what. Elizabeth Preston has more at Inkfish.
• If you’re bad a music, might you also be bad at learning Chinese, a language that relies on subtle distinctions in pitch? Maybe not. Callum James Hackett has the details at For The Ears.
• “Males have bigger brains than females,” writes Doctor Zen at NeuroDojo. At least, “if those males are sticklebacks from Iceland.”

That’s it for this week… Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

Another Monday, another week. Here’s what’s new from the physical sciences on ResearchBlogging.

What can we learn from nothing at all? On We are all in the gutter, colleague astronomer Niall Deacon describes a new paper on an intriguing gamma ray burst detected in 2005, which scientists have recently attempted to explain with a non-detection of gravitational waves.

How to encrypt a molecule? On NanoExplanations, Aaron Sterling gives a nice description of the issues with watermarking molecular structures.

The Microfluidics Future blog is really giving me an appreciation of this fascinating field of engineering. This week, Hector talks about a lab-on-a-chip project that mimicks spiders’ silk weaving capabilities. Awesome stuff.

Have a great week! I’ll be back next Monday with more selections.

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He unravels viruses at virology blog.

• The vision of protein design is to come up with a way to make enzymes that will perform novel chemistry. It has been suggested that the design process could be improved by crowdsourcing certain parts of the problem to gamers.
• The bacteria that make up the human gut microbiota engage in high levels of horizontal gene transfer. In one study, the high rate of transfer between E. coli and Salmonella two species was dependent on inflammation caused by the latter bacteria.
• Lateral gene transfer (LGT) facilitates the emergence and spread of bacterial virulence and antibiotic resistance. To the three classical mechanisms of LGT (transformation, transduction, and conjugation), we now add three other mechanisms by which DNA can be transferred between bacteria: gene transfer agents, membrane vesicles, and intercellular nanotubes.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

Krystal D’Costa selects notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the social sciences, covering anthropology, research, and philosophy. She blogs about anthropology, technology, and urban life at Anthropology in Practice. Follow her on Twitter @krystaldcosta.

Bloggers in the social sciences have been busy in the last week. You’ll find no shortage of interesting posts. There were some tough calls to make, but choose I must:

• The fall of one of the most powerful empires to have existed continues to fascinate us 1500 years after the fact. At Powered by Osteons, Kristina Killgrove investigates whether lead poisoning might have played a role in the Roman Empire’s undoing.
• One in ten people are on the spectrum for dyslexia. Dr. Stuart Farrimond makes a brief case for the genetic preservation of dyslexia, suggesting that it would have granted our evolutionary ancestors much needed benefits for survival in a world that was vastly different from out.
• Have you ever been in a situation where you just didn’t feel smart? Greg Laden explains that intelligence may be a socio-cultural signal that varies from context to context.
• What big teeth you have, A. bosei! At Lawn Chair Anthropology, Zachary Cofran tries to make sense of A. bosei’s dentition, which does not seem suited for its diet.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal.

• Sometimes you’re interested in new papers not for the main results that the authors present, but for some other data you see in a graph that might catch the corner of your eye. At Cracking the Enigma, Jon Brock discusses this, and a handy tool to help extract that data. The Adventures of DataThief!
• At BishopBlog, Dorothy Bishop has a nice inside-baseball sort of post about the business of publishing papers in high-impact journals. Novelty, interest and replicability.
• Having pets is a good thing, and science agrees. At Gaines, on Brains, find out about the latest research in this area: Fur-iends with Benefits.

That’s it for this week… Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

Today’s selections all seem to show us a glimpse of awesome new technology in a bright if distant future.

The shrinking magnetic storage devices story made some waves in the media, but not all stories got the science right. On All that matters Joerg Heber sets the record straight, and describes really nicely why this work should excite us.

Char’s Basal Science post on glow in the dark materials reminded me of the disappointingly faint glowing stars I once decorated my bedroom with. The science behind the phenomenon is pretty cool though, and the newly developed long-duration phosphorescent material he describes holds promise for exciting future applications.

How much water could we save if we could clean our clothes by just leaving them out in the sun for a few hours? Also on Basal Science, Cath talks about new developments in the quest for self-cleaning fabrics.

Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Monday with more picks.

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He unravels viruses at virology blog.

• The first recorded outbreak of syphilis, caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum, occurred in 1494 in Naples, Italy. Was the disease brought to Europe by Columbus and his crew, or was it always present in the Old World?
• It is well-known that RNAi silences genes by targeting mRNAs for degradation. Another mechanism of gene silencing occurs via modification of chromatin modifications. The results of studies in C. elegans reveal that such chromatin modification is gene specific and heritable.
• NADPH oxidase is a membrane-bound complex that produces reactive oxygen and nitrogen species that can destroy invading bacteria or viruses. Reduced activity of this enzyme might play a role in the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

Krystal D’Costa selects notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the social sciences, covering anthropology, research, and philosophy. She blogs about anthropology, technology, and urban life at Anthropology in Practice. Follow her on Twitter @krystaldcosta.

This week on ResearchBlogging.org:

• Is Columbus and his crew to blame for the rise of syphilis in the Old World? The debate continues at Spirochetes Unwound.
• What’s working and what isn’t working in rural education in India? Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal discusses the state of Indian rural education in 2011.
• How do you develop a typology within a typology? Evoanth has the details on archaeological classifications.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal.

• You might think that labels and logos indicate power or prestige, but you’d be wrong. Find out about the complicated relationship between overt labels and power at PsySociety in a great post by Melanie Tannenbaum.
• Can music make your hospital stay more bearable? In a post at a new (to me) blog called For the Ears, Callum James Hacket discusses some research on this question.
• Satire is a particularly nuanced form of humor. It might not be surprising, then, that Neurobonkers reports on a study that found “Colbert’s satire is so spectacularly deadpan that research has demonstrated that a significant proportion of right wing Americans actually believe that Colbert is genuinely a right wing commentator!”
• Finally, over at Psych Your Mind, Juli Breines lists her top five surprising social psychology findings from 2011.

That’s it for this week… Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!