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June 19, 2012

With the Presidential elections looming up, some have been asking why the United States is not making more of electronic voting. It’s being adopted in many other countries around the world, with India, Brazil, Estonia, Norway and Switzerland as notable examples. However, the United States has several examples in recent years where it has backed [...]

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Whence the Earliest Berliners? (Part 1)

This week, I'm hanging out in Chapel Hill at the Isotope Geochemistry Lab on UNC's campus. I'm here to process human dental enamel from Medieval Germans for strontium, to test the hypothesis that the earliest residents of modern Berlin migrated east from Cologne. A bit of background for this project: In the early 13th century AD, two towns were built on opposite sides of the Spree River. Called Berlin (or, sometimes, Altberlin) and Cölln, they eventually became one city in the […]

C.M. Melisch & J.P. Sewell (2011). Historische Chance – eine umfangreiche, mittelalterliche bis neuzeitliche Skelettserie vom ehemaligen St. Petri-Kirchhof in Berlin-Mitte, Mitteilungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 32 107-120.

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Simple fist-squeezing procedure helps athletes avoid choking under pressure

The next time you're faced with a high-pressure situation in sport, try squeezing your left fist tight for thirty seconds. According to a team of German sports psychologists, doing so will activate your right hemisphere, aiding automatic, skilled performance. This helps prevent choking under pressure, they say, which is linked with left-hemisphere activity, excess self-focus and conscious deliberation. Jurgen Beckmann and his colleagues tested their intervention across three studies. In the […]

Beckmann, J., Gröpel, P. & Ehrlenspiel, F. (2012). Preventing Motor Skill Failure Through Hemisphere-Specific Priming: Cases From Choking Under Pressure., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, DOI: 10.1037/a0029852

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Scientists Model Biofuel Production After Ants’ Fungus Gardens

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Bacteriology are studying the colonies of leaf-cutter ants as they cultivate thriving communities of fungi and bacteria using freshly cut plant material. While these fungi provide nutrients for the ants, researchers are hoping to replicate the process and apply it for better biofuel production. Read more »

Aylward, F., Burnum-Johnson, K., Tringe, S., Teiling, C., Tremmel, D., Moeller, J., Scott, J., Barry, K., Piehowski, P., Nicora, C. & Malfatti, S. (2013). Leucoagaricus gongylophorus Produces Diverse Enzymes for the Degradation of Recalcitrant Plant Polymers in Leaf-Cutter Ant Fungus Gardens, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 79 (12) 3770-3778. DOI: 10.1128/AEM.03833-12

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Video Tip of the Week: ENCODE ChIP-Seq Significance Tool

We’ve been doing training and workshops on the UCSC Genome Browser for 10 years now. It’s a tremendous tool that has to be a foundational item in your toolkit in genomics. But–there may be times when you want to examine some of the data that you can find there in another way, with a different [...]

Auerbach, R., Chen, B. & Butte, A. (2013). Relating Genes to Function: Identifying Enriched Transcription Factors using the ENCODE ChIP-Seq Significance Tool, Bioinformatics, DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt316

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The end for shock collars?

Something puzzles me about the arguments made by shock collar advocates. On the one hand they claim the e-collar doesn’t hurt, and on the other they say it’s a last resort to prevent ‘dead dogs’ due to recall and chasing problems. Surely the second justification casts doubt on the first? Two new scientific studies funded by the UK’s DEFRA address both arguments, and conclude that e-collars are unnecessary and detrimental to animal welfare.Shock collars (including invisible […]

Blackwell, E., Bolster, C., Richards, G., Loftus, B. & Casey, R. (2012). The use of electronic collars for training domestic dogs: estimated prevalence, reasons and risk factors for use, and owner perceived success as compared to other training methods, BMC Veterinary Research, 8 (1) 93. DOI: 10.1186/1746-6148-8-93

Herron, M., Shofer, F. & Reisner, I. (2009). Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117 (1-2) 47-54. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2008.12.011

Schalke, E., Stichnoth, J., Ott, S. & Jones-Baade, R. (2007). Clinical signs caused by the use of electric training collars on dogs in everyday life situations, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 105 (4) 369-380. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2006.11.002

Schilder, M. & van der Borg, J. (2004). Training dogs with help of the shock collar: short and long term behavioural effects, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 85 (3-4) 319-334. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2003.10.004

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June 19, 2012

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