Graying hairs that crop up with age could be more than just nature, they could be signs of stress, according to a new report in the June 12 issue of Cell. 

The researchers say that the kind of "genotoxic stress" that does damage to DNA depletes the melanocyte stem cells (MSCs) within hair follicles that are responsible for making those pigment-producing cells. Rather than dying off, when the going gets tough, those precious stem cells differentiate, forming fully mature melanocytes themselves. Anything that can limit the stress might stop the graying from happening, the researchers said. 

Who says politics and science can't mix?   Well, we say they shouldn't mix but we're rare in science media.  Yet sometimes political events can make for great science studies too.

Case in point, the value neuroscientists at the University of Washington got when former President George W. Bush and Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had shoes thrown at them by a crazy Iraqi 'reporter' during a Baghdad news conference. 

When Bush ducked and Maliki didn't flinch as the first shoe sailed toward them, it was a real-world example supporting the theory that there are two independent pathways in the human visual system. 

Can you tell when your dog has done something wrong by his appearance?   Not really, says Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, in Behavioural Processes.   It's mostly what you want to see.

Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a "guilty look" to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see 'guilt' in a dog's body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn't have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.

A study of patients and members of the public has shown that most lack even basic knowledge of human anatomy. The research, featured in the journal BMC Family Practice, found that people were generally incapable of identifying the location of major organs, even if they were currently receiving relevant treatment.

This study on "Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science" is now old news, but it hasn't answered many of the questions we're interested in about women in academic science careers. Women in 2004 and 2005 at top research universities were as successful as men in obtaining academic jobs and tenure, but the rub is that women are less likely to apply for academic or go up for tenure.

Why? Well, like I said, there are more questions that have to be addressed before we know why, but I'm betting that a big part of the problem is this:

I regularly read the Huffington Post, for the good reason that it often sports intelligent articles written from a progressive standpoint, and because I believe in open access and open contribution to the socio-political discourse (otherwise, I wouldn’t bother writing this blog).

Then again, one of the drawbacks of openness is that you get crap together with the good stuff.

This isn’t altogether bad, since reading crap is a necessary component of developing one’s own sense of critical thinking, sharpening the baloney detector, so to speak. But crap needs to be responded to, especially when it comes from influential sources.

Contrary to many notions about predators, it would seem that there are many whose success is directly linked to their social organization and more specifically to the role of the social leaders that may direct the group.



Predation is, by its nature, an energy intensive, high risk endeavor. Unexpected events may occur resulting in injuries, which may directly affect the ability of the predator to survive.

No. 1 “Evolution is the external and visible manifestation of the differential survival of alternative replicators.”

This is my all-time favourite, the Dawkins Fallacy, the definition of evolution Richard Dawkins gave in The Extended Phenotype p.82. The fallacy it contains is so obvious I’m amazed that his colleagues have not drawn his attention to it. The survival of replicators is a result of evolution, an outcome, and therefore cannot be the definition of evolution. If we said that fire is the visible manifestation of the production of ash, the statement would be true but meaningless. It would not be a definition of fire and it would tell us nothing about fire, just as Dawkins’ definition tells us nothing about evolution.

The search for planets capable of sustainable life (as we know it) is on, but with an infinite number of planets astronomers are focusing their attention on each system's 'habitable zone', where heat radiated from the star is just right to keep a planet's water in liquid form. They have found planets orbiting red dwarf stars because those make up about three-quarters of the stars close to our solar system. Potentially habitable planets must orbit closer to those stars, perhaps one-fiftieth the distance of Earth to the sun, since they are smaller and generate less heat than our sun.

Matthew C. Nisbet, assistant professor in the School of Communication writing in Nature Biotechnology, says there are changes that must be made to ensure quality science communication in the future. Some of his recommendations, based on the results of a science communication workshop in Washington, D.C., are: 1. Scientists should pursue a trust- and dialogue-based relationship with the public. The goal is not to 'sell the public' but to democratize public input about scientific issues so that members of the public can meaningfully participate in science-related decision making, which is not framing, but then ...