Astounding lizard evolution 1971-present

From Pharyngula: Still just a lizard

Here's the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km², and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km², which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.

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The transplanted P. sicula thrived and swarmed over the island of Pod Mrcaru, but they were different, and they had evolved in multiple ways.

The original P. sicula were insectivores who occasionally munched on a leaf; approximately 4-7% of their diet was vegetation. The P. sicula of Pod Mrcaru, though, had adopted a more vegetarian diet: examining their gut contents revealed that 34% of their diet was plants in the spring, climbing to 61% in the summer…and much of this diet was hard-to-digest stuff, high in cellulose. This is a fairly radical shift.

There were concomitant changes. The lizards' skulls were wider, deeper, and longer, and they had stronger bites — a necessity for chomping off bits of tough plants, instead of soft mosquitos. Instead of chasing bugs, they're browsing stationary plants, and their legs are shorter and they are slower. Population densities are higher. The Pod Mrcaru lizards no longer seem to defend territories, so there have been behavioral changes.

Still just a lizard, I know.

Now here's something really cool, though: these lizards have evolved cecal valves. What those are are muscular ridges in the gut that allow the animal to close off sections of the tube to slow the progress of food through them, and to act as fermentation chambers where plant material can be broken down by commensal organisms like bacteria and nematodes — and the guts of Pod Mrcaru P. sicula are swarming with nematodes not found in the guts of their Pod Kopiste cousins.

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Kandel: Short vs. Long-term memory

Science vs. Astrology

Astrologers fail to predict proof they are wrong
Telegraph.co.uk - August 17th, 2003

Good news for rational, level-headed Virgoans everywhere: just as you might have predicted, scientists have found astrology to be rubbish.

Its central claim - that our human characteristics are moulded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of our birth - appears to have been debunked once and for all and beyond doubt by the most thorough scientific study ever made into it.

For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people - most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subject should have had very similar traits.

The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study begun in London in 1958 into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading - all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.

The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the "time twins", however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: "The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative."
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Top Docs paid to back fraudulent findings

Merck wrote drug studies for doctors
By Stephanie Saul - International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.

The article cited one draft of a Vioxx research study that was still in want of a big-name researcher, identifying the lead writer only as "External author?"

Vioxx was a best-selling drug before Merck took it off the market in 2004 over evidence linking it to heart attacks. Last fall, the company agreed to a $4.85 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by former Vioxx patients or their families.

The lead author of Wednesday's article, Dr. Joseph Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry's published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread.

"It almost calls into question all legitimate research that's been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician," said Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and posted Tuesday on the journal's Web site.
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Facial cues for mate selection

Reuters: The image shows a pair of computerised "averaged" facial photographs taken from real people's pictures. According to the research, the face on the right is of someone who is more likely to be interested in a short-term sexual relationship whilst the one on the left is more likely to be interested in a long-term relationship.

LONDON (Reuters) - Members of the opposite sex can spot whether someone is after a one-night stand or something more permanent just by looking at their face, scientists said on Wednesday.

On men, a square jaw, large nose and small eyes are more likely to betray the look of lust than of love.

Women found men with softer features more likely to opt for commitment.

But the Durham University-led research found that while men can judge whether a woman is footloose-and-fancy-free or not, there is no common facial detail to explain it.

About 700 heterosexual people took part in the survey carried out by Durham, St. Andrews and Aberdeen universities.
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For couples:
Social influence in human face preference: men and women are influenced more for long-term than short-term attractiveness decisions

Abstract
In nonhuman animals, mate-choice copying has received much attention, with studies demonstrating that females tend to copy the choices of other females for specific males. Here we show, for both men and women, that pairing with an attractive partner increases the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces for long-term relationship decisions but not short-term decisions. Our study therefore shows social transmission of face preference in humans, which may have important consequences for the evolution of human traits. Our study also highlights the flexibility of human mate choice and suggests that, for humans, learning about nonphysical traits that are important to pair-bonding drives copying-like behavior.

Discussion
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Mate-choice copying has been proposed to be adaptive when there is a cost, such as energy, to evaluating the quality of potential mates or when discriminating between the quality of potential mates is difficult (Wade & Pruett-Jones 1990). In this way, social transmission may allow individuals to assess a potential mate quickly and efficiently, and perhaps teaches individuals what to look for in a mate. In humans, there are many aspects to a partner other than their physical traits, and potentially, the choices of others can be used to infer positive or negative traits, such as behavior, resources, or intelligence, which are difficult to infer just from physical appearance.

Specificity to long-term preferences implies that social influence is being used to determine nonphysical traits that make a target a good long-term partner. Studies have shown that individuals value physical attractiveness in short-term contexts over other attractive traits such as pleasant personalities (Buss & Schmitt 1993). Judges may then be able to acquire the physical information from a photograph to judge physical attractiveness for short-term contexts, and hence, the extra information from the paired partner is of little relevance. Humans bring two factors to a parenting relationship: a level of parental investment and potential heritable benefits (e.g., genes for high-quality immune systems). Social information may be more useful for judging the former given such information is less readily discernable. Of course, in species without parental care, mate-choice copying likely occurs because individuals are able to acquire information about the genetic quality of a prospective mate (Witte & Ryan 2002), and potentially, this is also true in humans despite our finding of specificity to long-term judgments.

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Neutron Star to envolope the world?

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Boffins: Antimatter comes from black holes, neutron stars
'No one could have expected so much unexpectedness'

By Lewis Page - January 15th 2008
TheRegister.co.uk

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Topflight astrophysics boffins believe they may have cracked the tricky problem of how to make antimatter, which would be useful for many purposes: for instance powering relatively practical starships, or - of course - blowing up an entire planet in one go. However, it appears that making antimatter requires the possession of a black hole or a neutron star, so it won't be happening any time soon.

For those few readers who don't know, antimatter is like normal matter but with properties reversed. Thus a normal electron of the type used to publish this article has a negative charge*, but an anti-electron (aka positron) is positive.

The clever thing about antimatter is that when it bumps into normal matter the two annihilate each other completely, converting entirely into energy according to Einstein's famous formula E=mc². This is the most powerful fuel-to-energy generation process possible - it makes an H-bomb look like a cap pistol. Some form of antimatter-powered drive might actually allow humans to travel between the stars within their own lifetimes under Einsteinian physics.

The energy created when electrons and positrons meet is emitted in the form of gamma rays. Back in the 1970s the existence of antimatter in the universe was verified in the obvious way - by sending gamma-ray detectors into the upper atmosphere on balloons.

According to the balloon detectors, there seems to be a large cloud of positrons throughout the centre of our galaxy, about 10,000 lightyears across and giving off the energy of 10,000 suns from constant antimatter annihilation as it reacts with ordinary electrons. But nobody knew why or how the antimatter was being created in the first place.

Now, however, that conundrum seems to have been solved.

"I think I can hear a collective sigh of relief," said Marvin Leventhal, a noted brainbox active in the field.

It seems that an international team of astrophysicists boiled down four years' worth of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) satellite INTEGRAL (INTErnational Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory). They noted that the glowing gamma-ray positron cloud bulged significantly in the direction of Galactic west.

The positron cloud bulge coincided with a region in which there are believed to be a lot of binary star systems containing neutron stars or the even more outrageous black holes. These star systems are known as "hard low-mass X-ray binaries".

According to NASA, this strongly suggests that "these binaries are churning out at least half of the antimatter, and perhaps all of it."

Rival boffins had of late been suggesting that the antimatter was actually created by some process involving dark matter, but NASA's Gerry Skinner pooh-poohed such notions.

"The INTEGRAL results seem to rule out dark matter," he said.

"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," added his colleague Georg Weidenspointer of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Weidenspointer, Skinner and Leventhal published their findings in the current issue of Nature.

Nobody knows exactly how black holes and neutron stars make antimatter, however. Nor is it clear how the antimatter gets away from such massive gravity fields, to drift about the Galactic core getting annihilated.

"We expected something unexpected, but we did not expect this," said Skinner, rather splendidly, suggesting that nobody could have expected so much unexpectedness.

NASA presumes to trump INTEGRAL by launching GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, this year. The space agency says its new satellite "may help clarify" the business of antimatter production; also that it might allow the detection of other, larger antiparticles rather than just positrons.

Original Article

British announce Human - Animal Hybrids

First British human-animal hybrid embryos created by scientists
The Guardian - Wednesday April 02 2008

Britain's first human-animal hybrid embryos have been created, forming a crucial first step, scientists believe, towards a supply of stem cells that could be used to investigate debilitating and so far untreatable conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease.

Lyle Armstrong, who led the work, gained permission in January from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create the embryos, known as "cytoplasmic hybrids".

His team at Newcastle University produced the embryos by inserting human DNA from a skin cell into a hollowed-out cow egg. An electric shock then induced the hybrid embryo to grow. The embryo, 99.9% human and 0.1% other animal, grew for three days, until it had 32 cells.

Eventually, scientists hope to grow such embryos for six days, and then extract stem cells from them. The researchers insisted the embryos would never be implanted into a woman and that the only reason they used cow eggs was due to the scarcity of human eggs.
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Paranoia becoming more prevalent in Britain

British population are 'highly paranoid'
By Bonnie Malkin and agencies - Telegraph.co.uk

11:33am BST 01/04/2008

The British population are highly paranoid, a study into fear on London's underground system has found.

Experts used to believe that paranoid thoughts - often involving exaggerated feelings of persecution or threat - were usually confined to people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants

But the new research, involving a "virtual" journey on the London underground, suggests that around a third of people regularly have moments of paranoia.

Dr Daniel Freeman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, who developed and led the experiment, said: "Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one's direction or hearing laughter in a room, but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions.

"Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people."

In the study, 200 volunteers drawn from the general population wore virtual reality headsets which set them on a computer-generated tube journey.
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During the four minute ride between London underground stops, the volunteers were able to walk around a carriage filled with "virtual" passengers who behaved like real people.

The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One read a newspaper, while another occasionally smiled if looked at. To add to the realism, a soundtrack of a train carriage was played.

While most volunteers found the computer characters friendly or neutral, almost 40 per cent experienced at least one paranoid thought.

A pre-assessment showed that those who were anxious, worried, pessimistic, or had low self-esteem, were most likely to feel paranoid.

One participant who experienced paranoid thoughts told the scientists: "There's something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something - assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

Another said: "There was a guy spooking me out - tried to get away from him. Didn't like his face. I'm sure he looked at me more than a couple of times though might be imagining it."

The findings are reported today in the British Journal of Psychiatry (1).
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