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Birger's find. It would be nice to know exactly where the sites are - presumably in the Pilbara somewhere.

" Moving Beyond Belly Button Biodiversity…we will study the species living with you on your body but also in the other biomes of YOUR household. If you want to know who is hiding in your refrigerator or mating in the pillow where you rest your head, we can help you. When you look beside you in bed, you notice no more than one animal (alternative lifestyles and cats notwithstanding). For nearly all of our history, our beds and lives were shared by multitudes. Live in a mud-walled hut in the Amazon, and bats will sleep above you, spiders beside you, the dog and cat not far away, and then there are the insects beating themselves stupid against the dwindling animal-fat flame. In addition, your gut would be filled with intestinal worms, your body (and nearly everything else) covered in multitudes of unnamed microbes, and your lungs occupied by a fungus uniquely your own."

"What are we aiming for? We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question "What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?""

Would be nice to see the actual strata that has been identified. As such, it is a statement with no supporting evidence. Has a paper been written?

"Individuals who are homozygous for the G allele of the rs53576 SNP of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene tend to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. However, little is known about how these differences manifest behaviorally and whether they are readily detectable by outside observers, both critical questions in theoretical accounts of prosociality. In the present study, we used thin-slicing methodology to test the hypotheses that (i) individual differences in rs53576 genotype predict how prosocial observers judge target individuals to be on the basis of brief observations of behavior, and (ii) that variation in targets' nonverbal displays of affiliative cues would account for these judgment differences. In line with predictions, we found that individuals homozygous for the G allele were judged to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. These differences were completely accounted for by variations in the expression of affiliative cues. Thus, individual differences in rs53576 are associated with behavioral manifestations of prosociality, which ultimately guide the judgments others make about the individual. "

"For study author Dan Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the "deficit model" in the field of science and technology studies-the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan's data suggest the opposite-that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy"

NEIL (Never Ending Image Learner) is a computer program that runs 24 hours per day and 7 days per week to automatically extract visual knowledge from Internet data. It is an effort to build the world's largest visual knowledge base with minimum human labeling effort - one that would be useful to many computer vision and AI efforts. See current statistics about how much NEIL knows about our world!!

"He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide. But they didn't: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says. This wasn't because the eyes of the radiologists didn't happen to fall on the large, angry gorilla. Instead, the problem was in the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas. "They look right at it, but because they're not looking for a gorilla, they don't see that it's a gorilla," Drew says. In other words, what we're thinking about - what we're focused on - filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see"

"Below is a list of commonly used scholarly resources at MIT that make their APIs available for use.  If you have programming skills and would like to use APIs in your research, use the table below to get an overview of some available APIs. "

"There is a "significant credibility gap" between researchers' expectations and the likelihood of their forging long-term careers in higher education, a survey has found. More than three-quarters of research staff responding to the Careers in Research Online Survey 2013 said they aspired to a career in higher education and around two-thirds said they expected to achieve this. But it was "unrealistic to expect" that this number of research staff, or even half of those in the early stages of their career, would be able to secure a long-term research role in higher education, says the report, based on the survey produced by Vitae, the careers organisation for researchers."

Our genetic code is translated by two super-families of modern-day enzymes. Carter's research team created and superimposed digital three-dimensional versions of the two super-families to see how their structures aligned. Carter found that all the enzymes have virtually identical cores that can be extracted to produce "molecular fossils" he calls Urzymes-Ur meaning earliest or original. The other parts, he said, are variations that were introduced later, as evolution unfolded. These two Urzymes are as close as scientists have gotten to the actual ancient enzymes that would have populated the Earth billions of years ago.

"Evolution likes to keep what works best. The rest falls by the wayside. In theory, this means that the most "fit" variations, say, a color that looks poisonous or one particularly attractive to the ladies, would become the most common. By this logic, the many colors of the guppy should have conformed to a single common pattern long ago. But they haven't. Instead, the male guppies continue to show not only bright colors but also a high diversity of colors. What keeps the variety going? The rare-male effect. Female guppies prefer the males that are rare, no matter what their color pattern actually is. This effect has been documented in the laboratory in guppies and in other species like fruit flies."

3,700 year-old store room held 2,000 liters of strong, sweet wine. Archaeologists have unearthed what may be the oldest -- and largest -- ancient wine cellar in the Near East, containing forty jars, each of which would have held fifty liters of strong, sweet wine. The cellar was discovered in the ruined palace of a sprawling Canaanite city in northern Israel, called Tel Kabri. The site dates to about 1,700 B.C. and isn't far from many of Israel's modern-day wineries.

"Note that the antimicrobial peptides are produced largely in the fat bodies-so there would be less of this sort of response in forager bees, which don't maintain their fat bodies. This makes sense, since foragers aren't expected to live for long. However, keep in mind that the bees in protein-hungry colonies are unable to develop their fat bodies fully-this one point where nutrition ties in to immunity. Surprisingly, Jay Evans found that these genes are not upregulated in bees from CCD colonies, even though the bees are full of pathogens! There are a few potential explanations for this finding that come to mind: The bee hemocytes are not recognizing the pathogens as foreign (suppression of recognition systems, perhaps by viruses?). The colonies could be protein-starved. Something is suppressing the transcription of the genes, or their translation to peptides. Note that viruses can do this very thing, which I feel may be a big clue!"

Two fictitious high-spirited scientists of the institute, passionate surfers, take off to visit the early Universe. Not to do serious research there but to experience the ultimate ride on the plasma waves of the big bang. However, they quickly realize that they would be stuck without their knowledge of the physics of the early Universe.

As someone who's researched dark matter extensively, it is my determination that dark matter most likely exists, although explaining exactly what it is is a challenge. Over this next series, I would like to lead you through the evidence, observations and discoveries that have led me to this conclusion, and I hope that I explain this well enough that it leads you to draw the same ones for yourself.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 19, 2010) - Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.