Via F1000 Member Earl Miller on twitter comes a nomination for an Ig Nobel prize: a note in Neuropsychologia, Thinking of God moves attention10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.029. The authors, at the University of Toronto, looked at target detection responses of people, finding faster responses when concepts of God or Devil were associated, respectively, with up/right or down/left spatial…
When you’ve got your chromatids together at cytokinesis, how do you separate them again? Here’s a lovely little evaluation from University of Michigan’s Yukiko Yamashita, talking about the protein cohesin, which is apparently involved in the proper segregation, and consequent release, of both chromosomes and centrosomes.
Yesterday on Facebook I posted a picture of … something, that had you all guessing: It’s actually a stereo-pair of mitochondria from human Leydig cells–the testosterone-producing cells of the testes–viewed using high resolution scanning electron microscopy. Evaluating the paper, F1000 Member Rosemarie Heyn at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” points out that there are…
Watching a pollen-covered bumblebee assaulting one of my sunflowers at the weekend, I was reminded of a remarkable paper in July’s J Exp Biol, which has attracted three evaluations. Tien Luu and colleagues in Queensland, Australia, built what is essentially a fully immersive flight simulator for bees, and discovered something very interesting about their flight.…
Cell biologists are a grumblesome lot. They always want more–more fluorophores, more microscopes, more photon yield… A technical advance in Nature Methods uses Bessel beam illumination to provide rapid three-dimensional imaging, creating what F1000 Member Bob Goldstein at UNC Chapel Hill calls “truly stunning” films of live cells. Do check out Bob’s evaluation, and the…
There was a fascinating-looking evaluation yesterday from James Duffin, Toronto, on a J Appl Phys article: Point: Counterpoint “High Altitude is / is not for the Birds!”. Unfortunately there’s no abstract, and I can’t get access to the article (despite the journal site telling me the PDF is free). It looks like some kind of…
Can a human perform as well as a machine? Usually the question is posed the other way round, and depressingly frequently answered with “much better.” But a curious study in Anesthesiology suggests that with a bit of training, anesthesiologists are just as capable of interpreting the output, in real time, of machines that keep an…
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no laughing matter–unless you’re an indomitable Gaul, that is. In the ever-popular Asterix the Gaul comic books, Asterix, his companions dish out magic potion-powered pugilism to various bad guys–Romans, Vikings, pirates and even extraterrestrials. If you’re anything like me, you might have wondered what happens to these victims. Wonder no…
Michael Lappe is an F1000 Member in Structural Genomics, and runs an independent group at the Max Planck in Berlin. Michael has just evaluated a very interesting paper on something that has occurred to most of us who have anything at all to do with biological datasets–‘Sciencenet’–towards a global search and share engine for all…
A fascinating little paper came out in PNAS last week, Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans10.1073/pnas.1105456108 (open access). Selected for F1000 by FM in Ecology Karl Sigmund, the authors took pre-existing communities–1,543 Ugandan farmers in 50 producer cooperatives–and got them to play a variant of a public goods game (PGG). In these…
