An article appearing in the Journal of Cell Science deals with the importance of being productively stupid and how that's one of the most important lessons graduate school teaches us.

From the article:

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

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Amen to this. Really. Graduate school is not just about doing experiments. Graduate school is about learning how to be a life-long student.

You can read the full article from the Journal of Cell Science here.

A new milestone in evolutionary biology was unveiled earlier this week that has been dubbed the "Rosetta stone" for understanding our evolutionary history - and her name is Ida.

From the article in the Guardian:

One reason Ida is so special is her exquisite preservation, and that is because the Messel pit, near Darmstadt in Germany, is a very exceptional place. Forty-seven million years ago it was a volcanic lake surrounded by a steamy sub-tropical forest. Because of the unique conditions there, Messel – which is now designated a Unesco world heritage site – has yielded countless fabulous fossils including bats, pygmy horses, crocodiles and even insects with the colours on their wings still visible.

People who study fossils are nearly always studying the hard parts: the shells and the bones. They have to deduce from the shape of each bone what the muscles were like. From that they can deduce more about how the animal held itself and moved. If they are lucky they can maybe make suggestions about what the internal organs were like.

With this fossil you don't have to make suggestions. Almost uniquely, we not only have the bones, but we also have the fur and the flesh. So it is not a question of deduction, it is not a question of imagination or suggestions, it is fact.

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Read the full article in the Guardian here and here.

Read the original article from PLoS here.

New research by a group of researchers at the University of Chicago has given insight into the phenomenon of gesturing and how it relates to learning.

From the article in New Scientist:

But might gesture also serve another purpose? Many scientists now think that gestures can help the person making them -- that moving your hands can help you think. Researchers have become increasingly interested in the connection between the body and thought – in the ways that our physical body shapes abstract mental processes. Gesture is at the center of this discussion. Now the debate is moving into learning, with new research on how students learn to solve math problems in the classroom.

To understand the research, consider a math problem like 3+2 +8 =___+8. A student might make a “v” shape under the 2 and 3 with their pointer finger and middle finger, as they try to understand the concept of “grouping” – adding adjacent numbers together, a technique that can be used to solve the problem. Previous research has shown that students who are asked to gesture while talking about math problems are better at learning how to do them. This is true whether the students are told what gestures to make, or whether the gestures are spontaneous.

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Read the New Scientist Article here.

Read the research paper (direct PDF download) here.

A recent study in PLOS Computational Biology demonstrates how the organization of a child's brain differs from that of an adult. Most fascinatingly, it appears that many of the regions activated in child brains during rest are close to one another, rather than long-distance connections that are more common in adults.

From the LiveScience article:

Researchers set the lower limit for study subjects at 7 years of age because the brain is approximately 95 percent of its adult size at this age.

Previous research revealed four brain networks with varying responsibilities in the adult brain that typically involve tight links between several brain regions that are physically distant from each other.

The new research found that this is not the case in children: Instead of having networks made of brain regions that are distant from each other but functionally linked, most of the tightest connections in a child's brain are between brain regions that are physically close to each other.

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Read the LiveScience article here.

Read the original research article here.

A leading fossil expert puts forth a new theory for how Neanderthals went extinct: We ate them.

A new article appearing in The Journal of Anthropological Sciences discusses evidence of our ancestor's potentially gruesome diet. From the article in the Guardian:

Previous excavations revealed bones that were thought to be exclusively human. But Rozzi's team re-examined them and found one they concluded was Neanderthal. Importantly, it was covered in cut marks similar to those left behind when flesh is stripped from deer and other animals using stone tools.

Rozzi believes the jawbone provides crucial evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals, and sometimes killed them, bringing back their bodies to caves to eat or to use their skulls or teeth as trophies. "For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place," he added.

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Read the article in the Guardian here.

Read the research article here.