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POPSPolitican Cartoons "The United States, some years back, found its new bogeyman "Islam" to replace its former imaginary enemy "Communism." And now the European press appears to have finally (?) found a replacement for the Jewish people that they used to malign and attack. Anti-Islam/Muslimism appears to now have officially replaced anti-Jewish sentiments in Europe. The roots of these attacks are the same: an inability to acknowledge and respect a diversity of people that might result in a Europe that is non-White and/or non-Christian. The anti-Muslim/Islam cartoons of today are little different than the anti-Jewish cartoons that were published by the Nazis during WW II."
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POPSThe DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By "Telepathic" Abilities Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.
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POPSHow Homophobia Hurts Us All It hurts me that my own Mother wouldn't love me if she knew I was bisexual, but it also helps me to know that through it all some people can love me for who I am. My husband, my youngest daughter, my very best friends, and the support at CM.
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POPSReverse evolution in real-time These findings provide further insights into the basic understanding of how evolution and diversity are generated and maintained. On the one hand, it provides evidence for evolution happening through changes in the distribution of alleles in a population (so-called standing genetic variation), from generation to generation, rather than the appearance of mutations, from one generation to the next. On the other hand, as Henrique notes, 'It has implications for the definition of biodiversity: some of the 'reversed' flies may be phenotypically identical to the ancestral flies, but they are genetically different. How then do we define biodiversity?' interesting experiments.
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POPSYour Spit Is Special :-) Mouth microbe makeup varied greatly from person to person, but not in any geographically structured way. Two people from Louisiana were likely to be as different as a Bolivian and a South African
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POPSHow rocks evolve It is not just living organisms that evolve. Minerals do too, and much of their diversity has arisen in tandem with the evolution of life
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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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POPSFamed Geneticist Creating Life Form That Turns CO2 to Fuel Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves. Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses. Suicide genes and vaccines mentioned in the same breath, sort of creeps me out a little. :roll:
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POPSPhilosophers without Gods
From book blurb on site: Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these commonstereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief. These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for example, express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in goodconscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficultproblems facing the h
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POPSHow a simple mathematic formula is starting to explain the bizarre prevalence of altruism in society This new mathematic model for society’s evolution is particularly interesting because not only it reveals a logic behind the large numbers of cooperators that we know exist in all human societies, but also it gives us a glimpse of the principles that can help “pushing” them into a better, fairer, path. Evolutionary game theory is a mathematical approach used to study (and predict) the evolution of social interactions, in which the study of conflict and decision-making is treated – like its name indicates – as a game.
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POPSMass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs. As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.
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POPSSexual strategies Breaking it down to the genes and fertility percentages does create a nice twist sometimes to the world of sex, and being a human. ;-)
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POPSAmerican Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators"of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations. Indeed strange...
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POPSGay? Who Cares? "For some of the pioneers from the edgy, embattled, ecstatic "good old days," this may be bittersweet. "But isn't that what everyone wanted 20 years ago?" Gates asks. "Just to be treated like everyone else?"
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POPSFrance launches digital library... 12,000 public domain full-text documents but is set to have by 2010 over 6 million books, movies, photographs and other documents from across the European Union countries.
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POPSSex and Gender
In fact, behind your question is the fundamental problem of the degree to which behaviour is innate and to which it is acquired – an essential question that philosophers and scientists have been debating for centuries. This remains an ideologically-charged subject, which the media adore. Absolutely. The media often echo works that argue that cerebral specialisation differs between male and female. They say, for example, that language functions are undertaken by both hemispheres only in women’s brains. What do you say? The theories on the hemispheric differences between the sexes in language appeared over thirty years ago. They have not been confirmed by recent brain imaging studies which allow us to see the living brain at work. These theories are often based on observations carried out on very small samples – often a dozen people. People continue to quote these studies whereas contemporary scientific reality is very different. Meta-analyses, which draw conclusions from all the exp
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