Björn Brembs

Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform.

Should you trust Elsevier?

More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda.

 Front cover of

the now-vanished

 Australasian Journal of Bone &amp; Joint Medicine

. Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The trinity of failures

According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect from their employees to help them make “evidence-led”, i.e., algorithmic employment decisions.

Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

Who’s responsible for the lack of action?

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.

Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet:  Since then, we have been waiting on the behavior of scholars to change, such that all our works indeed become accessible.

After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI‘s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):    Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

Why academic journals need to go

These days, many academic publishers can be considered mere Pinos: ‘Publishers in name only’. Instead of making scholarly work, commonly paid for by the public, public, as the moniker ‘publisher’ would imply, in about 80% of the cases, they put them behind a paywall.

The scholarly commons: from profiteering to servicing

Academic publishers in general and Elsevier in particular have a reputation for their ruthless profiteering, using professional negotiators pitting hapless librarians against their own faculty during journal subscription negotiations.

Why can Elsevier keep insulting scholars without consequences?

Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. Artist: Dave McKean  These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we describe experiments suggesting that insects appear to make a value-based decision before approaching the light.

Why did the moth fly into the flame?

Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data).  I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about  the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first post. As corresponding author on our paper, I will provide more context to our successful Open Data experience with Björn’s and Casey’s labs.

Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

Around 2005, German politicians decided on a plan to circumvent a newly created amendment to the German constitution that prevents federal funds from supporting state-owned institutions such as universities.

Data show “excellence initiative” was a massive failure – help stop it

Three years ago, representatives of libraries, publishers and scholars all agreed that academic publishers don’t really add any value to scholarly articles. Last week, I interpreted Sci-Hub potentially being a consequence of scholars having become tired after 20 years of trying to wrestle their literature from the publishers’ stranglehold by small baby-steps and through negotiations and campaigning alone.

Academic publishers: stop access negotiations

tl;dr:
 
 Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals.

Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review.

Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis

 et al.

entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits

The data clearly show that publications in

 Cell

,

 Nature

or

 Science

(

 CNS

for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.

No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in

 Science Magazine

last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

How embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science

Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing

Scientists as social parasites?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from April 19, 2011:

Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted these two on February 24, 2013:

The first one is a TED talk by Michael Dickinson on how flies fly: and the second one is on recording from fly visual neurons during flight and non-flight.

SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research

Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?

This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013:

In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In most if not all fields, scholarly journals are ranked in a hierarchy of prestige.

Solutions to the looming crisis in science

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968:  On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting.

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):    BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

One more reason to publish negative results

I have now posted the job ads for the PostDoc position in our lab at

 Nature

,

 Science

, SfN and FENS.

PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized

Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials?

Come and do research with us!

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any further disruptions.

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

Scholarly journals, on the face of it, emerged in the 17

 th

century as a medium to facilitate communication of scientific discoveries among interested scholars. In the 21

 st

century, it’s not all that different: researchers form communities around topics in which they share a common interest: Journal of Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Neonatology, Journal of Economics or the British Educational Research Journal.

Academic publishers and competition

This anecdote made my day today. On a

 Drosophila

researcher mailinglist, someone asked if anybody on the list had access to the Landes Bioscience journal ‘Fly‘. I replied by wondering that if #icanhazpdf on Twitter didn’t work, the days of ‘Fly’ are probably counted, with nobody subscribing.

#icanhazpdf more public than a publication?

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA (

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the

 FoxP

locus of

 Drosophila

with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.

With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.

Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

Maybe try another kind of mandate?

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as

 Nature

or

 Science

. After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data

The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

In support of subscripton cancellations

In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions.  At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption is very reasonable, as many more eyes see each paper in such journals and the motivation to shoot down such high-profile papers might also be higher.

Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?

Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public?

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly

 Drosophila

(more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?

Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best: In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic

 Library

Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

This year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior (WCALB) will be on one of my oldest and most central research projects, the commonalities and differences between operant and classical conditioning.

Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning

In which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science

This is the tweetlog covering July 3-5: Interesting! We find something similar in flies: Live fast, die young: Long-lived mice are less active https://feedly.com/k/16RDz21 It smells fishy: Copper prevents fish from avoiding danger https://feedly.com/k/12gw14F @

 biocs

@

 google

Yes!

Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess

After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while all of the current options are considered legal for the

 reader

, not all

 providers

of scholarly literature conform to every law in every country.

With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?

Amazing bead chain experiment

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 per hour for graduate students and US$350 per hour for faculty. Taking a conservative US$200 as an easy, lower-bound estimate for, say, a post-doc hour seems to cover most cases.

How about paying extra for peer-review?

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

No Evilsevier DEAL!

The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA.

German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?

tl;dr:


 Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material.

Replacing the prestige signal

Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.

Academic publishing – market or collectivization?

There have been repeated online discussions about my suggestion to libraries that now would be an excellent time to start cancelling subscriptions. Prime counter-argument is that librarians risked their jobs or at least face faculty backlash if they did that. Personally, I have witnessed many such cancellations and there has never been a riot or even a librarian reprimanded, let alone fired.

How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations

Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years.

Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This is commonly done by negotiating the articles in the denominator.

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?

tl;dr:
 
 It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article.

Collectively, the world’s public purse currently spends the equivalent of US$~10b every year on scholarly journal publishing. Dividing that by the roughly two million articles published annually, you arrive at an average cost per scholarly journal article of about US$5,000.

How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

Posting my reply to a review of our most recent grant proposal has sparked an online discussion both on Twitter and on Drugmonkey’s blog. The main direction the discussion took was what level of expertise to expect from the reviewers deciding over your grant proposal. This, of course, is highly dependent on the procedure by which the funding agency chooses the reviewers.

How to write your grant proposal?

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion.

With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and a second one by Nelson, which just appeared in PLoS Genetics.

Laboratories around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from nearly every organism, past and present.

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000 (DOI: 10.1038/76606). Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE


 , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues.

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net.

The

 F

orkhead B

 ox

P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies,

 dFoxP

, is necessary for a type of learning called operant self-learning, which resembles some aspects of language learning.

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning

UPDATE
 
 , 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one virtual desktop and the text another. In this way, I can actually review on-screen, but it is one heck of a work-around and by no means convenient.

I cannot take it any more.

Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at

 F1000 Research

. The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

The way academic publishing should be

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles“. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Your university is definitely paying too much for journals

Yesterday,

 Science Magazine

published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was used).

 Science Magazine

reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Retiring from science?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

Since the birth of our daughter, we spend our summers in Sweden, just like I used to, when I was little. This not only allows her to get more practice in Swedish then she gets talking with just me or her grandmother, but we also get to really recharge our batteries in the fabulous wilderness up there.

How to recharge in Sweden

Flashback: Noise in the brain?

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011:

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of

my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a fine line or any efforts to convince the community that action is required will fail.

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

Following the example of Glyn Moody, I thought I’d start a log on the tweets I send around. One never knows what’ll happen to Twitter and besides, this provides a neat place to store and find everything. So here are the tweets for July first and second: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT:  Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction“follow the money!” a tad too literally?

Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

Due to ongoing discussions on various (social) media, this is a mash-up of several previous posts on the strategy of ‘flipping’ our current &gt;30k subscription journals to an author-financed open access corporate business model. I consider this article processing charge (APC)-based version of ‘gold’ OA a looming threat that may deteriorate the situation even beyond the abysmal state scholarly publishing is already in right now.

How gold open access may make things worse

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

For our course this year I was planning a standard neurogenetic experiment. I hadn’t ever done this experiment in a course, yet, just two weeks ago I tried it once myself, with an N=1. The students would get two groups of

 Drosophila

fruit fly larvae, rovers and sitters (they wouldn’t know which was which). About ten larvae from each group would be placed on one of two yeast patches on an agar plate.

If only all science were this reproducible

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives.

 As a reader:

I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper on publication costs, it has been established that investments in surveillance technology are also part of the publisher spending academic libraries are financing.

Prioritizing academic publishers

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion

It is one of these rare events when I can post a video of one of my own talks. This one was in Berlin earlier this year, organized by The Lost Lectures in a very unusual venue, the Stattbad Wedding:    I’m planning to work more closely together with our computing center here to be able to record at least the lectures I give in English here at the university. So maybe there will be some more videos here, soon.

Video: Free will as an evolved brain function

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

In our new lab here in Regensburg, we are currently re-establishing the method of confocal microscopy. To start with, we used the fly lines which show a defect in the temporal structure of their spontaneous behavior (a project of one of our graduate students). this fly line uses two transgenic constructs (c105 and c232) to drive expression in specified neurons in the fly brain, i.e., the merged expression patterns of c105 and c232.

A wonderful example of Open Science

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times.

Free will:  it’s not what you think it is

Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

Looking for a PhD student

There have been many discussions about the march for science, pro and con. Some of them have made me doubt the utility of the march, some have made me fear unintended consequences, again others seemed tangential and petty. In these past months, I have struggled to articulate my own reasons why I feel the urge to march for science. Today, I start to see two main reasons to march for science.

Why I march

“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality”

Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79

On the productivity of scientists

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

Predatory Priorities

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software:  Nothing really has changed in a dozen years, it seems

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

bjoern.brembs.blog

[*This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me,
Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson's [guest
post](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/11/guest-post-why-our-open-data-project-worked/),
which focused on the [open
data](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/11/dont-be-afraid-of-open-data/)
aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind [our
paper](https://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/16/nar.gkv1193.full)
and a [second
one](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652)
by Nelson, which just appeared in [PLoS
Genetics](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652).*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

[[![ResearchBlogging.org](https://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_mid.png){decoding="async"
style="border: 0;"}](https://www.researchblogging.org)]{style="float: left; padding: 5px;"}Laboratories
around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from
nearly every organism, past and present. These sequencing data range
from entire genomes to segments of chromatin to RNA transcripts. To
explore this ocean of "BIG DATA", one has to navigate through portals of
the National Computational Biotechnology Institute's (NCBI's) two
signature repositories, the [Sequencing Read Archive
(SRA)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra) and the [Gene Expression
Omnibus (GEO)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/). With the right
bioinformatics tools, scientists can explore and discover
freely-available data that can lead to valuable new biological insights.

[Nelson Lau's lab](https://www.bio.brandeis.edu/laulab/) in the
Department of Biology at Brandeis has recently completed two such
successful voyages into the realm of genomics data mining, with studies
published in the Open Access journals of [Nucleic Acids Research
(NAR)](https://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/16/nar.gkv1193.full)
and the [Public Library of Science Genetics
(PLoSGen)](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652).  
Publication of both these two studies was supported by the [Brandeis
University LTS Open Access
Fund](https://scholcomm.brandeis.edu/open-access/brandeis-open-access-fund-description/)
for Scholarly Communications.

In this scientific journey, we made use of important collaborations with
labs from across the globe. The [NAR
study](https://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/16/nar.gkv1193.full)
used openly shared genomics data from the United Kingdom ([Casey
Bergman's lab](https://bergmanlab.ls.manchester.ac.uk/)) and Germany
([Björn Brembs' lab](https://lab.brembs.net/)). The [PlosGen
study](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652)
relied on contributions from Austria (Daniel Gerlach), Australia
([Benjamin Kile's lab](https://www.wehi.edu.au/people/benjamin-kile)),
Nebraska ([Mayumi Naramura's
lab](https://www.unmc.edu/eppley/about/faculty/naramura.html)), and next
door neighbors ([Bonnie Berger's lab at
MIT](https://people.csail.mit.edu/bab/)).

[In the NAR
study](https://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/16/nar.gkv1193.full),
Lau lab postdoctoral fellow Reazur Rahman and the Lau team developed a
program called
[TIDAL](https://www.bio.brandeis.edu/laulab/Tidal_Fly/Tidal_Fly_Home.html)
(Transposon Insertion and Depletion AnaLyzer) that scoured over 360 fly
genome sequences publicly accessible in the SRA portal. We discovered
that transposons, also known as jumping genetic parasites, formed
different genome patterns in every fly strain. There are many thousands
of transposons throughout the fly genome. The vast majority of these
transposons share a virus origin, being retrotransposons. Even though
most of these transposons are located in the intergenic and
heterochromatic regions of the fly genome, with on average more than two
transposons per fly gene, it is a straightforward assumption that some
of them are bound to influence gene expression in one way or another.

We discovered that common fly strains with the same name but living in
different laboratories turn out to have very different patterns of
transposons. This is surprising because many geneticists have assumed
that the so-called Canton-S or Oregon-R strains are all similar and thus
used as a common wild-type reference. In particular, we were able to
differentiate two strains which had only been separated very recently
from each other, indicating rapid evolution of these transposon
landscapes.

Our results lend some mechanistic insight to behavioral data from the
Brembs lab which had
[shown](https://f1000research.com/articles/3-176/v2) that these
sub-strains of the standard Canton-S reference stock can behave very
differently in some experiments. We hypothesize that these differences
in transposon landscapes and the behavioral differences may reflect
unanticipated changes in fly stocks, which are typically assumed to
remain stable under laboratory culture conditions. If even recently
separated fly stocks can be differentiated both on the genetic and on
the behavioral level, perhaps this is an indication that we are
beginning to discover mechanisms rendering animals much more dynamic and
malleable than we usually give them credit for. Such insights should not
only convince geneticists to think twice and be extra careful with their
common reference stocks, it may also provide food for thought for
evolutionary biologists.  In addition, we hope to utilize the [TIDAL
tool](https://www.bio.brandeis.edu/laulab/Tidal_Fly/Tidal_Fly_Home.html)
to study how expanding transposon patterns might alter genomes in aging
fly brains, which may then explain human brain changes during aging.

Screenshot of the TIDAL-Fly website:

[![tidal](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/tidal-300x244.png){.aligncenter
.wp-image-1018 .size-medium decoding="async" width="300" height="244"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/tidal-300x244.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/tidal-50x41.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/tidal.png 1002w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://www.bio.brandeis.edu/laulab/Tidal_Fly/Tidal_Fly_Home.html)

Given the number of potentially harmful mobile genetic elements in a
genome, it is not surprising that counter-measures have evolved to limit
the detrimental effect of these transposons. So-called [Piwi-interacting
RNAs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piwi-interacting_RNA) (piRNA) are a
class of highly conserved, small, noncoding RNAs associated with
repressing transposon gene expression, in particular in the germline.
[In the PLoSGen
study](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652),
visiting scientist Gung-wei Chirn and the Lau lab developed a program
that discovered expression patterns of piRNA genes in a group of
mammalian datasets extracted from the GEO portal. Coupling these
datasets with other small RNA datasets created in the Lau lab, the team
discovered a remarkable diversity of these RNA loci for each species,
suggesting a high rate of diversification of piRNA expression over time.
The rate of diversification in piRNA expression patterns appeared to be
much faster than in that changes of testis-specific gene expression
patterns amongst different animals.

It has been known for a while that there is an ongoing evolutionary arms
race between transposon intruders and the anti-transposon police, the
piRNAs. In mammals, however, the piRNAs appear to diversify according to
two different strategies. Most of the piRNA genomic loci discovered in
humans were quite distinct from those in other primates like the macaque
monkey or the marmoset and seemed to evolve just as quickly as, e.g.
*Drosophila* piRNA genes. On the other hand, a separate, smaller set of
these genomic loci have conserved their piRNA expression patterns,
extending across humans, through primates, to rodents, and even to dogs,
horses and pigs.

These conserved piRNA expression patterns span nearly 100 million years
of evolution, suggesting an important function either in regulating a
transposon that is common among most if not all eutherian mammals, or in
regulating the expression of another, conserved gene.

To find the answer, the Lau lab studied the target sequences of
different conserved piRNAs. One of them was indeed a conserved gene in
eutherian mammals, albeit not one of a transposon, but of an endogenous
gene. In fact, most of the conserved piRNA genes were depleted of
transposon-related sequences. A second approach to test the function of
conserved piRNAs was to analyze two existing mouse mutations in two
piRNA loci. The results showed that the mutations indeed affected the
generation of the piRNAs, and these mice were less fertile because their
sperm count was reduced. Future work will explore how infertility
diseases may be linked to these specific piRNA loci. It also remains to
be understood how a gene family originally evolved as transposon police
could evolve into a mechanism regulating endogenous genes.

In summary, this work is an example of how open data enables and
facilitates novel insights into fundamental biological processes. In
this case, these insights have taught us that genomes are much more
dynamic and diverse than we have previously thought, with repercussions
not only for the utility any single reference genome can have for
research, but also for the role of sequencing individual genomes in
personalized medicine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Rahman R, Chirn GW, Kanodia A, Sytnikova YA, Brembs B, Bergman CM, &
Lau NC (2015). Unique transposon landscapes are pervasive across
Drosophila melanogaster genomes. [Nucleic acids
research]{style="font-style: italic;"} PMID:
[26578579](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26578579){rev="review"},
DOI:
[10.1093/nar/gkv1193](https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkv1193){rev="review"}]{.Z3988
title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Nucleic+acids+research&rft_id=info%3Apmid%2F26578579&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Unique+transposon+landscapes+are+pervasive+across+Drosophila+melanogaster+genomes.&rft.issn=0305-1048&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=&rft.issue=&rft.spage=&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=&rft.au=Rahman+R&rft.au=Chirn+GW&rft.au=Kanodia+A&rft.au=Sytnikova+YA&rft.au=Brembs+B&rft.au=Bergman+CM&rft.au=Lau+NC&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Biology%2CBehavioral+Biology%2C+Ecology%2C+Genomics%2C+Evolutionary+Biology%2C+Genetics%2C+Zoology"}  
[Chirn, G., Rahman, R., Sytnikova, Y., Matts, J., Zeng, M., Gerlach, D.,
Yu, M., Berger, B., Naramura, M., Kile, B., & Lau, N. (2015). Conserved
piRNA Expression from a Distinct Set of piRNA Cluster Loci in Eutherian
Mammals [PLOS Genetics, 11]{style="font-style: italic;"} (11) DOI:
[10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652](https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1005652){rev="review"}]{.Z3988
title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=PLOS+Genetics&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1005652&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Conserved+piRNA+Expression+from+a+Distinct+Set+of+piRNA+Cluster+Loci+in+Eutherian+Mammals&rft.issn=1553-7404&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=11&rft.issue=11&rft.spage=0&rft.epage=&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.plos.org%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1005652&rft.au=Chirn%2C+G.&rft.au=Rahman%2C+R.&rft.au=Sytnikova%2C+Y.&rft.au=Matts%2C+J.&rft.au=Zeng%2C+M.&rft.au=Gerlach%2C+D.&rft.au=Yu%2C+M.&rft.au=Berger%2C+B.&rft.au=Naramura%2C+M.&rft.au=Kile%2C+B.&rft.au=Lau%2C+N.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Biology%2CBehavioral+Biology%2C+Evolutionary+Biology%2C+Genetics%2C+Zoology%2C+Genomics"}


Genetically Separable\"
href=\"https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14\"
target=\"\_blank\"\>Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically
Separable


Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank"&gt;Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

*[During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [June 9,
2010](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n616.html):]{style="font-size: 12px;"}  
*

I have no idea when it started, but probably long before Darwin, the
notion of 'design' kept creeping into descriptions of biological
organisms or traits: Birds are designed to fly or the eye is designed to
see. I've also been guilty of using the word 'design' for biological
objects every now and then. However, after reading a fair bit and after
thinking for some time now, I've come to the conclusion that the word
'design' is so misleading and not even wrong, that it should never be
used in biology at all, ever.

I'm only partially saying this because of a prominent creationist
movement in the US awfully dubbed 'intelligent design' (which couldn't
be further from biological reality). My main reason is that the use of
'design' is pernicious for biological research. 'Design' or engineering
approaches have been used over and over in biology and many if not most
of them have gone the way of Newtonian mechanics: extremely useful and
successful initially (and to some extent still today), but
scientifically falsified eventually. Take a rather recent, prominent
example: [Lee
Hood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hood){target="_blank"
rel="external"}'s automobile paradigm, according to which systems
biology is akin to finding car parts without a manual in the fog and
then trying to assemble the car. Current research shows that genetic
networks are, in contrast to car components, highly plastic and
forgiving of errors (a phenomenon termed robustness, often due to
[degeneracy](https://www.pnas.org/content/98/24/13763.full){target="_blank"}
in evolved systems). Even though the car analogy might seem daunting, it
is still grossly oversimplified and biologically misleading. Indeed,
expecting genetic networks to behave as stably as car components will
lead to the wrong experiments and the wrong conclusions. Nevertheless,
systems biology was and still is a very successful branch of biology.
I'm not a systems biologist, but I would be surprised if many systems
biologists still bought into the car analogy these days any more, after
what they have found out until today.

For the same reasons, there is no [blind
watchmaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker){target="_blank"},
because there is no watch. The analogy may still be useful in a
rule-of-thumb kind of way, but biologically it is completely false.

Another, much older engineering approach is that of brains as
input-output systems in neuroscience (the 'sensorimotor hypothesis'),
which purports that brains passively wait for stimuli to occur in order
to respond to them, much like radios, computers or other equipment that
we have designed. In some fields of neuroscience (and psychology) this
approach has been so pervasive that *any* behavior is referred to as a
response, assuming that there *always* must be an underlying stimulus
triggering the behavior. It is not only recent ecological and
ethological research on predators specializing in exploiting stereotypic
behaviors in prey species which shows that being responsive is not an
evolutionary stable strategy: responding reliably to the same stimuli in
the same predictable way will neither get you to the unexpected food
patch nor prevent a predator or competitor from predicting your next
move. "Nature red in tooth and claw" will make sure that any predictable
species will not last for long. There is a very good ultimate cause for
the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: "Under carefully controlled
experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well
pleases": species which didn't obey the law have not survived. It thus
appears that for the last 100 odd years, neuroscience has been studying
the exceptions to the rule that brains are always active and are
constantly producing output, on which sensory stimuli merely exert a
modest, modulatory role. I think it is fair to assume that one reason
for this research direction (apart from the relative experimental ease)
is that there is no mechanism or object we have designed that works in
such a way. Everything we have made responds to commands and so people
thought this is how brains operate.

Given the success of this approach in biology and of Newtonian mechanics
in physics, it is no surprise that some thinkers have come to see brains
as deterministic Newtonian clockworks. Complicated, maybe, but
deterministic and predictable none the less. Any observed behavioral
variability was shrugged off as random noise, when indeed it was the one
brain function that kept animals in the run for the next generation. It
is high time that neuroscientists realize that Newtonian mechanics are
as falsified in biology as they are in physics: the world is not
deterministic and neither are brains. The fact that brains are not
engineered, but evolved allows for freedom of choice without
quasi-magical quantum computing in the brain. All the brain requires to
be unpredictable is some source of variability from which it can
generate spontaneity, and there is plenty of such variability in neurons
and their components, with or without quantum effects. The selection
pressure of predictable animals being outcompeted, eaten or left without
a mate established early on that every brain is equipped with a function
which allows for adaptive behavioral choice. In some animals, there was
need for more of such capabilities. Those animals seem to have more
freedom of choice. Other animals could get away with being more
predictable, giving the impression of being less 'free' and more
[robot-like](https://www.esf.org/index.php?id=6460){target="_blank"}.
I'm starting to get the impression that the model systems used in
neuroscience are predominantly of the latter sort.
![smoking.png](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/e107_images/emotes/yellow/smoking.png){decoding="async"}

Be that as it may, all animals possess this trait to a larger or lesser
degree and have been using it for survival and procreation since the
very first brain evolved. I think it is time biology sheds the last
remnants of classical thinking and starts to study 'free will' as the
biological trait it is: the ability to behave differently in the same
situations, the ability to chose from identical options, the mental coin
toss. The centuries of philosophical thinking on this topic have
provided us with a wonderful framework within which these empiricial
findings can be embedded. Because [brains are output-input
systems](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/content39.html){target="_self"}
(rather than the other way around), our lab has started to study the
[spontaneous choices of the fruit
fly](http://brembs.net/spontaneous){target="_self"}
*[Drosophila](http://brembs.net/spontaneous){target="_self"}* and how
the brain generates them. Currently, a graduate student in our lab is
studying where in the brain these processes take place in order to later
be able to understand how the circuits mediating these choice function.
It is a testament to the idiocy of creationists that [our research was
featured on a creationist
blog](https://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/flies-show-free-will/){target="_blank"}
as supporting creationism. The opposite is the case: all brains possess
free will precisely because there is no design in biology.
[Evolution](http://brembs.net/evolution){target="_blank" rel="external"}
is the only reason why we have free will and it is neither dualistic,
nor spiritual, nor mystic: it is biological.


Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology

[*During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [April 19,
2011](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/news733.html):*]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

 

<div>

The last decades of research on human
[evolution](http://brembs.net/evolution){target="_blank" rel="external"}
have provided an astounding body of converging evidence for an African
origin of the human lineage just under about 200k years ago, with a
subsequent migration across the globe starting around 60k years ago
until all the main regions of this planet were inhabited by humans at
around 15k years ago. Compare this scenario to the creationist story,
where humans were shaped by a magic man out of clay about 6k years ago,
which means it happened just after the Sumerians have invented glue.What
is the converging evidence telling the "Out of Africa" story?It all
started with fossils and artifacts. Archeology, with its own dating
techniques and collection methods, suggested a route that looks
something like this:

[![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_psXvAyonPUs/TahLImPWf8I/AAAAAAAAEEg/uNw-U56GL1M/2011-04-15_153755.jpg){decoding="async"}](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_psXvAyonPUs/TahLImPWf8I/AAAAAAAAEEg/uNw-U56GL1M/2011-04-15_153755.jpg){target="_blank"
rel="external"} 
([Image
source](https://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature2/map.html){target="_blank"})

Later, genetic evidence came along. Geneticists, with their own dating
techniques and experimental methods suggested migration routes that
looked something like this:

[![](https://www.dhushara.com/book/unraveltree/mtDNA2.jpg){decoding="async"}](https://www.dhushara.com/book/unraveltree/mtDNA2.jpg){target="_blank"} 
([Image
source](https://www.dhushara.com/book/unraveltree/unravel.htm){target="_blank"})

After the genetic evidence, came evidence from a bacterium associated
with humans: *Helicobacter pylori*. It lives in our guts and can cause
stomach ulcers. It's been associated with our digestive tract for many
thousands of years. Looking at the different strains of these bacteria,
microbiologists, using their own dating techniques and experimental
protocols, deduced that this bacterium in our guts must have traveled
roughly along these routes:

[![hpylori_evol_small.jpg](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/e107_images/newspost_images/hpylori_evol_small.jpg){decoding="async"}](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/e107_images/newspost_images/hpylori_evol.jpg){target="_blank"} 
([Image
source](https://www.nature.com/nrgastro/journal/v7/n11/fig_tab/nrgastro.2010.154_F1.html){target="_blank"})

Most recently, linguists came along and studied the phonemes that make
up 504 of the different human languages around the globe. These
linguists adopted the analysis tools from the geneticists to their own
dating techniques and sampling methods and came up with a map that
suggested the following main routes along which the human languages seem
to have developed:

[![](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BL090A_LANGU_G_20110414190308.jpg){decoding="async"}](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BL090A_LANGU_G_20110414190308.jpg){target="_blank"} 
([Image
source](https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews){target="_blank"})

Clearly, getting the dates correct using phonemes will prove a lot
harder than the previously used dating techniques. Nevertheless, these
are four independent lines of evidence, collected over many decades by
scientists with vastly different backgrounds and training. Yet, the
results agree to an astonishing extent.

However, this doesn't mean it's 'true' or 'scientifically proven'. It
only means that this is the best humans can currently possibly do and
anything new that comes along must not only explain the current
congruence of disparate data, but also explain more data, than the
current 'Out of Africa' theory can explain. A few self-contradictory
passages in an ancient text do not even begin to come close to being a
contender.

Given this sort of evidence, it becomes rather obvious that creationists
are either uninformed or unpersuadable. For the former, information like
the one in this post should be more than sufficient to falsify the
creationist dogma. For the latter, ridicule and derision is the best
response.

This post was inspired by [Lapidarium
Notes](https://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/4633090702/evolution-of-language-tested-with-genetic){target="_blank"}.

</div>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

<div>

Pertinent peer-reviewed literature:

- Green, R., Krause, J., Ptak, S., Briggs, A., Ronan, M., Simons, J.,
 Du, L., Egholm, M., Rothberg, J., Paunovic, M., & Pääbo, S. (2006).
 Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA Nature, 444
 (7117), 330-336 DOI:
 [10.1038/nature05336](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature05336){rev="review"}
- Linz, B., Balloux, F., Moodley, Y., Manica, A., Liu, H., Roumagnac,
 P., Falush, D., Stamer, C., Prugnolle, F., van der Merwe, S., Yamaoka,
 Y., Graham, D., Perez-Trallero, E., Wadstrom, T., Suerbaum, S., &
 Achtman, M. (2007). An African origin for the intimate association
 between humans and Helicobacter pylori Nature, 445 (7130), 915-918
 DOI:
 [10.1038/nature05562](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature05562){rev="review"}
- Atkinson, Q. (2011). Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder
 Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa Science, 332 (6027),
 346-349 DOI:
 [10.1126/science.1199295](https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199295){rev="review"}

</div>

[This third installment of my
[tweetlog](https://bjoern.brembs.net/category/tweetlog/) covers July
10-18:]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

- Cytoskeletal Determinants of Stimulus-Response Habits
  [https://feedly.com/k/15OdS3q](https://t.co/vY2Npama33 "https://feedly.com/k/15OdS3q"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/15OdS3q"}
- Wow! 7340 full-text and PDF downloads, and only 5510 abstract views
  for our journal rank paper:
  [https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full](https://t.co/WQ7jx32L6B "https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"}
- In Science We Trust: Poll Results on How You Feel about Science:
  [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-we-trust-poll ...](https://t.co/sq6QQKW5LB "https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-we-trust-poll"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-we-trust-poll"}
- "Doubt is our product" -- how the tobacco industry misrepresented our
  research:
  [https://targ.blogs.ilrt.org/2013/07/16/doubt-is-our-product/ ...](https://t.co/WKduBtYs1f "https://targ.blogs.ilrt.org/2013/07/16/doubt-is-our-product/"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://targ.blogs.ilrt.org/2013/07/16/doubt-is-our-product/"}
  by
  [~~@~~**MarcusMunafo**](https://twitter.com/MarcusMunafo){dir="ltr"}
- Motor Circuit-Specific Burst Patterns Drive Different Muscle and
  Behavior Patterns
  [https://feedly.com/k/1atMeKc](https://t.co/34EE2oN2qe "https://feedly.com/k/1atMeKc"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/1atMeKc"}
- Interestingly: the sentence adverbs of PubMed Central
  [https://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/interestingly-the-sentence-adverbs-of-pubmed-central/ ...](https://t.co/F3nOy0StEB "https://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/interestingly-the-sentence-adverbs-of-pubmed-central/"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/interestingly-the-sentence-adverbs-of-pubmed-central/"}
- Further Fell Fallout From Finch Folly: The Royal Society Relapse
  [https://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1021-Further-Fell-Fallout-From-Finch-Folly-The-Royal-Society-Relapse.html ...](https://t.co/UIqvhc8dpN "https://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1021-Further-Fell-Fallout-From-Finch-Folly-The-Royal-Society-Relapse.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1021-Further-Fell-Fallout-From-Finch-Folly-The-Royal-Society-Relapse.html"}
- Joseph Esposito on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still
  needs to be done?
  [https://poynder.blogspot.com/2013/07/joseph-esposito-on-state-of-open-access.html ...](https://t.co/YEJuQry74h "https://poynder.blogspot.com/2013/07/joseph-esposito-on-state-of-open-access.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://poynder.blogspot.com/2013/07/joseph-esposito-on-state-of-open-access.html"}
- Misconceptions about evolution video has its own misconceptions
  [https://feedproxy.google.com/\~r/Neurodojo/\~3/vOoyPoLrCHk/misconceptions-about-evolution-video.html ...](https://t.co/YCldiGf7rD "https://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Neurodojo/~3/vOoyPoLrCHk/misconceptions-about-evolution-video.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Neurodojo/~3/vOoyPoLrCHk/misconceptions-about-evolution-video.html"}
- Science and the public: Promotional tactics corrupt research
  [https://feedly.com/k/15Ogi29](https://t.co/4Gl15Ncagv "https://feedly.com/k/15Ogi29"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/15Ogi29"}
- Reproducibility: Two more red flags for suspect work
  [https://feedly.com/k/15OfZ7w](https://t.co/jub7sOeLK8 "https://feedly.com/k/15OfZ7w"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/15OfZ7w"}
- Sending a message
  [https://wp.me/p4g7f-nU ](https://t.co/v8DPd9tqzr "https://wp.me/p4g7f-nU"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://wp.me/p4g7f-nU"}
  via
  [~~@~~**researchremix**](https://twitter.com/researchremix){dir="ltr"}
- Why librarians are needed more than ever in the 21st century
  [https://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/why-librarians-are-needed-more.html ...](https://t.co/hx3x2iHEfv "https://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/why-librarians-are-needed-more.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/why-librarians-are-needed-more.html"}
- Congratulations!
  [~~@~~**ivanoransky**](https://twitter.com/ivanoransky){dir="ltr"}
  leaves Reuters for MedPage Today.
  [https://shar.es/k3t16](https://t.co/y3xCeLdaNY "https://shar.es/k3t16"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://shar.es/k3t16"}
- Open Access DOI Resolver:give it a DOI it gives back OA full-text
  institutional repository URL!
  [https://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk/ ](https://t.co/g1QMj8Tux3 "https://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk/"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk/"} via
  [~~@~~**HSSOpenAccess**](https://twitter.com/HSSOpenAccess){dir="ltr"}
- "surprisingly readable for something so depressingly stupid." --
  'Positivity Ratio' Criticized In New Sokal Affair
  [https://bit.ly/17k78JV](https://t.co/fquVtL6QYT "https://bit.ly/17k78JV"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://bit.ly/17k78JV"}
- Animal studies produce many false positives
  [https://www.nature.com/news/animal-studies-produce-many-false-positives-1.13385 ...](https://t.co/5N7TnAp1lU "https://www.nature.com/news/animal-studies-produce-many-false-positives-1.13385"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.nature.com/news/animal-studies-produce-many-false-positives-1.13385"}
- "we should not make the author field of papers a proxy for all
  scientific output credit..." --
  [https://bit.ly/1bFzyRZ](https://t.co/3ExSTXwoii "https://bit.ly/1bFzyRZ"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://bit.ly/1bFzyRZ"}
- Anybody with first-hand experience with Primo ScholarRank?
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDly9qPpPYQ ...](https://t.co/jhqMoaVbTs "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDly9qPpPYQ"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDly9qPpPYQ"}
- [~~@~~**Protohedgehog**](https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog){dir="ltr"}
  [~~@~~**bioSimonUoB**](https://twitter.com/bioSimonUoB){dir="ltr"}
  [~~@~~**brembs**](https://twitter.com/brembs){dir="ltr"} Judging a
  paper on journal IF like judging photography contest on presence of
  celebrity in background.
- Recombineering Homologous Recombination Constructs in Drosophila
  [https://feedly.com/k/12PrjvY](https://t.co/SWH99VhAaA "https://feedly.com/k/12PrjvY"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/12PrjvY"}
- The Molecular Basis of Sugar Sensing in Drosophila Larvae
  [https://feedly.com/k/13JXhQH](https://t.co/5tU9mj1gwj "https://feedly.com/k/13JXhQH"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/13JXhQH"}
- Heather Joseph on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still
  needs to be done?
  [https://poynder.blogspot.de/2013/07/heather-joseph-on-state-of-open-access.html ...](https://t.co/sYNhQOI9Pt "https://poynder.blogspot.de/2013/07/heather-joseph-on-state-of-open-access.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://poynder.blogspot.de/2013/07/heather-joseph-on-state-of-open-access.html"}
- It's plain and simple: transparency is good for science and in the
  public interest
  [https://www.trialsjournal.com/content/14/1/215/abstract ...](https://t.co/UkloXci01w "https://www.trialsjournal.com/content/14/1/215/abstract"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.trialsjournal.com/content/14/1/215/abstract"}
  [~~\#~~**trials**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23trials&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"}
- Of the 10k downloads, \~6k full-text views:
  [https://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/AbstractImpact.aspx?ART_DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291&name=human_neuroscience&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Psychology-w28-2013&type=1 ...](https://t.co/kKvi9IhfUw "https://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/AbstractImpact.aspx?ART_DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291&name=human_neuroscience&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Psychology-w28-2013&type=1"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/AbstractImpact.aspx?ART_DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291&name=human_neuroscience&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Psychology-w28-2013&type=1"}
- Today, 10k+ downloads for our paper on the lack of evidence for
  journal rank:
  [https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full ...](https://t.co/WQ7jx32L6B "https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"}
- iPhylo: Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository
  [https://iphylo.blogspot.com/2013/07/learning-from-elife-github-as-article.html?spref=tw ...](https://t.co/rbkUgBfLfj "https://iphylo.blogspot.com/2013/07/learning-from-elife-github-as-article.html?spref=tw"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://iphylo.blogspot.com/2013/07/learning-from-elife-github-as-article.html?spref=tw"}
- The cat frog came back, the very next day
  [https://feedly.com/k/1btBayl](https://t.co/S6YqmnOFSq "https://feedly.com/k/1btBayl"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/1btBayl"}
- An astonishingly shallow treatment of a very real problem: Risk
  [https://feedly.com/k/10PiLHV](https://t.co/a7PRgYlxjU "https://feedly.com/k/10PiLHV"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/10PiLHV"}
- The Evolution of Drosophila melanogaster as a Model for Alcohol
  Research
  [https://feedly.com/k/1bty5OA](https://t.co/NkmSOoLkN2 "https://feedly.com/k/1bty5OA"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/1bty5OA"}
- [~~@~~**Technixer**](https://twitter.com/Technixer){dir="ltr"}
  Exactly. To get around this issue, we wrote this instead:
  [https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full ...](https://t.co/WQ7jx32L6B "https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full"}
- The Selected Papers Network (Part 3)
  [https://feedly.com/k/1btxlch](https://t.co/KDv5xS5Qxu "https://feedly.com/k/1btxlch"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/1btxlch"}
- Fruit Flies Seek Mates Leggingly: Scientific American Podcast
  [https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=fruit-flies-seek-mates-leggingly-13-07-11&WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter ...](https://t.co/ycbZ2RVJ2s "https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=fruit-flies-seek-mates-leggingly-13-07-11&WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=fruit-flies-seek-mates-leggingly-13-07-11&WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter"}
  via [~~@~~**sciam**](https://twitter.com/sciam){dir="ltr"}
- Want good reasons to be a Creationist? You won't find them here.
  [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2013/07/11/want-good-reasons-to-be-a-creationist-you-wont-find-them-here/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter ...](https://t.co/gjHtaPJYIl "https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2013/07/11/want-good-reasons-to-be-a-creationist-you-wont-find-them-here/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2013/07/11/want-good-reasons-to-be-a-creationist-you-wont-find-them-here/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter"}
  via [~~@~~**sciam**](https://twitter.com/sciam){dir="ltr"}
- Brains don't respond to stimuli -- brains act and then evaluate the
  response of the environment:
  [https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/07/brains-as-outputinput-systems/ ...](https://t.co/ORYvBZx3nD "https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/07/brains-as-outputinput-systems/"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/07/brains-as-outputinput-systems/"}
- Unhelpful Research Advice \#2
  [https://wp.me/pP1Q8-JZ](https://t.co/r8Q8gqn0R6 "https://wp.me/pP1Q8-JZ"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://wp.me/pP1Q8-JZ"}
- Brains as output/input systems
  [https://wp.me/p3walV-4R](https://t.co/JdeX2oqbMg "https://wp.me/p3walV-4R"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://wp.me/p3walV-4R"}
- "Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?" New study
  tries to answer
  [https://buff.ly/1dmB7Cx](https://t.co/hQZu5a5hpv "https://buff.ly/1dmB7Cx"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://buff.ly/1dmB7Cx"}
- A call for open access to all data used in AJ and ApJ articles
  [https://buff.ly/1dmzZPn](https://t.co/qX7MF1k5Xj "https://buff.ly/1dmzZPn"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://buff.ly/1dmzZPn"}
- The Cost of Scientific Publishing
  [https://disq.us/8e1c8n](https://t.co/WaIce0ApuY "https://disq.us/8e1c8n"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://disq.us/8e1c8n"}
- Open is a state of mind
  [https://feedly.com/k/13ONY0u](https://t.co/3MMuVxqs0L "https://feedly.com/k/13ONY0u"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/13ONY0u"}
- On the Training of Future Neuroscientists: Insights from the Grass
  Laboratory
  [https://feedly.com/k/10O65Rz](https://t.co/GYk6yACfeA "https://feedly.com/k/10O65Rz"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/10O65Rz"}
- How Did the Chicken Cross the Road? With Her Striatal Cholinergic
  Interneurons, Of Course
  [https://feedly.com/k/10O5b7B](https://t.co/RFdOQ6veq7 "https://feedly.com/k/10O5b7B"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/10O5b7B"}
- Olfaction and Vision Meet in the Retina
  [https://feedly.com/k/10O4FGt](https://t.co/SSLqGPWG3q "https://feedly.com/k/10O4FGt"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/10O4FGt"}
- Busting the top five myths about open access publishing
  [https://theconversation.com/busting-the-top-five-myths-about-open-access-publishing-14792 ...](https://t.co/UmYqCnqcmZ "https://theconversation.com/busting-the-top-five-myths-about-open-access-publishing-14792"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://theconversation.com/busting-the-top-five-myths-about-open-access-publishing-14792"}
  via
  [~~@~~**ConversationUK**](https://twitter.com/ConversationUK){dir="ltr"}
- Isolation of Sensory Neurons of Aplysia californica for Patch Clamp
  Recordings of Glutamatergic Currents
  [https://feedly.com/k/10O3Tti](https://t.co/KuMNzxLkJv "https://feedly.com/k/10O3Tti"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/10O3Tti"}
- [~~\#~~**Open**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Open&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"} Access and the looming crisis in
  [~~\#~~**science**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23science&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"}
  [~~\#~~**OA**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23OA&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"}
  [~~\#~~**scientific**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23scientific&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"} papers
  [~~\#~~**biomedical**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23biomedical&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"} journal
  [~~\#~~**publication**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23publication&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"} \|
  [~~@~~**scoopit**](https://twitter.com/scoopit){dir="ltr"}
  [https://sco.lt/5Oa6uP](https://t.co/Ku0HtzoFlF "https://sco.lt/5Oa6uP"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://sco.lt/5Oa6uP"}
- Open access on the conference circuit
  [https://buff.ly/12lnORq ](https://t.co/Tcypa1K9yx "https://buff.ly/12lnORq"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://buff.ly/12lnORq"}
  via
  [~~@~~**stephen_curry**](https://twitter.com/Stephen_Curry){dir="ltr"}
- The challenge of semantically marking up articles (more thoughts on
  PLoS Hubs)
  [https://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-challenge-of-semantically-marking.html ...](https://t.co/9MYwwApkXS "https://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-challenge-of-semantically-marking.html"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-challenge-of-semantically-marking.html"}
- Authors of PLOS ONE paper on UK public's views of science & CAM reply
  to
  [~~@~~**HomeopathicDana**](https://twitter.com/HomeopathicDana){dir="ltr"}'s
  critique
  [https://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=68063&root=68063 ...](https://t.co/nvk4sBXbz6 "https://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=68063&root=68063"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=68063&root=68063"}
  [~~\#~~**scicomm**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23scicomm&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"}
  [~~\#~~**pppr**](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pppr&src=hash){dir="ltr"
  query-source="hashtag_click"}
- Science trash-talk
  [https://buff.ly/1dheMWY](https://t.co/woaXKW10CJ "https://buff.ly/1dheMWY"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://buff.ly/1dheMWY"}
- Open Access to Research Data: The European Commission's consultation
  in progress
  [https://buff.ly/15vqDQo](https://t.co/DvUBh5kKLE "https://buff.ly/15vqDQo"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://buff.ly/15vqDQo"}
- "Greater scrutiny of high-profile publications has had a modest impact
  on retractions"
  [https://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0068397 ...](https://t.co/36ZvFlJPX2 "https://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0068397"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0068397"}
- Life of a Neuro Pope
  [https://feedly.com/k/1aUSTjh](https://t.co/aeQ2M3aOgS "https://feedly.com/k/1aUSTjh"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
  expanded-url="https://feedly.com/k/1aUSTjh"}
- Decapitated Worms Regrow Heads with Memories Still Inside
  [https://shar.es/Akx6F](https://t.co/xnfFuphM9G "https://shar.es/Akx6F"){dir="ltr"
  target="_blank" rel="nofollow" expanded-url="https://shar.es/Akx6F"}


This third installment of my tweetlog covers July 10-18: Cytoskeletal Determinants of Stimulus-Response Habits https://feedly.com/k/15OdS3q Wow!

bjoern.brembs.blog

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology

Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!

Tweetlog: fruit flies, evolution and #openaccess