Palmers Guide

Credit: Professor Roy Caldwell at UC Berkeley.
If you want to find an ocean animal that kills with speed, don’t look to sharks, swordfishes, or barracuda. Instead, try to find a mantis shrimp. These pugilistic relatives of crabs and lobsters attack other animals by rapidly unfurling a pair of arms held under their heads…

The star of Thanksgiving was domesticated by Mayans 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Image of a print showing small wormhole traces; courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Wormholes aren’t just for time travel or teleportation anymore. Some very real and ancient wormholes are now helping to trace the distribution of insect species and artwork.
A biologist found himself in the unlikely world of centuries-old European woodblock print art…

A view from the Louisiana State-Alabama college football game, November 3, 2012. Credit: flickr/thepipe26
The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) college football rankings are in turmoil. For two weeks in a row, the top-ranked team has been upset by an underdog from central Texas. (Full disclosure: As a Baylor alum who is the daughter and granddaughter of Aggies, I might be just a little smug…

Fifty years after scientists first posed a question about protein folding, the search for answers has led to the creation of a full-fledged field of research that led to major advances in supercomputers, new materials and drug discovery, and shaped our understanding of the basic processes of life, including so-called “protein-folding diseases” such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and type II diabetes.

This is a false-colored scanning electron micrograph of a zebrafish embryo, a popular disease model and study system for drug development and cancer research.  

Brain scans of rap artists taken during improvised performances provide a snapshot of creative flow.

Scientist have revealed the birth timing and embryonic origin of a critical class of inhibitory brain cells called chandelier cells, tracing the specific paths they take during early development into the cerebral cortex of the mouse brain. The work sheds light on the genetically programed, or “nature” part of the nature/nurture question of human development.

Former Apprentice candidate Katie Hopkins has offered solutions to the problems with the NHS. So it’s only fair that someone with biomedical science knowledge offers solutions for how to fix the problems with the economy.SpotOn London 2012 took place recently. For those unaware, it’s a conference focussing on “how science is carried out and communicated online”…

A particle, which might be a Higgs boson, decaying into muons in the ATLAS detector. Credit: ATLAS Experiment/CERN
If you’ve read anything about the Higgs boson, you probably know that this particle is special because it can explain how fundamental particles acquire mass. Specifically, evidence of the boson is evidence that an omnipresent Higgs field exists—one that slows particles down and makes them heavy…

Neighboring neurons in an insect’s antennae can block each other without sharing any synaptic connections.

BETTIAH, INDIA–A jeep traveling through this small town in rural Bihar State affords the usual sights: the traffic chaos of donkey carts, cycle-rickshaw wallahs, motorbikes carrying six-person families, wandering cattle and pigs–all contributing to the cacophony of urban Indian life. As the town chaos thins out, there are other sights such as: haystacks, sugar cane fields and bright pink saris…

Many months ago I told some of my friends that I’d run analyses of their 23andMe data, and report it back to them. A year ago I made the same promise to some of my readers. But life got in the way, and I’ve been very busy. I’m working on scripts to make the whole process efficient for me (if you want to know, I’m trying to get the output to be easy to merge many runs with CLUMPP and then produce DISTRUCT type outputs; I’ve done this with other Admixture outputs, but for various reasons the labeling gets messed up with my ‘personal’ project)…

Despite claims that pseudoscientific views are on the rise, history shows that belief in things like astrology or the paranormal have always been with us and are likely to remainI often come across the assumption, or assertion, that pseudoscientific views or belief in the paranormal are increasing. Yet the claim that there is a “rising tide of irrationality” seems to be backed by little evidence…