A Map of All Known Species of the World

Since first conceptualized by Charles Darwin in his seminal book, The Origin of Species (1859), tree diagrams of various kinds have been used to depict evolution and convey the relationship between various species across the animal, plant, and microbial kingdoms.

Now, a project called OpenTreeOfLife.org has confensed tens of thousands of various phytogenic trees into one beautiful and inuitive circular diagram, as seen below.


Circle of Life

This lovely and useful guide is the end result of three years of work undertaken by researchers from a dozen scientific institutions from around the world.

Every line in the circle represent a species, and together they account for all 2.3 million species thus far named; another 5.4 million are thought to remain to be properly accounted for. With around 15,000 new species being discovered annually, the diagram will continue to grow in size and sophistication — so it is a good thing anyone is free to suggest updates or tweaks to the database.

As biologists continue to make progress in discovering and classifying new species (and re-examining existing ones), we can expect to see a lot of changes in the makeup of this diagram. I cannot wait to see this used in classrooms and popular science books.

Source: Scientific American


Trauma Can Run In Our DNA

It is not surprising that the impact of trauma often transcends generations; after all, the psychological and behavioral consequences can easily rub off on one’s children. But a recent finding from New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital strongly suggests that trauma is not just socially conditioned, but genetically inheritable.

As the Guardian reports, the study analyzed the genes of children born to Jewish men and women who, in some way or another, had suffered during the Second World War (as camp internees, torture victims, being on the run, etc.). The offspring of these survivors were already known to have an increase chance of stress disorders, and sure enough, results showed that the region of a gene linked to stress was altered in a way not seen in the control group. (The research team confirmed that the changes were not due to any trauma experienced by the children themselves.) Continue reading

The Ultradian Rhythm

Ever find yourself periodically losing energy and enthusiasm throughout the day? Turns out, there is a name for that phenomenon, and it reveals a lot about how our waking lives should be structured. More from Christine Carter of the Greater Good Science Center:


…[About] every hour and a half to two hours, we experience a significant “ultradian dip”, when our energy drops and sleep becomes possible. When we work through these dips—relying on caffeine, adrenaline, and stress hormones to keep us alert—instead of letting our bodies and brains rest, we become stressed and jittery, and our performance falters.

Now I feel a lot less bad about hitting these seemingly random walls of fatigue and disinterest. But how does one overcome this problem? Thankfully, it is a lot simpler than you would think.  Continue reading

The Unknown Chinese Woman Who Helped Find a Treatment for Malaria


Vox.com recounts the amazing story that led up to her breakthrough discovery.





What Makes the Human Brain So Special

If have about thirteen minutes to spare, I recommend checking out this fascinating TED Talk by neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who discovered a new way to count the brain’s neurons — and subsequently unveiled some curious characteristics. (If you have trouble viewing the embedded video below, click here.)

My timing for sharing this lecture is pretty apt, given the recent discovery that the brain has an unfathomably large capacity for storing data, equal to roughly one petabyte. To put that in perspective, Gizmodo notes:

A good analogy is the total amount of data amassed at the U.S. Library of Congress, which is about 235 terabytes. One petabyte is about four times that. Put yet another way, one petabyte is enough to store the DNA of the entire population of the United States twice over. So our brains may not have the equivalent storage capacity of the entire Web, but it’s still a huge data reservoir.

It is easy to take for granted just how amazing our brains are.


Cancers Cells Programmed Back to Normal

News about the next big breakthrough in cancer treatments are a dime a dozen. But this particular achievement seems worthy of hype and attention. Here is hoping its results can be further verified and replicated.

According to the Telegraph:




“We should be able to re-establish the brakes and restore normal cell function,” said Professor Panos Anastasiadis, of the Department for Cancer Biology.




As always, medical experts are rightly cautious about the results, noting that there is still quite a gap between cells grown in a laboratory and those of a human with cancer. Nevertheless, this is a big step forward, and presents yet another promising approach to consider in combating this scourge.

Altruism: It’s In Our DNA






















Sleep and Ethics

Coming shortly after my blog about the consequences of sleep deprivation, a common issue in our society, Mic.com published an article about a Harvard study that found yet another negative effect from insufficient rest: bad ethics.

Previous research has shown that people are more likely to become more unethical as the day goes on, but the Harvard team wanted to see if people with different sleeping patterns had different responses to temptation. So the researchers separated study participants into morning larks and night owls and gave them two different decision-making tasks that actually tested their honesty.

The Harvard team found that “larks will be more unethical at night than in the morning, and that owls will be more unethical in the morning than at night” — the more tired people felt, the more they were inclined to lie.

Here’s a chart showing the correlation between lack of energy and lack of ethical scruples:

The results are not too surprising, given that lack of sleep has been linked to a wide variety of mental and emotional problems, including increased likelihood of irritability, depression, impaired judgement, and so on.  It stands to reason that a mind weakened by lack of sleep would under-perform in other areas as well.  You simply won’t be thinking as much or as clearly.

As with my previous post on the subject, the implications of this finding take us back to the socioeconomic paradigms of our society: namely a business culture that makes people work increasingly unpalatable hours that are simply not conducive to optimal physical or mental performance. The Mic article makes a similar note:

Studies like this challenge the notion of a traditional 9-5 workday: If people are naturally inclined to be more productive and ethical at different hours of the day, isn’t it inefficient and ultimately dangerous for a company to ask everyone to work the same hours?

The Harvard team think so. “Managers should try to learn the chronotype (lark, owl, or in between) of their subordinates and make sure to respect it when deciding how to structure their work,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Managers who ask a lark to make ethics-testing decisions at night, or an owl to make such decisions in the morning, run the risk of encouraging rather than discouraging unethical behavior.”

As technological advances make it easier for people to telecommute or restructure their schedules, it’s up to managers to decide whether they want to allow flexible workdays. If you can get people to operate at optimum efficiency and moral uprightness for their shift, does it matter when they do the work?

Unfortunately, Americans employers overall have a bad track record of heeding, much less implementing, such evidence-backed recommendations. There has already been good evidence, not to mention historical precedence, showing that people are more productive when paid better and given more leisure time; yet the trend has increasingly been in the opposite direction, regardless (for their part, most government agencies and school administrations have not followed suit either).

Barring a few forward-thinking and largely niche businesses, it does not seem likely that the average employer will be willing to provide that much flexible without legal and/or organized pressure (though in fairness, I could see some individual local managers in non-9-to-5 jobs designing their schedules to work with their employees’ preferences).

Otherwise, we should do our best, whenever possible, to maintain schedules that are more conducive to the wellness of our minds, bodies, and souls. The connection between our physical health and mental health cannot be understated.

Recent Research Finds Humans Have Only Four Emotions

From The Atlantic

Conventional scientific wisdom recognizes six “classic” emotions: happy, surprised, afraid, disgusted, angry, and sad. But the [University of Glasgow] scientists studied people’s facial expressions, and the emotions they signal, by showing people computer-generated facial animations. They asked the observers to characterize the faces based on those six basic emotions, and found that anger and disgust looked very similar to the observers in the early stages, as did fear and surprise. For example, both anger and disgust share a wrinkled nose, and both surprise and fear share raised eyebrows.

The thing was, as time went on, the face showed the distinction between the two, but when the emotion first hit, the face signals are very similar, suggesting, the researchers say, that the distinction between anger and disgust and between surprise and fear, is socially, not biologically based.

This leaves us with four “basic” emotions, according to this study: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted.  These, the researchers say, are our biologically based facial signals—though distinctions exist between surprise and fear and between anger and disgust, the experiment suggests that these differences developed later, more for social reasons than survival ones.

“These results show that dynamic facial expression models transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time, characterized by simpler, biologically rooted signals early in the signaling dynamics followed by more complex socially speciﬁc signals that ﬁnely discriminate the six facial expressions of emotion,” the study reads.

The researchers posit that the wide-open eyes that come with fear/surprise are a response to “fast-approaching” danger, and that we widen our eyes to get more visual information. The wrinkled nose that comes with anger/disgust, they say, is a response to “stationary danger,” such as pathogens—by wrinkling your nose, you may be less likely to breathe in something harmful.

“Our data reﬂect that the six basic facial expressions of emotion, like languages, are likely to represent a more complex set of modern signals and categories evolved from a simpler system of communication in early man developed to subserve developing social interaction needs,” the authors wrote. By that they mean these four emotions are the basic building blocks from which we develop our modern, complex, emotional stews.

It’s remarkable how so many seemingly mundane characteristics of our species have vital evolutionary origins for our survival.