It feels good, for a die-hard sceptic like I am, to live and let unexplained phenomena die. The phenomena in question are measured deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model (SM), our wonderful theory of subnuclear interactions, which has been condemned to fail by theorists soon after its construction, but continues, disappointingly for many, to succeed in explaining experimental results.

The encouragement (or requirement) of diversity sometimes gets labeled reverse racism, under the assumption that encourgaing diversity is only about somehow making up for past injustices by discriminating against today's white men who may never have themselves committed such injustices.

I'm not trying to step into the touchy issue of Supreme Court politics (nor am I arguing that quotas are always a good thing), but I've run across this interesting observation in several contexts recently:

"Participants push themselves to formulate better arguments when they know they will have to justify them."

In the last few columns, I described how laboratory simulations of a volcanic prebiotic environment showed that interesting organic reactions can be driven by the heat and pressure associated with vulcanism. I also described my own studies of volcanic sites on the present Earth, which we call prebiotic analogue environments, and pointed out some of the problems that arise when we try to duplicate laboratory experiments in the real world geothermal conditions. 

In the comments following the column, Gerhard Adam suggested that ice might be a plausible alternative to a hot site for the origin of life.

Chicago O’Hare Incident

Human laughter can be traced back 10-16 million years to the last common ancestor of humans and great apes, according to new research published today.   Dr Marina Davila Ross, a primatologist of the psychology department at the University of Portsmouth, reconstructed the origins of human laughter by mapping the laughter sounds of great apes and humans on an evolutionary tree.

In Davila Ross’s reconstructed evolutionary tree, humans were closest to bonobos and chimpanzees, more distant from gorillas and most distant from orangutans.  

Biologists always love when researchers in psychology departments reconfigure the evolutionary tree for them.

New research shows that when two species of stickleback fish evolved,  different genes in each species caused the loss of their pelvises and body armor.  Researchers say they were surprised because they expected the same genes would control the same changes in both related fish.

Thank you.  Thank you very much.

Using single-molecule manipulation, researchers at Harvard University say they have uncovered a fundamental feedback mechanism that the body uses in regulating the clotting of blood. A new physical, quantitative, and predictive model of how the body works to respond to injury could improve treatment of bleeding disorders.

It also gives insight into how bleeding disorders, such as type 2A von Willebrand disease, disrupt this regulation system, potentially leading to new avenues for treatment and diagnosis.

Dating human migration has always been something of a guess, especially without corroborating archaeological evidence.

Researchers at the University of Leeds say they have devised a more accurate method .  That's good news, because the most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt. 

Bats, unlike most animals, don't primarily use their voices for communication.  Instead, they use echolocation to navigate their surroundings but they can also use it, and the characteristics of other bats' voices, to recognize each other, according to a study by researchers from the University of Tuebingen, Germany and the University of Applied Sciences in Konstanz, Germany.

The study published June 5 in PLoS Computational Biology, explains how bats use echolocation for more than just spatial knowledge and it might also help explain how some bats travel at high speed, at night, in formation without interfering with each other.

In previous posts I have made the argument that the brain constructs a data organization framework which represents our worldview (or belief systems). It is against this structure that new information will be evaluated, accepted, or rejected. I also want to be clear that the idea of a worldview or belief system is not optional. All humans have one, since it is a requirement to provide a minimal framework against which data is acquired and classified. It should also be understood that the concept of a belief system carries no special connotation be it religious, superstitious, supernatural, or anything else. It is simply a term that refers to the data organization framework in the brain.