"Perhaps not quite as exciting as revivified dinosaurs, but still amazing: plants from the late Paleolithic era are claimed to have been regenerated from fossil material (Yashina et al. 2012. Regeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,000-y-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost.  PNAS doi:10.10.73/pnas.1118386109).  This has very little to do with systems biology, but I was interested and thought you would be too.  Perhaps I could trace some kind of connection (did you know that our Artist-no-longer-in-Residence, Brian Knep, shared two Academy Awards for his work on the movie Jurassic Park?) but it would be forced and hardly worth it.  Better to admit to mild frivolity."

"We review the observations and the basic laws describing the essential aspects of collective motion -- being one of the most common and spectacular manifestation of coordinated behavior. Our aim is to provide a balanced discussion of the various facets of this highly multidisciplinary field, including experiments, mathematical methods and models for simulations, so that readers with a variety of background could get both the basics and a broader, more detailed picture of the field. The observations we report on include systems consisting of units ranging from macromolecules through metallic rods and robots to groups of animals and people. Some emphasis is put on models that are simple and realistic enough to reproduce the numerous related observations and are useful for developing concepts for a better understanding of the complexity of systems consisting of many simultaneously moving entities. As such, these models allow the establishing of a few fundamental principles of flocking. In particular, it is demonstrated, that in spite of considerable differences, a number of deep analogies exist between equilibrium statistical physics systems and those made of self-propelled (in most cases living) units. In both cases only a few well defined macroscopic/collective states occur and the transitions between these states follow a similar scenario, involving discontinuity and algebraic divergences."

"The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility.…"

Also unknown is how conching emerged: as a lucky discovery, perhaps, or in flashes of insight from creatures whose intelligence may rival our own but happen to lack fingers and hands. Because Shark Bay’s dolphins are very territorial, however, and conching has been witnessed in disparate locations on its east and west sides, the researchers believe conching was discovered several times independently.

If, as with sponging, conching is taught primarily by females to other females, then conching could have been an invention of single mothers trying to feed their families. That it’s being witnessed with more frequency suggests Shark Bay’s dolphins are learning about it. Perhaps those four who watched Con were taking a lesson.

"Part of the fun in natural history is playing word detective! Naturalists speak in greek and latin and love mashing together parts of these languages to create new, yet often very descriptive, words. This month, I want to talk a little about an awesome word – MYRMECOMORPHY.

This beauteous etymological wonder is derived from from the root words myrmex, meaning ant, and morphos, meaning form. Soooooooo, myrmecomorphy is ant-mimicking! This is a form of Batesian mimicry, which occurs between two, often very different, species are very similar in appearance. The caveat is that the initial species is usually toxic, spiny or otherwise unpleasant to eat, while the mimic is a fraud and only appears to be dangerous."

"As we have shown, Cluster Reverberation is a mechanism available to neural systems for robust short-term memory without synaptic learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mechanism proposed which has these charac- teristics – essential for, say, sensory memory or certain working-memory tasks. All that is needed is for the network topology to be highly clustered or modu- lar, and for small groups of neurons to store one bit of information, as opposed to the conventional view which assumes one bit per neuron. Considering the enormous number of neurons in the brain, and the fact that real individual neu- rons are probably too noisy to store information reliably, these hypotheses do not seem farfetched.…"

"An active microbiota, reaching up to 10 E+7 cells/g, was found to inhabit a naturally occurring asphalt lake characterized by low water activity and elevated temperature."

"Created by Cristóbal Vila, this video manages to explain how everything, from snails to flowers, is built according to predictable mathematical principles. Numbers have never been more sublime."

"So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on."

"Each of us contains roughly 10 times as many microbial cells as human ones. And while some microbes make us sick, many play vital roles in our physiology. They give us the ability to digest foods whose nutrients would otherwise be lost to us, and they make essential vitamins and amino acids our bodies can't. And yet, because the vast majority of these microbes die when extracted from their native habitat, they have been impossible to study and have remained a mystery..."

"Because of the numerous squirrel migrations, John Audubon and John Bachman were convinced that the squirrels on the move were a separate species from the gray squirrels and used the scientific name Sciurus migratorius.

One of the earliest referenced migrations occurred in 1749 in Pennsylvania. Records show the state spending 3 cents for each squirrel killed. Over 640,000 were turned in for bounty.

Sometimes, hunts were organized to control the migration. One hunt in 1822 killed almost 20,000 squirrels. These hunts continued through the 1850s. In 1857, it was reported a hunter killed 160 in one day."

"VIB researchers, such as Siegbert Melzer in Tom Beeckman's group, have studied two such flower-inducing genes. They have deactivated them in thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a typical annual. The VIB researchers found that mutant plants can no longer induce flowering, but they can continue to grow vegetatively or come into flower much later. Melzer had found that modified crops did not use up their store of non-specialised cells, enabling perennial growth. They can therefore continue to grow for a very long time.

As with real perennials these plants show secondary growth with wood formation creating shrub-like Arabidopsis plants."

We were talking about the Uncanny Valley a few days ago, and I was reminded of Hod's dreaming spider robots, twitching in their sleep.

Stupid government. Call your representative.

Saw a crow the other day with flashy white palms on his wings. Central blazes, essentially. Not as weird or mistaken as I thought. But very very startling.

"When the mind fixates on absolute discontinuities, mischief is often in the offing..."

"The idea that the correct functional, the correct structural and the best possible aesthetic solutions are one and the same thing must, I am afraid, be abandoned..."

Something big.

Probably won't be able to attend.

Worth bookmarking as well as adding to the blogroll....

Someday I'll have to publish that paper. Maybe my Erdös number will improve from all the cites....