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I doubt I can beat Wiccan's amazing physics Q&A marathon, but I'm kinda bored, and I like educating. So ask away! Rules: (1) You can ask anything, though I prefer it to be about, you know, biology ;) I'll tell you right now that I don't even know a fraction of this huge subject, so you may...

I'm about halfway through reading The God Instinct by Jesse Bering, reseach psychologist and blogger for Scientific American. While by his own admission, he isn't very good at "biting his tongue" (i.e. he's pretty open about his view that God is an illusion), the book has raised some very...

ERV on ScienceBlogs brings to our attention a detailed study of ERVs in a bunch of mouse strains that have been bred in labs for various lengths of time. Sounds cool! Not terribly surprising, but still nice to know :) Also, a few insertions seemed to be associated with gene expression...

In the latest PLoS Biology, Gerald Joyce of replicating ribozyme fame muses about the nature and probability of life in terms of information. Bit by Bit: The Darwinian Basis of Life (PLoS Biology 10:e1001323) All known examples of life belong to the same biology, but there is...

A SciAm blog post reports: I like the idea. What does everyone else think?

This looks like impressive stuff. According to a study just out in Science, a ribozyme has been half-evolved, half-engineered that can replicate pretty long (up to 95 nucleotides) RNA strands from single nucleotides. (The previous version could only do 14 nucleotides.) This new ribozyme can also...

Today's xkcd gave me such a chuckle. ETA: alt-text: 'So, we did the study again and found no link. It was probably a --' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED'

Yet another freakish Cambrian creature, yet another relative of arthropods, yet another transitional form (?). This very leggy guy just came out in Nature (reconstruction from Liu et al., 2011): It's called Diania cactiformis. It's a new lobopodian (a group including velvet worms plus a whole...

I thought those in the crevo debate might find this useful or at least interesting. I stumbled on a review (pdf here; it's a reasonably accessible read, I think) that discusses what we know (or knew, as of 2007) about the fitness effects of mutations. Basically, not all that much. Some key...

A book review in Science drew my attention to this book. Has anyone read it? It looks incredibly interesting (and written by someone who should know what he's talking about!), and apparently it's quite layman-friendly.

(This so totally for Greg1234 :D) I first heard about this yesterday in a departmental seminar, and I've only just started collecting stuff to read about it, but I thought it's too interesting not to share. *geek :cool:* The CRISPR system (second link is a delightfully short review in Science)...

This paper is a few years old, but I only heard about it in this morning's class on sexual conflict. It kinda turned my worldview upside down. Allow me to geek out about it a bit :) Pischedda A, Chippindale AK (2006) Intralocus Sexual Conflict Diminishes the Benefits of Sexual Selection. PLoS...

Very interesting new paper in PNAS: Intercalation as a means to suppress cyclization and promote polymerization of base-pairing oligonucleotides in a prebiotic world Trying to put the important bits in plain(er) English: (Disclaimer: I only read parts of the paper: the introduction, the...

To continue with the "tradition" started by the Spiders thread :) I wanted to title this thread "ctenophores" or "comb jellies" or something equivalent, but I figured that most people here (myself included) probably don't know enough about ctenophores to devote a whole thread to them like we...

Haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds really cool: Scientists Create Tiny RNA Molecule With Big Implications for Life's Origins And the big implications, brought to you by PNAS: Very, very cool. (If you have no idea what's going on, go here for a description of translation. What...

I get the Science table of contents by email, but I don't always read it. Man, I'm so glad I did today... [link] In case someone isn't too familiar with alvarezsaur(o)ids, some links: Wikipedia entry, reconstructed skeleton and life restoration of Shuvuuia deserti. I can't wait to see what...

Hi everyone, I would like to apologise to, well, everyone in general, and Razzelflabben in particular, for my sudden disappearance. :o Razzel, thanks for the (mostly) civil discussion way back in, uh, September? (I hope it wasn't August...) I would like to say that you had a good point about...

And probably a silly one. I got the idea from The Elegant Universe, which I've just started. Somewhere in the first chapter, it says that the universe wouldn't be the same if the ratios of the strengths of fundamental forces would be only slightly different. Now, that's a (to me) new way of...

I saw this today at SciAm. I didn't know swearing came from so deep, but I have plenty of subjective experience with its highly beneficial effect after knocking various body parts into hard objects :D

Just found this in my inbox: PNAS has a shiny new collection of articles on Darwin and evolution. I haven't had the time to read any of them, but some of the titles look very interesting. Natural, sexual and artificial selection, speciation, convergence, Darwin in the history of science, all...