Category Archives: Biology

This is a guest post by PhD student and science writer JakeBuehler. Heblogs over atSh*t You Didnt Know About Biology, which is full of hisunrepentantly celebratory insights into life on Earths under-appreciated, under-acknowledged, and utterlyamazing stories. Nature is a rough place. If you live your life skirting along the more vulnerable, fragile, tasty threads of the food web, the world is just a whirlwind of claws and fangs flung about by cruel scaffolds of bone and muscle. But just as predators have evolved an assemblage of tools useful in catching, killing, and dismembering prey, their quarries have evolved a staggering number of defenses aimed at keeping themselves from being shoveled down another animals maw. There are many ways to protect yourself. You can be face-meltingly fast, like a pronghorn or a gazelle. You can live in huge herds, and rely on communal vigilance and statistics to keep you safe. You can also be as unappealing a meal as possible, and the variation in approaches to this evolutionary strategy that results in nature is astounding. Porcupines and their grapple-deterrent spines. Turtles and their notably unbiteable shells. Skunks and their odoriferous chemical weaponry. And, if you want to get gross with it, … Continue reading →

Shomu's biology project- feel free to donate This is a promotional video from Shomu's biology for the funding of the upcoming project of Shomu's Biology. Please watch the video and feel free to donate. ... By: Suman Bhattacharjee … Continue reading →

AP Biology Video Notes Meiosis, Part C By: BIO STUFF … Continue reading →

Oregon Institute of Marine Biology joins University of Oregon strike Oregon Institute of Marine Biology graduate student teachers joined a strike Dec. 2, 2014, alongside their fellow Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation union members at the University of Oregon... By: theworldlink … Continue reading →

Biology December 1, 2014 By: man1eating1squirrel … Continue reading →

Alleles - Introduction to Biology - 7.1 Alleles - Introduction to Biology - 7.1 Article: http://www.academyofone.org/049-alleles-introduction-to-biology-7-1/ Visit: http://academyofone.org AoO Prime: http://www.academyofone.org/regist... By: Academy of One … Continue reading →

Biology: December 3, 2014 By: man1eating1squirrel … Continue reading →

Biology Music Video - What a Wonderful World Scroll up xD. By: Murtburl … Continue reading →

Editors note: This is part of our investigation into synthetic biology and bioengineering. For more, download the new BioCoder Fall 2014 issue here. A programming language for scientific experiments is important for many reasons. Most simply, a scientist in training spends many, many hours of time learning how to do lab work. That sounds impressive, but it really means moving very small amounts of liquid from one place to another. Thousands of times a day, thousands of days in preparation for a career. Its boring, dull, and necessary work, and something that can be automated. Biologists should spend most of their time thinking about biology, designing experiments, and analyzing results not handling liquids. More importantly, weve all read reports about experimental results that arent reproducible. That doesnt necessarily mean that the results are invalid, but that theyre susceptible to small changes in the way the experiment is carried out: a particular persons pipetting technique, the particular lab equipment they used, or parts of the experiment that nobody would bother to record in a scientific paper. Describing the process completely, performing the experiments on robotic lab equipment, and automating the data collection not only eliminates many variables, it makes it possible … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 4-Dec-2014 Contact: Jean Daunizeau jean.daunizeau@gmail.com 33-157-274-326 PLOS People regularly engage in sophisticated 'mentalizing' (i.e. guessing the intentions or beliefs of others) whenever they convince, teach, deceive, and so on. Research published this week in PLOS Computational Biology demonstrates the laws that govern these intuitions and how efficient they are for anticipating the behaviour of other people. Jean Daunizeau and colleagues from INSERM and CNRS combine mathematical modelling, experimental psychology and behavioural economics to measure the sophistication of human 'mentalizing'. The authors asked 26 participants to play repeated games against artificial (Bayesian) 'mentalizing' agents, which differ in their sophistication. Critically, the participants were told that they were either playing against each other, or that they were gambling without any in-the-flesh opponent, like in a casino. The results show that participants won against the artificial 'mentalizing' agents when the game was socially framed, and lost in the non-socially framed games. This study demonstrates that 'mentalizing' enables humans to guess how others learn about themselves, even in the absence of any explicit communication. This mental skill increases the chances of success in the context of repeated competitive social interactions. The authors are currently applying this work to assess how this … Continue reading →