One advantage developmental biologists have over paleontologists is that they can experiment on the development of these animals.

The failure to consider how biodiversity grows reflects an even more troubling flaw in the modern synthesis: it lacks any real sense of history.

Marston's Wonder Woman didn't spend her time encouraging Superman to be awesome, because she was way to busy being awesome herself.

blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero

But the underlying message you get when you watch Wonder Woman defer over and over to Superman's awesomeness is that the most important person in the world has to be a man.

both parents display the same work ethic has an amplified influence, but only in the case of calling-oriented offspring. As our capitalist society favors money and professional achievement, a child with two calling-oriented parents is more likely to have the confidence to ignore these societal pressures and pursue her dreams.

Children can affect their parents’ work ethic, too. Allowing people to bring their children into the office has been shown to boost efficiency and productivity—and could help raise that next generation of career-oriented workers.

Come meet our students, & you will not be surprised—(or resentful)—that they receive high grades. Possibly, you will be impressed.

"Grade inflation" a code term like "affirmative action."

These students should be A's. 

At large universities where thousands are admitted, bell-curve grading is used to "flunk out" many freshmen. Very different in Ivy League. Bell-curve grading, which assures a percent of low grades & failures, is a cruel academic necessity in some quarters. Encourages cheating.  

And while I did find most of my classmates to be "excellent"—that is: smart, compassionate, well-read, curious—a lot of us weren't especially hard-working.

saw our time at Princeton as a reward, not an opportunity to push ourselves again, even harder. The university's relatively lax grading policies only encouraged that mentality.

Starting my junior fall, professors could give out only a limited number of A-range grades. The change prompted lots of anxiety and indignation from the student body—and now, nine years later, it may be rolled back. But for me, "grade deflation" was a much-needed kick in the pants. I started reading more carefully, taking more diligent notes, developing relationships with my professors and their teaching assistants. I ended up learning a lot more

Yes, hard-working students should be rewarded with good grades. But a very good way to inspire students to work hard in the first place is to make good grades worth something.

late-life care for the chronically sick is not only expensive but also, much too often, ineffective and inhumane. For years, the system seemed impervious to change.

Thanks to modern treatment, people commonly live into their 70s and 80s and even 90s, many of them with multiple chronic ailments.

five or more chronic conditions account for less than a fourth of Medicare’s beneficiaries but more than two-thirds of its spending—and they are the fastest-growing segment of the Medicare population. What to do with this burgeoning population of the frail elderly?

“I walked out of that room and said, ‘There has got to be a better way than this,’ ” he told me recently. “I was appalled by how we care for—or, more accurately, fail to care about—people who are near the end of life. We literally treat them to death.”

Home-based primary care comes in many varieties, but they share a treatment model and a business model. The treatment model begins from the counterintuitive premise that health care should not always be medical care.

by keeping patients out of the hospital whenever possible, saves Medicare upwards of $2,000 a month on each patient, maybe more

program collects whatever payment it can from Medicare and private insurance, it operates at a loss, and is run as a community service and a form of R&D.

Under the new health-care law, Medicare has begun using its financial clout to penalize hospitals that frequently readmit patients. Suddenly, hospitals are not so eager to see Grandma return for the third, fourth, or fifth time.

home-based model of primary care will be a challenge.

That would be like spiritual suicide right now,” he told me, “because there is so much going on. I’m more hopeful all the time. We’ve rolled the rock all the way to the top of the hill, and now we have to run to keep up as it rolls down the other side.”

“It would be a mistake to jump and say that dogs were domesticated in Europe and not anywhere else,” he said. “We know pigs were domesticated independently in China and Turkey, so there’s no thinking that dog domestication had to happen in just one place.”

"The experiments are elegant and seem to show that in the mouse sperm production can be achieved when only two genes from the Y-chromosomes are present.

"Whilst this is of limited use in understanding human fertility, this kind of work is important if we are to unravel to complexities of how genes control fertility."

males dislike ornamented females because blue badges indicate a potentially negative quality in females. Although both sexes may develop similar ornaments because they share the genes that underlie the phenotype, expressing the ornament can be beneficial in one sex but detrimental in another.

One solution is to have the expression of [ornamentation] regulated by other factors that are already different between sexes,”

the causation and persistence of ornamentation in females” as well as “unambiguous information on fitness consequences of female ornamentation,” he continued. Because both sexes produce testosterone, added Cox, “regulation by testosterone is not a perfect mechanism for complete sex-limitation [of blue badge expression].”

detrimental ornamentation in females is a paradox that “begs the interesting question of why male-typical ornamentation persists in female fence lizards,” said Langkilde. “We plan to follow this up by examining potential benefits associated with these male-typical ornaments in females.”

Way added that there might be other reasons why newborns should carry immunosuppressive cells

Baby formulas contain small amounts of arginine. Sidney Morris, a biochemist from the University of Pittsburgh, said that it may be important to avoid fortifying them with extra arginine, lest it swamps the arginase activity of CD71+ cells, releases the immune system, and causes problems for the developing infants’ guts.

“Whether the precise mechanism of immunosuppression is the same or different in each of these circumstances remains to be determined,” he said.

You have probably heard of this theory, in which the left and right halves of the brain are characterized, respectively, as logical versus intuitive, verbal versus perceptual, analytic versus synthetic, and so forth. The trouble is that none of these sweeping generalizations has stood up to careful scientific scrutiny. The dif­ferences between the left and right sides of the brain are nuanced, and simple, sweeping dichotomies do not in fact explain how the two sides function.

top and bottom portions of the brain have very different functions. This fact was first discovered in the context of visual perception, and it was supported in 1982 in a landmark report by National Medal of Science winner Mortimer Mishkin and Leslie G. Ungerleider, of the National Institute of Mental Health.

scientists trained monkeys to perform two tasks. In the first task, the monkeys had to learn to recognize which of two shapes concealed a bit of food.

These functions occur relatively close to where neural connec­tions deliver inputs from the eyes and ears—but processing doesn’t just stop there.

top parts of our frontal lobe can take into account the confluence of information about “what’s out there,” our emo­tional reactions to it, and our goals.

Four distinct cognitive modes emerge from how the top-brain and bottom-brain systems can interac

The two systems always work together. You use the top brain to decide to walk over to talk to your friend only after you know who she is (courtesy of the bottom brain). And after talking to her, you formulate another plan, to enter the date and time in your calendar, and then you need to monitor what hap­pens (again using the bottom brain) as you try to carry out this plan (a top-brain activity).

speak of differences in the degree to which a person relies on the top-brain and bottom-brain systems, we are speaking of differences in this second kind of utilization, in the kind of processing that’s not simply dictated by a given situation. In this sense, you can rely on one or the other brain system to a greater or lesser degree.

The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feel­ings, and behavior in profound ways. The notion that each system can be more or less highly utilized, in this sense is the foundation of the Theory of Cognitive Modes. 

ways of working are critical in mathematical work and when they are taught and valued, many more students contribute, leading to higher achievement

mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists. 

harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass.

online platform explaining research evidence on ability and the brain and on good mathematics teaching, for teachers and parents. The course had a transformative effect. It was taken by 40,000 people, and 95 percent said they would change their teaching or parenting as a result.

does not simply test a mathematical definition, as the first does. It requires that students visualize a triangle, use transformational geometry, consider whether different cases satisfy the mathematical definition, and then justify their thinking.

There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.

The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them.

American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development

The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant

gives more time for depth and exploration than the curricula it has replaced by removing some of the redundant methods students will never need or use.

Research on differentiated kidney cells, particularly podocytes that can be cultured in the lab, may hold some answers. Although there are a few human- and mouse-derived cell lines that potentially differentiate into functional podocytes, there is a need for better cell lines and systems that mimic the in vivo situation more closely

It was indeed the connecting data framework that held the entire project together,” said Josh Stuart, professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is part of the TCGA-led project.

“It provides a framework for the science to be extended upon, instead of publication as a finite endpoint for research,”

Dramatic budget cuts in the past few years, however, may make US academia less of a paradise.

Europe make around 50 percent of what full professors there make, postdocs in the U.S. earn less than a third of a professor’s salary.

European salaries also lag behind those in the U.S., with the average European life scientist making anywhere from 41 to 82 percent of what the average American researcher earns.

Equal Pay Act prohibited unequal pay for men and women doing the same jobs. But salary disparities remain, including in the life sciences. “It is a persistent problem,” says Curtis. “It’s important for people to realize that there are continuing inequalities.” In this year’s survey, for example, male respondents in the U.S. reported an average total income of around $111,000 per year, while their female counterparts averaged just $77,000 in annual pay.

fewer women make it to high-level positions than men do, says Curtis.

life-science specialty is often tomorrow’s overcrowded field. Case in point: genomics versus genetics. Genomics relies heavily on bioinformatics, mathematics, and computational modeling

survey highlights the well-established discrepancy between industry and academic salaries. According to the data, life scientists in industry make around $136,000 per year, compared to average academic earnings of $85,000.

found similar copy number variations in neurons derived in culture from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)

neural progenitor cells derived from the same iPSC lines did not exhibit such abundant diversity. This suggested that the genetic variation in neurons occurred only at later stages of differentiation. And that the variation developed in a short space of time—the seven weeks it took to differentiate neurons from neural progenitors. Furthermore, the results implied that genetic variations seen in adult postmortem brains were unlikely to be a mere side effect of aging.

addition to neuroimaging techniques that can reveal regional brain activity, brain lesioning can also help shed light on the most important targets for a particular disorder. In brain lesioning, misfiring neurons or their connections are destroyed, most commonly using a heating probe inserted in the brain. Once the first patients are treated, data on effectiveness and side effects, in combination with continued neuroimaging, can help further focus the targets. Lesioning is an alternative to DBS in certain specific cases and can be effective, but it is irreversible, and any untoward effects can be permanent. Because the dose of DBS at the same site can be adjusted down if adverse effects emerge, it is considered to be a potentially safer alternative.

cross-reactive antibodies bind relatively weakly to their targets and, under normal circumstances, would probably get outcompeted by antibodies with a narrower focus but higher affinity. “For whatever reason, antibodies to the conserved regions are very rare,”

possible to skew the response towards more broadly cross-reactive antibodies, in mice, in a particular situation,”

not advocating that we use rapamycin [in humans],” said McGargill. However, her group’s discovery could point to other ways of achieving the same effect, perhaps by manipulating the immune system into producing more cross-reactive antibodies. “Maybe instead of trying to enhance the immune response, we need to dampen it a little bit, and allow it to be more diverse,

allowing for an

onymous comments, PubPeer aims to create an open, debate-friendly environment, while maintaining the rigor the closed review process currently used by most journals. Its creators, who describe themselves as “early-stage scientists,” have also decided to remain anonymous, citing career concerns.