A crustacean eye that rivals the best optical equipment - "Go Evolution"

Normally, such a structure should still perform poorly over the entire visible range. What makes the structure work is that the tubes are made of membranes containing molecules that also have a refractive index that differs depending on the orientation of the light field. Now, we have four different refractive indexes: two associated with the form birefringence and two associated with the membranes. All four of them vary depending on the color of the light coming down the tubes. The form birefringence changes in just the right way to compensate the changes due to the membrane, providing a quarter waveplate that works well across the entire visible spectrum.

How good is this? A simple quarter waveplate made from a piece of quartz is accurate to within about ±20 degrees over the entire visible range—this is on the bad side of absolute junk. A quarter waveplate that makes use of form birefringence for better performance clocks in at around ±9 degrees. R8 beats this by a factor of three with a variation of just ±2.7 degrees over the visible range.

All I have to say at this point is: go evolution.

Contrary to the author's statement this research is, of course, evidence of Intelligent Desgin. How could 'evolution' (random change over time) result in something so complex?

Monkeys Fall Into the Uncanny Valley, Just Like Humans | Wired Science

Monkeys are freaked out by almost-but-not-quite-real depictions of themselves. That tendency is well documented in humans, but has never before been seen in another species.

This interesting item shows a pyscological similarity between macaque monkeys and humans. Yet more evidence that we share evolutionary roots.

Second law of thermodynamics "broken"

Physicists knew that at atomic scales over very short periods of time, statistical mechanics is pushed beyond its limit, and the second law does not apply. Put another way, situations that break the second law become much more probable.

But the new experiment probed the uncertain middle ground between extremely small-scale systems and macroscopic systems and showed that the second law can also be consistently broken at micron scale, over time periods of up to two seconds.

Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings

Some researchers have created some fMRI images which, at first glance, show that a dead salmon had a brain response when asked to interpret images of human emotion. Funny? Hell yeah! But instructive also.

Bennett’s point is that a suite of methods known as multiple comparisons correction can allow researchers to maintain most of their statistical power while keeping the danger of false positives at bay.

The work highlights that brain science is highly data-driven and statistical now. Although the visualizations — usually some orangey spots on an otherwise dark brain scan — seem simple, the data collection and interpretation that go into producing them is intense.

Vul, who published a controversial paper earlier this year that was critical of some statistical methods used in the field, said he appreciated that Bennett was also trying to do some “internal policing” to make fMRI practitioners’ methods as rigorous as possible.

Unfortunately...

Bennett’s paper has been turned down by several publications, but a poster on the work received an appreciative audience at the Human Brain Mapping conference earlier this summer. Neuroscience researchers have been forwarding it to each other for weeks.

via wired.com and thanks to bfchirpy's blog for the link to this item.

It's distressing that publications continue to have a bias towards papers with positive results. Negative results, including false positives, can be even more instructive. On the flip side, the informal networks are spreading the story anyway.

The Earth's Great Oxidation Event may have ended in a big dip - Ars Technica

The rise of oxygen, which altered the planet's atmosphere and enabled multicellular life, may not have come as two large bursts, as has been widely held, but rather as several "whiffs." That is the provocative conclusion of a study of chromium isotopes in ancient sedimentary rocks published in Nature. A team of geochemists led by Robert Frei of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, found that oxygen took a few twists and turns before reaching its present level.

Five essential things to know about evolution - Ars Technica

A really inefficient solution can be a lot better than the alternative

...

Evolution solves problems in parallel

...

Evolution doesn't happen overnight

...

A million years is a lot longer than we think it is

...

We wouldn't recognize a key transition while it was happening

A nice summary of some important points.

Calculating why we see classical behavior in a quantum world - Ars Technica

One of the remaining mysteries of quantum mechanics is the question of how we transition between the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics and the everyday world of classical objects. From a strict reductionist point of view, everything is quantum, and, yes, you could build a dog if you had the right mixture of quarks and electrons. Although this statement is technically true, it highlights an enormous gap between what we observe reality to be—continuous and largely deterministic—and its foundation, the weird mixture of continuity, descreteness, deterministic evolution, and probabilistic behavior that define the quantum world.

This is an intersting take on what has been an awkward problem.