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POPSFish have personalities "The recognition that behavioral syndromes exist in a wide range of animal species is a key development in the understanding of animal behavior,"
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POPSGossip more powerful than truth 
The researchers then took the game a step further and showed the students the actual decisions people had made. But they also supplied false gossip that contradicted that evidence. In these cases, the students based their decisions to award money on the gossip, rather than the hard evidence, showing such information is a powerful tool, Sommerfeld said. "Rationally if you know what the people did, you should care, but they still listened to what others said," he said. "They even reacted on it if they knew better." Researchers have long used similar games to study how people cooperate and the impact of gossip in groups. Scientists define gossip as social information spread about a person who is not present, Sommerfeld said. In evolutionary terms, gossip can be an important tool for people to acquire information about others' reputations or navigate through social networks at work and in their everyday lives, the study said. One example could be using gossip to learn tha
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POPSSimple reason helps males evolve more quickly “There’s a health aspect in figuring out differences in gene expression between the sexes,” said Wayne. “To make a male or a female, even in a fly, it’s all about turning things on -- either in different places or different amounts or at different times -- because we all basically have the same starting set of genes.”
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POPSBig-brained Animals Evolve Faster a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that animals with larger brains, relative to their body size, have more developed skills for changing their behavior through learning and innovation, facilitating the invasion of novel environments and the use of novel resources. Despite the progress, the role of the brain in the adaptive diversification of animals has remained controversial, mostly due to the difficulties to demonstrate that big-brained animals evolve faster. Now, ecologist Daniel Sol of CREAF-Autonomous University of Barcelona and evolutionary biologist Trevor Price of the University of Chicago, provide evidence for such a role in birds in an article in The American Naturalist. Analyzing body size measures of 7,209 species (representing 75% of all avian species), they found that avian families that have experienced the greatest diversification in body size tend to be those with brains larger than expected for their body size.
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POPSHumans are endangered while ignorant of truth and reality. There are a number of links,which are to different fields. Some information be fact, some can be philosophical, or speculative, but it will modify any opinion. Any fact doubted should be verified but these days people are learning to do that as a matter of course. If we're going to get out of this hole, we n eed a bigger ladder.
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POPSEarth is upside down • “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970. • “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...” Life magazine, January 1970. • “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970. • “...air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970. • Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years. • “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.
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POPSBacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.
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POPSEvolution in Your Brain Edelman is also chair of neurobiology at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, and founder and director of the Neurosciences Institute, a research center dedicated to unconventional “high risk, high payoff” science
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POPSDrug for Longer Life The other drug is a small synthetic chemical that is a thousand times as potent as resveratrol in activating sirtuin and can be given at a much smaller dose. Safety tests in people have just started, with no adverse effects so far. The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. There is no Food and Drug Administration category for longevity drugs, so if the company is to submit a drug for approval, it needs to be for a specific disease. Nonetheless, longevity is what has motivated the researchers and what makes the drugs potentially so appealing.
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POPSBiologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life "We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful." By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.
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POPSYes, there really are gay animals From Salon magazine, 1999. Research into "alternative sexual behavior" among animals. Apparently, it's much more prevalent than you might think. So much for homosexuality being "unnatural."
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