HENRY

Mike Love’s got an awesome Geneaology of Influence application which visualizes “the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture”. Very very awesome

A new study by Franks et al in today’s P.N.A.S., demonstrates the rapid evolution of flowering time as a response to climate change. They took stored ancestral seeds from a pre-drought population of Brassica rapa and compared how long it took the ancestral plants, the modern post-drought plants and hybrids of the two to flower.

The shortened growing season caused by the drought led to rapid adaptive evolution for quicker flowering times, in just a few generations.

Steven Pinker in Time:

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn’t respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up.(…) Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

Continue reading The Mystery of Consciousness

Richard Robinson in PLOS Biology:

A field of spring wildflowers, abuzz with busy insects seeking nectar and spreading pollen, may look like a perfect model of random interaction. But ecologists have discovered order within this anarchy. For instance, as the number of species grows, the number of interactions does too, while the connectivity (the fraction of possible interactions that actually occur) and the nestedness (the relative importance of generalist species as mutualistic partners of specialist species) shrinks. Study of such networks of species is still in its youth, and the rules that generate these patterns of interaction are still being worked out. In a new study, Luis Santamaría and Miguel Rodríguez-Gironés propose that two key mechanisms—trait complementarity and barriers to exploitation—go a long way in explaining the structure of actual networks of plants and their many pollinators.

Continue reading Both Barriers and Trait Complementarity Govern Pollination Network Structure or the paper causing the discussion, Linkage Rules for Plant–Pollinator Networks: Trait Complementarity or Exploitation Barriers?

Jim Holt in the New York Times:

But when it comes to the still bigger picture — the fate of civilization, of the planet, of the cosmos — pessimism has historically been the rule. A sense that things are heading downhill is common to nearly every culture, as Arthur Herman observes in “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It’s not hard to find a psychological explanation for this big-picture gloominess. As we age, we become aware of our powers diminishing; we dwell on the happy episodes from our past and forget the wretched ones; moving toward the grave, we are consumed by nostalgia and foreboding. What could be more natural than to project this mixture of attitudes onto history at large? Continued…

Bill Hooker at 3 Quarks Daily has finished up a fascinating series of articles on Open Access in Science:

…I talked about the scholarly practice of Open Access publishing, and about how the central concept of “openness”, or knowledge as a public good, is being incorporated into other aspects of science. I suggested that the overall practice (or philosophy, or movement) might be called Open Science, by which I mean the process of discovery at the intersection of Open Access (publishing), Open Data, Open Source (software), Open Standards and Open Licensing… The potential is immense, and from our current perspective we cannot predict more than a fraction of the ways in which openness will transform the culture and practice of science.

Go read part one, part two, and the finalé, part three

Cognitive Daily has an interesting piece on how the brain distinguishes between metaphor and irony