SXSW 2012 – Influence: It’s in Your Genes
“More and more marketers are looking to tap into data to determine a value on a person. Tools like Klout, PeerIndex, and Avenue Empire are developing thei...
Category: Links of note
PLoS ONE: Predator Cat Odors Activate Sexual Arousal Pathways in Brains of Toxoplasma gondii Infected Rats
“Cat odors induce rapid, innate and stereotyped defensive behaviors in rats at first exposure, a presumed response to the evolutionary pressures of predat...
Suicide-Bombing Bacteria Could Fight Infections – ScienceNOW
“The researchers tweaked the genes that allow P. aeruginosa to detect other members of its species and put this synthetic genetic code into E. coli’...
PLoS Biology: Endosymbiosis: Lessons in Conflict Resolution
“In sum, the past few years have witnessed a surge of new empirical and theoretical approaches to understand the dynamics of bacterial–insect relationship...
Three Snug Bugs – ScienceNOW
“Mealybugs are the Russian nesting dolls of the animal world. Their bodies harbor a bacterium that helps them turn plant sap into usable nutrients, and th...
Complexification, complexity inflection points, and Russian nested dolls
Proteome-wide post-translational modification statistics: frequency analysis and curation of the swiss-prot database : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Gr...
A Bug in a Bug in a Bug – ScienceNOW
“But when Von Dohlen and her student Shawn Kohler examined the mealybugs’ so-called “symbiotic spheres,” long assumed to be host structu...
Is Evolution Predictable? – ScienceNOW
“Fifty to 100 genes affect whether a worm enters the dauer state. In theory, deletions on any of them could keep worms from becoming dauer larvae. But man...
PLoS Pathogens: Selection of Resistant Bacteria at Very Low Antibiotic Concentrations
“These results add another dimension to the evolution of resistance and suggest that the low antibiotic concentrations found in many natural environments ...
Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history : Nature News
“The past months have seen a swathe of discoveries, from details about when Neanderthals and humans interbred, to the important disease-fighting genes tha...