We Need More Science: 03/03/15

Sony Targets 2016 For ‘Project Morpheus’ VR on PS4

Sony unveiled a new, much-enhanced prototype of its Project Morpheus virtual reality hardware for PlayStation 4 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, saying that it intended to release the peripheral in the first half of 2016.

The new Morpheus prototype features a number of improvements over the original version that Sony demonstrated at last year’s GDC. The screen has been upgraded to a 5.7 inch OLED display, which greatly reduced the amount of motion blur and latency that we experienced when we demoed the new version. Sony says that Morpheus will support graphics that output at 120 frames per second, and added that PlayStation 4 consoles will be able to natively support that output.

Sony Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida said that the prototype represents the “near-final” version of Morpheus.

“What we are showing is a handmade prototype,” Yoshida told WIRED at the event, adding, “The guts are almost done.” Yoshida says Sony will begin to loan these prototypes to developers so they can begin creating Morpheus games in April, but they are not the “final final” kits.

In addition to showing the new Morpheus hardware iteration, Sony brought three of VR demos to San Francisco. The most intriguing, “London Heist,” was a cover-based first-person shooter in which you had to duck down behind a desk to protect yourself from bullets, then pop up to shoot enemies.

Reloading your gun meant rifling through the drawers of the desk, using two PlayStation Move motion controllers to move your “hands” around in virtual space, finding magazines full of bullets and physically inserting them into your gun by rotating them into place.

The realistic action—both the big movements up and down and the aiming and firing of the gun, and the tiny movements of opening drawers and fiddling with magazines—made for a remarkably engaging experience, easily the best thing Sony has ever shown using Morpheus.

The pop-and-shoot action of “London Heist” is in contrast to the official demonstrations that rival Oculus has shown for its Rift VR headset, since Oculus has said that it intends players to be seated at all times during its games.

“We are not as hardcore as the Oculus guys, saying that this is just a seated experience,” says Yoshida. “We like the standing-up experience, so we want to push it.”

“Not to the level that will make your cord choke you,” he added, pantomiming someone being strangled by a controller wire.

“The London Heist.”

Sony

Although it hasn’t garnered nearly as much attention as the Oculus Rift, Sony would seem to have some innate advantages that could give it the best shot at making a huge mainstream splash in the virtual reality pool in 2016. It’s easy for consumers to understand everything they need to run Project Morpheus games; you just need a PlayStation 4 and the device. And PlayStation 4 has taken off like a rocket since its launch; Sony said Tuesday that PlayStation 4 has now sold 20 million units worldwide, giving the company a massive addressable user base by the time Morpheus makes it to stores.

Additionally, Sony has made massive strides in getting indie game developers to put their games on PlayStation 4 or even produce exclusive content for the platform. This is important since most if not all of the most compelling virtual reality experiences so far have come from small, innovative developers. Sony called out Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes , a game about bomb defusal created by a three-person team, as one of the best demos on Morpheus so far.

But as demos become games and crazy ideas become things you can buy on the PlayStation Store, Yoshida says that Sony may find itself having to take a bigger role in the development process.

“These days, we’re not doing much of the ‘you cannot do this’ kind of communication” with game developers, Yoshida said. “We used to do it a lot.” Sony was well-known during the PlayStation 3 era for having a heavy hand with game developers, rejecting games on concept alone, or requiring content to be added to them before they would allow them to be released.

Yoshida says that the process has been “much simplified” these days. “But,” he says, “you can make a VR game that makes everyone sick in 20 seconds. I think we need to reintroduce a bit more game design-side conversation with developers, if they bring in something we feel is dangerous.”

Players loved the demo taht Sega put together of Alien: Isolation on Oculus, for example, but Yoshida said that the game’s use of the right analog stick to move the camera is “very, very dangerous” in that way. He said that Sony may introduce a rating system on the PlayStation Store that informs customers of the “intensity” of the experience.

Sony did not give any clues as to what the price of Morpheus would be at launch. Yoshida said that while the company wants to make the unit low-priced, it also is aware that putting out a subpar VR product to scrimp on costs could badly impact the whole future of the technology.

“Trying VR for the first time is the worst time, because you are not familiar to the VR experience,” he said. “So we really really want to make good hardware before we bring it to the market in large scale.”

The current Morpheus prototype, which Sony will bring to this year’s E3 Expo in June for more players to try, meets that standard, he says.

“This is what we have to achieve before we can responsibly bring this to market.”

Famed Venture Capitalist Says No Discrimination at Kleiner

John Doerr started off his morning looking at a chart—no doubt a common occurrence for one of the most famous investors in Silicon Valley history. Except this time Doerr was on the witness stand, and the chart was a list of partners employed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers during the `80s and `90s. And the list didn’t include any women, said Alan Exelrod, an opposing attorney in the gender discrimination case that’s pulling back the curtain on one of the tech industry’s most storied venture capital firms. Exelrod asked Doerr to confirm that Kleiner didn’t employ women during those decades.

But you don’t get to be a billionaire by backing down that easily. The chart had left off investing partner Cynthia Healy, who worked in the life sciences division, Doerr said. During the same round of questioning, Doerr was unwavering in his assertion that Kleiner didn’t discriminate.

“I don’t consider Kleiner Perkins to be a firm run by men,” he said. “We have many female partners, many female general partners.”

Doerr’s turn on the stand came during the second week of testimony in the gender bias lawsuit filed three years ago by Ellen Pao, a one-time partner at the firm. Pao is suing Kleiner Perkins for $16 million in damages, alleging that she was held back professionally at the firm because of her gender and that Kleiner Perkins retaliated against her when she reported being pressured into a relationship with a married colleague.

I don’t consider Kleiner Perkins to be a firm run by men. John Doerr

The potentially landmark trial, now in its sixth day in court, could have far-reaching implications for how women are treated in a male-dominated industry. Doerr’s testimony is being watched especially closely, and not just because of his massive influence as the venture capitalist who led Kleiner’s investments in such wildly successful companies as Amazon and Google. As Pao’s longtime boss and mentor, Doerr also plays a key role in the events cited in Pao’s case. While Doerr himself has been absent from the courtroom until now, his name has been mentioned throughout the trial, with former and current colleagues casting him in a positive light. He’s been portrayed by other Kleiner colleagues as Pao’s protector at the firm and a supporter of getting more women into the venture capital industry in general.

“Team JD”

Doerr testified Tuesday that he viewed the associate partner and chief-of-staff job for “Team JD”—the position Pao was hired to fill at Kleiner back in 2005—to be “very sophisticated.” A job description shown in court by Pao’s team said the position required someone with a technical undergraduate degree in either computer science, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering. An advanced degree in law or business was described as desirable, though not required.

Previously, the Kleiner defense team tried to cast this role as largely administrative in nature, with tasks that included helping with the calendar and writing speeches and press releases. Pao, the defense argued, should not have expected to transition into a full-time investing role from this starting position. But Doerr acknowledged under questioning from Exelrod that two partners on Team JD—Matt Murphy and Aileen Lee, who were both hired around 1999—were promoted to senior partner after about five years each.

Exelrod tried to establish a pattern of glowing praise from Doerr for Pao, citing passages from her 2006 performance review in which Doerr complimented Pao’s writing skills her successfully planning of a “global summit” that resulted in KPCB receiving a “significant number of new business plans.” In two reviews, an employee evaluation from 2006 and a 2007 email related to Kleiner Perkins’ China initiative, Doerr called Pao “quiet,” which Exelrod tried to show was meant as a compliment. The descriptions stood in stark contrast to those offered by colleagues, who accused Pao of elbowing her way into other people’s initiatives and of being “territorial.”

Team Building, VC-Style

In his testimony, however, Doerr himself also said that Pao had had trouble with interpersonal skills during the time she was employed at Kleiner Perkins. “I think you’ll find this was a recurring challenge,” he said. To “build a relationship of trust and cordiality” with former Kleiner partner Trae Vassallo, who had also testified in the case, Doerr suggested that Pao challenge her to a game of tennis, or that the two travel to China together.

Of Pao’s affair with then-Kleiner partner Ajit Nazre, Doerr testified he thought Nazre had displayed a serious lack of judgment, and confirmed he wanted to fire Nazre in 2007—and that he might have, had Pao not stepped in and said she was prepared to move past the conflict and continue the work relationship. Doerr confirmed that Nazre’s bonus was docked as a result of the affair but that “the biggest punishment was I told him I’d lost confidence in his ability to be a leader at Kleiner Perkins.” Nazre was promoted to a senior partner position in 2008 but left the company in 2012 after a sexual harassment investigation.

In his testimony, Doerr also confirmed Pao’s claim that he asked her to hand over a client with whom she had been building relationships, patent management company RPX, to another Kleiner Perkins partner. Pao claimed Doerr asked her to do so because Komisar “needed a win,” which he confirmed on the witness stand. “Kleiner needed a win,” Doerr said. “We all needed a win.”

‘Better Leaders’

In her cross-examination, defense attorney Lynne Hermle urged Doerr to discuss his advocacy work. Doerr said he did nonprofit work in education, the climate crisis, and reduction of poverty, especially for women with AIDS in Africa. “My fourth, but not final cause, is advocating for women,” Doer said, “the subject of this trial.”

Hermle went on to list every woman at Kleiner Perkins, asking if Doerr had a hand in hiring them. Doerr confirmed each one. He also confirmed that he had backed plenty of women-led companies during his time at Kleiner Perkins. Doerr called the number of women in the venture capital industry “pathetic,” and he testified that he thinks a more diverse group leads to better decision making and better products. “Almost always,” he testified, “women are better leaders than men.”

Back to the Future’s Clock Tower Scene Remade With Lego

From food to hand-knit scarves to recreations of your favorite movie scenes using Lego bricks, everything is better when it’s made with love. And for the good folks at Macro Lego Universe, an enterprise dedicated to making Lego-based movies, it’s all about the brick life. Their latest endeavor? Remaking the suspense-filled clock tower climax of Back to the Future with minifig Marty and minifig Doc trying to harness the power of lightning to get back to, well, the future! The short was shot at the Brick 2014 fan convention, and does a surprisingly effective job of reproducing the emotional impact of the original scene considering its “actors” have mostly stationary faces. But if The Lego Movie taught us anything, it’s that we should never underestimate the capacity of tiny plastic yellow toys to induce human levels of empathy.

We’d love to say more, but it looks like we’re Outatime—hey-OOOOOO!

Opinion: How Women In STEM Can Close the Wage Equality Gap

More than a week after the Academy Awards broadcast, people are still buzzing about Best Supporting Actress winner Patricia Arquette’s acceptance speech, punctuated with a poignant and resounding call for wage equality and equal rights for women.

Arquette’s rallying cry struck a chord with both audience members and viewers at home — a reaction shot of Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez whooping and clapping in agreement has since become an Internet meme. But more than providing a “GIF-able” moment, Arquette’s sentiments on the issue of wage inequality allude to a larger, more nuanced challenge faced by female professionals across all industries 45 years after Congress first began debating the Equal Rights Amendment.

Reshma Saujani

About

Reshma Saujani is the Founder & CEO of Girls Who Code.

The issue of the wage gender gape is especially close to my heart. In 2012, I created the non-profit organization Girls Who Code specifically to close the gender gap in technology and engineering. Why? Because despite the fact that women make up the majority of the general workforce, we comprise only 25 percent of technical jobs. Because we’re missing the mark on tapping into a diverse talent force: statistics show that only 2.7 percent of venture-backed companies have a woman at the helm, and African-Americans and Latino/as make up only 5 percent of employees at top-tier tech companies; less than 2 percent of VCs are people of color. The New York Times yesterday released analysis showing that for every woman CEO there are four men named John.

Last week, when pointing out how only four women are included in Forbes’s list of the top 100 venture investors in tech, Hillary Clinton remarked, “We are going backwards in a field that is supposed to be all about moving forward.”

I believe strongly that getting more women into STEM fields is the right place to start addressing this problem. Why? For starters, STEM jobs see a smaller gender-related wage gap than non-STEM jobs: 14 cents on every dollar versus the 21 percent gender-related wage disparity in non-technical industries.

Women are becoming the primary breadwinners in households across the United States at a quick clip. By educating, inspiring, and equipping young women of all backgrounds with the skills and resources to pursue academic and career opportunities in computing fields, we are incubating the multifaceted and incredibly diverse 21st century female workforce. The time has arrived to further develop their talents in what are by far the fastest-growing STEM verticals: technology and engineering.

Granted, empowering the next generation of innovators is no easy feat. But out of the thousands of participants who’ve excelled at our Girls Who Code programs most tell us that they believe learning how to program will lead to job security and a rewarding professional life. This optimism flies in the face of available statistics illuminating just how deeply flawed and sorely lacking our current education system is at equipping young women with the tools needed for the careers of the future.

By 2020, 1.4 million computer specialist jobs will be available in the U.S., and yet we’re only on pace to filling 29 percent of them with specialized graduates—a mere 3 percent of which will be women, even less of which are women of color. Women make up a smaller percentage of STEM degrees than they did nearly three decades ago. By exposing girls to tech careers through school, community-based programs and corporate internships, we can reverse that trend—and probably with a lot more speed and ease than waiting for lawmakers to legislate equality.

Girls should learn to code, program, design and engineer because this is where opportunities will be ample, financially viable, and impactful to modern society—and we simply can’t allow girls to be left behind. We need to galvanize young women to be curious about ideating and building products that problem-solve and make the world a better and more inclusive place. It’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure we equip them with the skills to do so.

Increasing the exposure and access young women have to STEM jobs and skills can no doubt be an effective component of any effort to close the gender-related wage gap. I know I’m inspired every day to change the world by the talented, ingenious, and driven young women we serve at Girls Who Code. They are going to code a better future for all of us.

Opinion: How Women In STEM Can Close the Wage Equality Gap

Reshma Saujani

About

Reshma Saujani is the Founder & CEO of Girls Who Code.

Forget The PC, The Real Crapware Problem Is on Android

A Motorola Moto X smartphone, using Google's Android software. Mark Lennihan/AP

Bloatware, the crappy and unnecessary software that comes preinstalled on your new computer, has been around since AOL paid PC makers to roll its dial-up service into their machines back in the 1990s. But that era may be coming to a close.

Last week, the world’s largest PC maker, Lenovo, vowed to “eliminate what our industry calls ‘adware’ and ‘bloatware'” from its PCs. The company was forced to do this when it got caught sliding a seriously dangerous piece of adware called Superfish onto its laptop computers. Lenovo’s pledge is a win in the battle against bloatware. But in 2015, PCs are now a bit of a sideline skirmish. The most important front right now is Android. On phones running Google’s mobile operating system, the forces of bloatware are winning.

Android has a bigger bloatware problem than the PCs, but Google could make it go away. All it would have to do is become its own wireless carrier.

Take Jared Burrows, a software developer with Northrop Grumman who’s written a few Android apps of his own. Burrows runs a custom script that yanks about two dozen unwanted programs off of his Android phone, he says. He hates all that unwanted software, and for good reason. “I do not like things running in the background because it causes my battery to run down, and it’s always using data,” he says.

Bloatware is a bigger headache on Android phones than it is on PCs for multiple reasons, says Irfan Asrar, a researcher with mobile security company Appthority. “Not only is it harder to remove (every time you do a factory reset it will come back), but it’s costing you resource such as data usage and battery drainage as well as pushing the boundaries on privacy,” he said in an email to WIRED.

Fix This, Google—Please!

Tiny margins make consumer electronics a cutthroat market, Asrar says. As a result, bloatware lures device manufactures with a tempting additional revenue stream that comes from asking app developers and publishers to pay up for the privilege of being distributed with the phone. “In some cases this also helps subsidize the price of the device,” Asrar says.

What’s worse, Droidland has not one source of bloatware but two. Handset makers like Samsung and HTC love to pre-install their own apps. Then carriers like Verizon or AT&T do the same thing. My Samsung Galaxy Note, for example, shipped with pre-installed messaging software from Google, Samsung, and Verizon. That’s excessive.

But if Android has a bigger bloatware problem than the PCs, Google could make it go away. All the maker of the world’s most popular mobile operating system would have to do is become its own wireless carrier.

Google’s Nexus phones are already the most bloatware-free Android handsets out there. If Google then becomes a wireless carrier itself—an “experiment” that’s in the works, the company said yesterday—then it could also cut out the carrier-level junk and build a phone that’s completely bloatware free.

Apple keeps its phones largely free of this unwanted software by exerting rigorous control over what can and cannot get installed on its own hardware. Yanking this much control away from the phone companies by delivering a phone unsullied by their crappy add-ons was a big breakthrough. But as a mobile carrier, Google would have more control of the final product than even Apple. It would be the only company to oversee every stage of the mobile market: from coding the base software to building the handsets to controlling the little white boxes that get sent out to customers.

With that much power, maybe Google could give the world the kind of Android phones we really want: the kind that doesn’t come filled with crap from the moment we turn them on.

Another Attempt to Make the Killer Connected Credit Card

Stratos is aiming to ship next month. Stratos

Remember Coin, the credit card-sized gizmo that promised to streamline your wallet by consolidating all your other, actual credit cards? It raked in approximately a gazillion dollars in pre-orders when it debuted in November 2013, only to become another certified crowdfunding debacle, beset by delays and acrimony. Buyers were initially told it would ship summer 2014; the vast majority are still waiting.

If nothing else, the saga proved that there is interest in a wallet-slimming wonder card. Now, those interested have another option to consider. Stratos is more or less the same concept as Coin, just with a slicker design and one other key advantage: Its creators claim it’s actually ready to ship. The question is whether or not it will be relevant once the payment world starts the shift to chip-enhanced cards this fall.

One Card Fits All

If you remember Coin, you’re already familiar with the basic idea behind Stratos. You load your credit and debit cards into a smartphone app with a provided dongle, and they reside electronically on the Stratos card itself. From there, you can use them via the device anywhere you’d use the original.

The Bluetooth-equipped card, designed by Herbst Produkt, has a handsome design and a few especially nice touches. For one, while it can hold an unlimited number of cards, three touch-sensitive shortcuts on the device itself let you quickly pull in your most frequently-used cards. The rest—including rewards and membership cards and the like—can be summoned by tapping the device to your phone and selecting the desired one from an app. As designer Scot Herbst puts it, the aim was to streamline the interactions and to keep the card-switching from feeling cumbersome or kludgey.

The Stratos team, based in Ann Arbor, MI, has been working on the device for three years. CEO Thiago Olson says he and his co-founders made a deliberate decision to keep their heads down while they worked on the technology, to make sure they could deliver when they did debut. “Switching from the R&D to the manufacturable card is so hard,” he says. At this point, their manufacturer is pumping out cards and the company plans to start shipping them in April.

Credit Cards Are A-Changin’

Even if Stratos is the one card to rule them all, it won’t last forever. October is the suggested deadline for retailers to switch over to a more secure standard called EMV. Instead of swiping your card and transmitting data via the magnetic strip, you dip your card and the point of sale device reads an embedded chip. It’s the same thing they’ve used in Europe for years under the name “chip and pin.”

The first current version of Stratos won’t be able to replicate the chip-based transactions. Granted, even with the October deadline, there will likely be a transition period as merchants and card issuers get sorted out with the new technology. But at some point, people are going to stop accepting the old school swipe-based transactions, and when that does happen, your first-gen Stratos will become a nice hefty bookmark. There’s a good chance the first version of Stratos will be largely outmoded in a matter of months.

Stratos

Olson and company are actively trying to figure out a second-generation Stratos that will make sense in this landscape. One of the ideas they’re considering is a card that could make tokenized payments from your other cards via magnetic stripe or NFC—essentially Apple Pay in credit card form. Olson also has visions of a platform where digital cards could be issued securely and instantaneously; Stratos is in talks with networks and issuers about this sort of system. In an effort to future-proof their offering, Stratos is launching with a subscription model and promising to send all users a new card with whatever next-gen tech they decide on every year. Memberships start at $95 for one year and $145 for two. Still, Olson readily admits that payments are a rapidly changing space. Stratos’ future is anything but guaranteed.

But Olson is confident that there’s room for some sort of credit card in our future, even with changing standards and the rise of mobile payments. Apple Pay and the like will be fine for when you’re in Whole Foods, he says, but what about when you’re in a restaurant? You’re not going to hand your phone to the waiter. Perhaps more importantly, we’re still a long ways from ubiquity. We’ve got years of “can I pay with my phone here?” limbo ahead. Not so with the trusty credit card. “From a consumer side, you don’t really have to worry about where it works. It works everywhere,” Olson says. “We don’t view the card as an artifact that’s going away.”

Unlocking key to immunological memory in bacteria

A powerful genome editing tool may soon become even more powerful. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have unlocked the key to how bacteria are able to "steal" genetic information from viruses and other foreign invaders for use in their own immunological memory system.

"We've shown that bacteria need only two proteins to facilitate this process, Cas1 and Cas2," says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist with Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division. "Our findings could provide an alternative way of introducing needed genetic information into a human cell or correcting a problem in an existing genome."

Doudna, who also holds appointments with the University of California (UC) Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Department of Chemistry, and is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), is the corresponding author of a paper in Nature that describes the research. The paper is titled "Integrase-mediated spacer acquisition during CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity." The lead author is James Nuñez, a member of Doudna's UC Berkeley research group. Other authors are Amy Lee and Alan Engelman.

Bacteria face a never-ending onslaught from viruses and invading strands of nucleic acid known as plasmids. To survive this onslaught, bacteria and archaea deploy a variety of defense mechanisms, including an adaptive-type immune system that revolves around a unit of DNA known as CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. A CRISPR unit of DNA is made up of "repeat" elements, base-pair sequences ranging from 30 to 60 nucleotides in length, separated by "spacer" elements, variable sequences that are also from 30 to 60 nucleotides in length.

Through the combination of CRISPR and squads of CRISPR-associated -- "Cas" -- proteins, bacteria are able to utilize small customized RNA molecules to silence critical portions of a foreign invader's genetic message and acquire immunity from similar invasions in the future by "remembering" prior infections. Doudna and her research group have been pioneers in unraveling the mysteries behind the CRISPR-based immunological memory of bacteria.

"We've learned that bacteria can acquire critical pieces of genetic information from foreign invaders and insert this information into the CRISPR loci within their own genome as new spacers," Nuñez says. "These foreign-derived spacers basically function as a memory bank."

Until now, however, it was not known how spacers are stolen from the foreign invader's genome and transferred into the CRISPR loci of the host. Working with the bacteria E. coli and using high-throughput sequencing of spacers inserted in vitro, Doudna, Nuñez and their colleagues found that the memorizing proteins -- Cas1 and Cas2 -- recognize repeating sequences in CRISPR loci and target these sites for the spacer insertion process.

"Repeat sequences in a host bacterium's CRISPR locus form DNA cruciform (cross-shaped) structures that recruit Cas1 and Cas2 to the site for the insertion of spacer sequences," Nuñez says. "The cruciform structures tell Cas1 and Cas2 precisely where to place the spacer sequences from a foreign invader, a virus or a plasmid. When the process is completed, the host bacterium is now immune to future infections from that same type of virus or plasmid."

Doudna and her group believe that it may be possible in the future to program Cas1 and Cas2 proteins with a DNA sequence that carries desired information, i.e., codes for a specific protein, then insert this DNA into the appropriate site in the genome of a human cell using additional Cas1 and Cas2 proteins.

"It turns out that bacteria and archaea have been using Cas1 and Cas2 proteins in their immunization process for millions of years," says Nuñez. "Our next task is to figure out the rules behind the process and how to apply them to human cells."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Nikon’s New Point and Shoot Has an Absurdly Long Zoom Range

If you want a camera lens with a zoom range of 24mm to 2000mm, you won’t find it in a DSLR. In order to get that kind of preposterous wide-angle to telephoto reach in one package, you’ll have to opt for Nikon’s new Coolpix P900 fixed-lens ultrazoom.

If you do the math, that translates to an impossible-sounding 83X optical-zoom range (well, 83.33X to be precise) in a camera the size of a small DSLR. That’s plenty of reach for moon photography, and nature shots that keep you a safe distance away from that grizzly bear.

A tripod is always a good idea at that sort of range, but you may even be able to shoot those long distances handheld. Nikon has developed a new optical system for the P900 that provides five shutter-speed stops of shake compensation, which is a must for a lens with this kind of telephoto reach. There’s also a snap-back zoom feature that helps you reframe a shot if your optics lose a faraway subject.

The major tradeoff compared to a DSLR, of course, is the sensor size. The P900 has a 16-megapixel 1/2.3-inch type sensor that’s closer to the size of what you’d find in your smartphone than the APS-C sensor most DSLRs employ. And in order to shoot handheld at full telephoto with a fast shutter speed, you’re going to need plenty of light (or to jack the ISO close to its 6400 max setting): The maximum aperture at full zoom is F6.5, while it’s a much brighter F2.8 at 24mm wide-angle.

In terms of build and features, it’s a lot more DSLR-like. The full-bodied P900 has a beefy handgrip, full-manual exposure controls, an exposure bracketing mode, 7fps burst shooting, and 1080p video recording at up to 60fps. Along with a 3-inch flip-and-swivel LCD screen, there’s an eye-level optical viewfinder. Like most modern-day cameras, Wi-Fi and NFC are also built in.

At $600 starting in April, it’s pricey for a fixed-lens camera with a sensor that small. But given that its zoom capabilities are one-of-a-kind, it just might be worth it to you. It’s no secret that standalone cameras are struggling now that smartphones are the everyday cameras of choice for nearly everyone. At least with the P900, you’ll never wonder if your iPhone would be just as good—or at least, if it could see quite as far.

IKEA’s New Furniture Won’t Jumpstart Wireless Charging

The promise of walking through your front door, placing your phone on a normal-looking table without any garish accoutrements, and effortlessly replenishing your phone battery isn’t the real world yet. IKEA’s new wireless-charging furniture line takes a big step toward that goal, but it won’t get us all the way there.

The biggest problem with wireless charging thus far hasn’t been the competing standards, or even that it’s not really “wireless”—you need to plug the charging surface into a wall outlet, after all. The biggest problem is that it’s been kind of kludgy. There are numerous wireless-charging accessories out there—all sorts of mats and connector-free stands that work with compatible phones and cases—but they’re smallish, sometimes finicky, and almost certainly don’t mesh with your decor. Besides, wireless charging is arguably less convenient at this stage than faster charging, and wireless accessories can’t match the amps or speeds of some modern wired components.

When wireless charging does eventually reach the masses, it’ll be in the home. Stations that support the Qi wireless charging standard, which is built into an increasing number of cases and phones, including the newly announced Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, are already in some cars and public places, including airports and hotels. Public wireless-charging stations that support a different technology—the Power Matters Alliance standard backed by Duracell Powermat and Procter & Gamble—are offered in some Starbucks and Madison Square Garden.

But wireless charging in a public space is an odd fit. It requires leaving your phone sitting there, untethered by any kind of wire, around a bunch of strangers. Now that phones are the centers of our personal-info universe, the risk is not worth the reward.

Moving the same built-into-furniture setup to an in-home setting makes a whole lot more sense. Doubly so when that furniture–a range of tables, lamps, desks, and standalone charging pads–comes from a company with the reach and design sense of IKEA. Recharging your phone no longer becomes an “activity,” it’s just something that happens whenever you set it down. And with IKEA backing the Qi standard, which is already well ahead of the Power Matters Alliance standard in terms of device support and number of locations, it’s a step toward not just large-scale adoption but a single standard.

There are still plenty of limitations though. The new IKEA pieces are closer to that “every surface is a charger” ideal, but they still need to be plugged in. You also can’t use it to charge all of your gear; the Wireless Power Consortium, which developed the Qi standard, says its transmitters are all 5W models, good enough for charging up a phone. 7.5W and 15W transmitters are in production—more useful for faster phone charging and charging tablets—but the kind of firepower needed to charge a laptop is still a ways off.

You also need to buy this first generation of wireless-charging lamps, tables, and desks based on the fact that it’s a wireless-charging lamp, table, or desk. In other words, if the style of these limited offerings doesn’t match your home decor or your taste, well, no IKEA wireless-charging lamp for you. That makes it a tougher sell, especially given that if you want to create your own electric furniture, there are plenty of Qi adapters that let you build them into the stuff you already own. IKEA will also be taking that route, selling several sizes of Qi modules, bundled with instructions for installing them into existing pieces.

Even if all of those challenges were surmountable, though, you’d still be left with the chicken and egg problem that defines the state of wireless charging today. Charging isn’t mainstream because it isn’t ubiquitous nor invisible enough. And an attempt to make it ubiquitous and invisible—such as the world’s largest furniture-store chain building it into its wares—is a tough sell, because wireless charging isn’t mainstream enough.

You can’t fault IKEA for trying to jumpstart the wireless-charging revolution, but this first effort probably won’t help Qi crack the mainstream. For one, more styles of IKEA furniture need to be available in Qi versions. Love that Blüppo nightstand, Flurkk lamp, or Smødjel desk? Well then, opt for the wireless-charging model. The range of gadgets you can charge is also prohibitive at the moment. Once a desk can magically, invisibly charge a laptop, that’s when you should take notice. Until then, there’s just not enough juice.

Plants detect bacterial endotoxin in similar process to mammals

Similar to humans and animals, plants possess an innate immune system that protects them from invading pathogens. Molecular structures that only occur in pathogens enable their recognition and trigger the immune response. Lipopolysaccharide (endotoxin) is one such substance, occurring in the outer membrane of certain bacteria. A team of scientists from Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB) in Halle has now described the first endotoxin immunosensor in plants.

Bacteria do not just attack people and animals, but also cultivated plants such as tomatoes, cabbages and rice -- causing crop losses with significant economic impact around the globe. Plants are not defenseless, however. They possess an innate immune system equipped with various immunosensors that detect substances occurring only in microorganisms and trigger a defensive reaction. In mammals, for instance, toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) detects lipopolysaccharide, which is also referred to as endotoxin and is the main component of the outer membrane of many bacterial pathogens.

Since plants also mount an immune response to lipopolysaccharide, the assumption was that they too possess an immunosensor for this substance. The nature of this sensor was previously unknown. Now, though, a multidisciplinary team of scientists from TUM, IPB and the Leibniz-Center for Medicine and Biosciences in Borstel has succeeded in decoding the detection mechanism for bacterial lipopolysaccharide in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress).

The search for the plant's lipopolysaccharide sensor was complicated by the fact that the endotoxin does not consist of a single defined molecule, but of a complex mixture of similar lipopolysaccharide molecules. For that reason, it has also not yet been possible to synthesize it for testing. So the analysis, purification and chemical separation of components of the lipopolysaccharide at the Borstel research center was a key prerequisite for the genetic and biochemical plant tests at TUM and IPB.

Protein LORE helps plants to fight bacteria

These tests allowed the scientists to determine which sensor Arabidopsis plants use to detect lipopolysaccharide. Their experiments showed that this function is performed by the LipoOligosaccharide-specific Reduced Elicitation (LORE) protein they discovered, which also initiates the subsequent immune response. However, LORE differs in its composition from endotoxin sensors in animals. So evolution has produced two separate instances of this detection principle, occurring independently in animals and in plants.

The team was also able to show that, despite the different sensors, both animals and plants detect the same component of lipopolysaccharide: lipid A. In humans and other mammals, lipid A can trigger an excessive immune response with sepsis and septic shock as life-threatening complications.

Interestingly, not all plants exhibit the LORE immunosensor -- only crucifers. In addition to Arabidopsis, this family includes important crop plants such as brassica, mustard and rapeseed. However, the scientists also found that the sensor retains its function if transferred into other plants. It could therefore serve as a tool for researching and producing plants with improved resistance to bacterial pathogens, the scientists say.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Technische Universitaet Muenchen . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Human Population and My Ancestors

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My mother and grandmother - image taken a few years before the start of Facebook. Rhett Allain

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My mother and grandmother - image taken a few years before the start of Facebook. Rhett Allain

Here is a fun plotting game (suggested by my colleague David Norwood).

We all know that in the past there were not as many humans on Earth as there are now. Right now we are around 7 billion humans on this planet but just 200 years ago the population was around 1 billion (or less). So, the further back in time you go the fewer humans are on Earth.

Ok, now what about your ancestors? Personally, I have two parents. Both of my parents had parents so that I had 4 grandparents. My grandparents had parents which gives me 8 great-grandparents and so on. The further back in time I go, the more ancestors I have.

Now let’s merge these two sets of data. How far back in time do I have to go such that the number of my ancestors is the same as the human population? To answer this, I need two things. First, I need a plot of the Earth’s population. This isn’t too difficult. Just check out this page on Wikipedia regarding World Population. There are plenty of graphs from which you can get population data. I used one of those along with plotly’s web digitizer to get the data.

What about a plot of the number of ancestors? If I call myself the zeroth generation and my parents the 1st generation, then I can write the number of humans in a generation as:

Where N_g is the number of humans (just in that generation) and n is the generation number. But what is the time frame for a generation? If my ancestors have children at the age of 20 instead of 30, there will be a different number of ancestors 300 years from now. Of course the actual time between generations varies. For this calculation I will use 25 years for all generations.

Now for the plot.

According to this estimation, in the year 1280 I had 351 million ancestors and there were 351 million humans on Earth. But what does this really mean? Nothing.

Homework

When life gives you meaningless problems, make homework. I think that is an old saying. Well, here is some homework.

What happens if you change the time span of a generation? What year does your ancestor size equal the population for a time span of 20 years? What about 30 years?

Suppose the generation span (time between generations) is not constant. Maybe it is a random distribution (you can pick the kind of distribution) with times between 20 and 30 years. How does this change the crossing date?

Make the generation span a random function that also depends on time such that the further back in time, the more likely the generation span is shorter.

Of course, this model assumes no mixing. It assumes that all of your ancestors were unrelated. Is there any way to make a model with ancestor crossover (not sure what to call that).

What if you were born in 1950? How much would that change your cross over date?

Final homework question: write a story to explain why all of your ancestors are the only people on Earth.

PCH Buys Fab, as a Retail Outlet for Hardware Upstarts

Liam Casey, the founder and CEO of PCH. Ian Allen

Fab.com, the massive and eclectic online design emporium, has gone through a few reincarnations since it was founded in 2010. First a social network for gay men, its founders then flipped it into a flash-sale site for quirky household products—in the process raising over $300 million in venture capital. But that fad didn’t last, and Fab moved to selling in-house designs online.

Today marks yet another new chapter for Fab: PCH International, the company that designs supply chain solutions for hardware startups, is buying Fab for an undisclosed amount. This move isn’t about making Fab run better. It’s about turning PCH into a vertically integrated powerhouse for hardware startups.

Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg won’t be continuing with the company, but other than that, PCH founder and CEO Liam Casey says the acquisition won’t mean many dramatic changes for Fab. “We’re really excited about the way [Fab general manager Renee Wong] has managed the team,” Casey says, nodding to the streamlining and restructuring that’s taken place in recent months, after a couple of beleaguered years for Fab. (Once valued at $1 billion, rumors last fall suggested it would only sell for $15 million.)

One of the changes Wong introduced was to start cutting down on the amount of inventory Fab kept sitting around in huge warehouses. That’s crucial to Casey, because for PCH the purchase is a step towards executing on his novel, grand idea of how could retail can work, and “having warehouses full of inventory is a big concern for us,” Casey says. “That slows you down as a company.” That’s a lesson that should prove vital to the hardware startups that Casey’s company is betting on.

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One of the startups to come out of Highway1's first class was Drop, a smart kitchen scale that walks would-be bakers through the exact ingredient amounts that they need, and can easily recalibrate proportions.Photos by Drop

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Another Highway1-incubated startup: Cue, which aims to bring lab diagnostics to the home. Photos by Cue

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Skylock, a bluetooth gadget, gives bike riders keyless entry but also allows them to share access to their bike.Photo: Velo Labs

From Furniture to Hardware

Casey has a specific vision for how hardware retail should work: rather than work with traditional big box retailers that demand a certain amount of inventory up front, startups should gage consumer interest before they manufacture products. Recently, PCH, through its Highway 1 program, has incubated Cue, a smart at-home medical device; Flic, an open-source tactile button for controlling digital apps; and the Drop Smart Scale. All of those tiny startups could’ve been hammered by the demands of traditional retail; instead, PCH worked with them to determine market reach, and to manufacture accordingly. “We love to replace inventory with data,” he says.

That data has to come from somewhere. For some new gadgets, it’s easily culled through the community created by Kickstarter campaigns. For PCH, Fab’s user base—still robust, even after all the company’s struggles—is a new kind of data-creating community. That community could become a new market for some of the gadgets that PCH already works with, and it could be a pool of users whose shopping habits inform new, curated product lines. Casey compares this idea to what Netflix has done with original programming, so you can imagine that while Fab keeps humming along, new designers will work with both PCH and Fab to create newer, special-edition products based on what they’re already showing interest in.

To pull this off, PCH will need to find harmony between the tech-heavy companies it typically works with, and Fab’s millions of shoppers who are used to items like quirky chairs and lamps. If it does, it’s on to a big idea for retail: a one-stop-shop that’s looking out for every player, from the idea man to the manufacturer to the buyer. “For us that’s always been a focus: how do you manage every step of the experience?” Casey says.

An Awesome 8-Bit Music Video Made Using Beads as Pixels

The Very Best’s “Let Go” isn’t your standard-issue 8-bit-inspired music video. While it has all the fun and side-scrolling action of an 8-bit video, the clip for the indie duo’s new track also has something else: It was made out of beads.

Crafted by Swedish artist Pappas Parlor, the “Let Go” video (premiering above) took more than a month to make by meticulously arranging pixel beads—aka those little doo-dads that you used to form into patterns and fuse together with a clothes iron. “We talked to him about doing an old-school 8-bit game type video with all the characters and landscape being made out of pixel beads and giving the impression of stop motion filming,” says Very Best’s Johan Hugo.

The video features 8-bit versions of Hugo and his band mate Esau Mwamwaya running through two different levels. In the first they run from street dogs in Mwamwaya’s home of Malawi and in the second they’re in Hugo’s native Sweden and, he explains, they’re running “from a fox and our enemies are the far right-wing political party. … We tried to come up with funny things that could happen in the video as well as address some of our more serious concerns.”

Check out the video for “Let Go,” which ends with cameos from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio and The Vaccines’ Freddie Cowan, above. The Very Best’s new album Makes a King drops April 7.

Fat? Sick? Blame Your Grandparents’ Bad Habits

Toward the end of World War II, the Nazis blocked all food and fuel supplies to the Netherlands, leading to famine. Many babies born during this famine suffered long-term effects, including a higher incidence of a variety of conditions such as heart disease, obesity, glucose intolerance, and obstructed airways. Severe trauma altered the victims’ gene code for life, even if the victim had yet to be born.

But here’s the weird part: The effects didn’t stop with a child or with a generation. Postwar and post-famine, later-born siblings were also affected. Even in periods when food was available and the war over, a genetic memory lingered.

And it appears to linger a long time. In follow‑up studies, the daughters of Dutch mothers who had suffered through WWII’s famine while pregnant in turn had daughters with twice the average rate of schizophrenia. In other words, mothers’ wartime duress was passed on to their daughters, in the form of mental illness, and then on to the granddaughters: a genetic scar, inherited collectively by many individuals across at least two generations. Somehow, genes had been altered even for those who had no direct contact with the famine itself.

Excerpted from

Evolving Ourselves by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans

If our gene code can change in real time because of our surrounding environment, and if these changes can be passed on, then a long-discredited biologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, may not have been 100 percent wrong. In the early 19th century, Lamarck was run out of bio-town for daring to suggest that evolution can take place in one generation; he argued that if giraffes stretch their necks to reach the upper branches of trees, their necks will lengthen and this beneficial trait will be passed to their progeny.

In other words, Lamarck was saying that evolution isn’t the very slow and apparently haphazard process Darwin described. And today, of course, the AP Biology review (or any other relevant text) states something like, “We now know that Lamarck’s theory was wrong. This is because acquired changes (changes at a ‘macro’ level in somatic cells) cannot be passed on to germ cells.” Cut and dried, case closed . . . except that the Dutch famine cases seem to contradict this assertion.

The Case of the Voodoo Tomatoes

Until very recently, “transgenerational inheritance” was a concept typically banned from all polite geneticists’ conversations. But then doubts began to creep in when scientists performed experiments and observed the various nifty tricks and speed with which various bacteria adapted to new environments.

The experimenters realized two things: First, there was a very low likelihood that rapid adaptation was taking place due to random, beneficial mutations. Second, given how fast a trait like antibiotic resistance could spread within a species and across many species of microbes, there had to be some real-time evolutionary reset mechanism. So a few brave souls revived the term “epigenetics,” first coined in 1942 by Conrad H. Waddington, a British scientist.

In one experiment, scientists shocked mice every time they smelled almonds. When these mice reproduced, their kids and grandkids were born afraid of the same smell.

Most early epigeneticists were ignored or written off as “voodoo biologists.” What they preached was such a radically different discipline from core genetics that as long as their experiments were confined to bacteria, the outcomes and modes of action could be considered a fluke.

But then came tomatoes, in which scientists observed and quantified transgenerational changes from mother to daughter to granddaughter tomato after exposure to drought, extreme cold, or great heat. The discoveries kept piling on; in 2013, a Cornell team demonstrated that epigenetics, not gene code, was a critical factor when trying to figure out when and why a tomato ripens.

Similar epigenetic effects were discovered in worms, fruit flies, and rodents; a creative and slightly mean-spirited experiment involved letting mice smell sweet almonds and then shocking their feet. Soon mice were terrified of the smell of almonds. When these mice reproduced, the kids were never shocked, but they were still quite afraid of the same smell. So were the grandkids. The brains of all three generations had modified M71 glomeruli, the specific neurons sensitive to that type of smell. We do not yet know how many generations epigenetic tags can survive for, but in rats the effects can last at least four generations. In worms, disrupting epigenetic control mechanisms can have consequences persisting for 70 generations.

This implies that an environmental stimulus (for example, famine, stress, toxins, affection) can be transmitted via the nervous, endocrine, or immune systems to the DNA in each cell, which in turn sets switches that express hereditary code to silence or activate in a particular situation. Under siege by some invaders? Flip a few switches to cope. Fall harvest plentiful? Flip a few switches to store fat, procreate, and ramp up metabolism. A plague in the neighborhood? Flip a few switches to enhance resistance.

Your DNA genome has “on/off” chemical switches that collectively are known as your epigenome. So your epigenome is unique and changes every time a switch is flipped. Because your epigenome’s switches are considered reversible when they are passed from parent to child, many scientists view this to be “soft evolution,” i.e., not guaranteed to be as enduring as when a mutation arises in the core DNA genome.

The epigenome can be passed on, sometimes reversed, sometimes reinforced. Unlike in classic Mendelian genetics, it is hard to predict and quantify, so you can just imagine how this variation in experimental outcomes has driven many careful, traditional scientists who believed the DNA code was the be‑all and end-all of heredity completely crazy. They would try to eliminate all the variables, use genetically identical rats, and sometimes get completely different results. So it is no surprise that for decades epigenetics was ignored or pooh-poohed by funders, senior biologists, and science magazines. There was no reliable way to trace the precipitating event and no way to easily predict which individuals would be affected in future generations.

So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet‑to‑be‑conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.

Soft evolution is like an annotated book. Those who read different annotations of the same book may end up with very different learning.

As we experience stress, love, aging, fear, pleasure, infection, pain, exercise, or hunger, various hormones adjust various physical responses within our bodies. Hormones surge through our blood; changes in cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, interleukin, leptin, insulin, oxytocin, thyroid hormone, growth hormone, and adrenaline make us behave and develop in different ways. And they signal to our epigenomes, “Time to flip some switches!”

Genes get shut off or turned on as the world around us changes.

The Book of Life

Soft evolution is analogous to an annotated book. The basic text and argument of the book remain the same. But if the text is gradually surrounded by margin notes and comments, then those who read different annotations of the exact same book may end up with very different learning, depending on who annotated the particular copy they borrowed, how they treated the original text, how the reader decided to interpret the interplay between the original printed text and the annotations, and whether some of the annotations were erased or modified by other readers.

There are multiple ways to add in rapid, inherited epigenetic adaptations without any change in the core DNA code. One basic and common mechanism is DNA methylation: Enzymes in our cells attach a methyl group (CH3) to a cytosine (C) located next to a guanine (G) in our DNA, forming a methylated island. This tells the gene that follows next, “Shhh, do not express yourself.”

One of the key reasons for human diversity is that about 70 percent, or roughly 14,000, of our genes have these “on/off” switches plus random mutations among them, so there are countless combinations of ways that these switches are flipped in the human population.

Sperm and eggs get a nearly fresh start: An estimated 90 percent of the switches are erased before conception occurs, which means most epigenetic memories are lost. But there is still a lot of recent data moving from generation to generation. (Those who described sperm as simple bags of DNA with a tail could never explain why sperm had so many receptors for so many hormones not directly related to reproduction, including leptin, one of the obesity genes, as well as 19 growth factors, cytokines, and neurotransmitters.)

Epigenetic switches can be flipped on and off in sperm, eggs, or embryos, so your kids and grandkids can share your environmental experiences and knowledge, and be better prepared for the environment they will soon be entering. For instance, if you were a male smoker, and your brother was not, 28 epigenetic signals in your sperm would be different from his. Sperm are listening.

At conception, your grandchildren listen to distant tales, and sometimes pass them on.

Reprinted from Evolving Ourselves by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) Juan Enriquez and Steven Gullans, 2015.

PCH Buys Fab, as a Retail Outlet for Hardware Upstarts

Former Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. Fab.com

From Furniture to Hardware

An Awesome 8-Bit Music Video Made Using Beads as Pixels

Check out the video for “Let Go,” which ends with cameos from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio and The Vaccines’ Freddie Cowan, above. The Very Best’s new album Makes a King drops April 7.

In hot and cold water: The private lives of 'Hoff' crabs revealed

Researchers at the University of Southampton have shed light on the private life of a new species of deep-sea crab, previously nicknamed the "Hoff" crab because of its hairy chest.

Male and female Hoff crabs lead largely separate lives at volcanic vents 1.5 miles (2.4 km) deep on the ocean floor near Antarctica, because of the conflicting demands of feeding and raising young among the sexes.

In 2010, a British expedition revealed a 'lost world' of deep-sea animals thriving around volcanic vents on the ocean floor near Antarctica. Among the many new species of deep-sea creatures was a hairy-chested crab. Using a deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to examine the distribution, size and sex of these crabs at the vents, Dr Leigh Marsh and her colleagues have now pieced together their private lives.

"The life cycles of deep-sea animals have been largely hidden from us until now," says Dr Marsh, "but thanks to more frequent expeditions and advances in technology, we are getting a clearer picture of the natural history of the ocean depths that cover most of our world."

The researchers found that large male Hoff crabs live highest on the mineral spires of the deep-sea vents, closest to the hot fluids that jet from them. At the base of the mineral spires, smaller males mingle with females in spectacular piles, many crabs deep, where they get together to mate. The females then crawl away from the bustling piles of crabs and the warm mineral-rich fluids seeping from the seafloor, which can be toxic to their young.

Away from the mineral spires, the few crabs found by the researchers were all females, carrying developing offspring under their curled-up tails.

Moving away from the warmer waters of the spires takes the females across a gauntlet of predators, such as large sea anemones and seven-arm seastars. Away from the vents, the cold water of the deep Antarctic also slows down the metabolism of the adult female crabs, making them less active than in the warmer waters of the jostling piles. However, the conditions away from the vents may be more stable and less harmful to their offspring for their early development, making the journey of the females worthwhile.

Males, meanwhile, don't share in "child-care" arrangements with the females, and instead can climb up the mineral spires of the vents to take advantage of the warmth and conditions best suited for growing bacteria on their hairy chests. By scraping off and eating these bacteria using comb-like mouthparts, the males can grow much larger than the females.

Study co-author Dr Jon Copley says: "Deep-sea vents are island-like habitats on the seafloor, and discoveries like these show that our exploration of the life that thrives around them has only just begun."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Southampton . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Fat? Sick? Blame Your Grandparents’ Bad Habits

The Case of the Voodoo Tomatoes

In one experiment, scientists shocked mice every time they smelled almonds. When these mice reproduced, their kids and grandkids were born afraid of the same smell.

Soft evolution is like an annotated book. Those who read different annotations of the same book may end up with very different learning.

Genes get shut off or turned on as the world around us changes.

The Book of Life

At conception, your grandchildren listen to distant tales, and sometimes pass them on.