Tuesday evening, Facebook made major changes to its news feed and today the Internet is a hornet’s nest of complaints, protests, and threats. There is a new round of “quit Facebook” memes, and a collective groan of pain from millions of users. Similar dissent occurred when Netflix recently spun off its DVD-by-mail service into a separate company, Qwikster, or earlier this year when dating site OKCupid was purchased by the behemoth Match.com.

In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue.  It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I thought, but evolutionary and not revolutionary.  We had covered a Lancet paper on much the same thing in 2008.  But in the course of a correspondence with a media rep she noted something important; not only was this not a traditional transplant, this was not even one where an organ was decellularized and recellularized with the patient's stem cells, it was created for the patient and in just two days.

That meant no immunosuppressive drugs, at $20,000 per year, and no morbidities due to their side effects.

Octopoteuthis is a curious animal. As the name suggests, it's a squid that looks like an octopus. Babies have eight arms and two tentacles, but they lose the tentacles as they grow up--becoming the only adult squid with eight appendages.

They have other intriguing features as well. We tend to think of squid as relatively sociable animals traveling in schools or shoals, but Octopoteuthis lives a solitary life in the deep sea, rarely coming across another member of the same species.

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the possible existence of another closely related particle.

The Higgs boson would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. but a group of EPFL physicists say it would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth - and it could be verified with data from the Planck satellite.

A study out tomorrow in Nature by researchers from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at the University College of London and colleagues is questioning the anti-aging effects of sirtuin – which is “just”the most important anti-aging gene of the decade - claiming that its capacity to increase longevity was nothing more than an experimental error, and showing that,once the flaws are corrected, sirtuin has no effect on lifespan.

To religious fundamentalists, atheists in science are engaged in an insidious campaign to undercut morality and replace it with God-less relativism and moral equivalence.  To militant atheists, religious people are intellectually immature, anti-science busybodies telling people how to live.

Social projection, where we believe that others agree with us, helps us validate our beliefs. Psychologists say that we tend to believe people who are similar to us in an important way, religion or lifestyle, will act as we do and even vote as we do.

And we exaggerate differences between ourselves and those who are explicitly unlike us, another form of rationalization.

A new plant species is appropriately named Spigelia genuflexa because after fruits are formed, the fruiting branches 'bend down' and deposit  the capsules with seeds on the ground and sometimes burying them in the soft cover of moss, a phenomenon called geocarpy.

Geocarpy ensures that the seeds end up as close to the mother plant as possible, facilitating its propagation the following season. A famous example of geocarpy, a rare adaptation to growing in harsh or ephemeral environments, is the well-known peanut, which is from from the legume family and buries its fruits in the ground.

Edward Calabrese, an environmental toxicologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst,  says he has evidence that oNobel Prize winner Hermann Muller knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

We've often defended Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.  Publishing 50 years before Darwin, he can be forgiven for not having 'the greatest idea anyone ever had' and in the last few years,  geneticists have gotten on board as well and no longer dismiss out of hand his belief that acquired traits can be passed on to offspring.

Much of the pre-Darwin thinking was teleological and that is why natural selection in evolution met so much resistance.  But science quickly won and Lamarck's theory of transformation went onto the ash heap of biological history. Yet in the last decade, we have learned that the environment can leave traces in the genomes of animals and plants, in the form of epigenetic modifications.