There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

The human brain is often described using literally cosmic superlatives. Here is V.S. Ramachandran, a renowned neuroscientist: That's some serious complexity there, yes, but hidden in the description is a mundane reality: the human brain is made of neurons which make synapses with other neurons, which means that it's made of the same stuff as the brain of a sloth or a goldfish or an earthworm.

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.

The decline of global honeybee populations are a major environment concern, because of their vital role in our food systems and pollination of flowering plants. Twenty first century ’Omics is coming to the rescue, and published in GigaScience this week is an article that presents the genome and proteome of a mahor threat to bee colonies, the parasitic mite, Tropilaelaps mercedesae.

A truly human-specific gene, not merely a human-specific version of an animal gene or a mammal gene or a primate gene — that is something particularly interesting.

For the last few years, we have been working on the development of new Drosophila flight simulators. Now, finally, we are reaching a stage where we are starting to think about how to store the data we’ll be capturing both with Open Science in mind, but particularly keeping in mind that this will likely be the final major overhaul of this kind of data until I retire in 20 years.

Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most of them boil down to a cost/benefit estimate. The time spent traveling does not seem worth the hardly noticeable benefits any more. I got involved in Open Science more than 10 years ago.

Quintessence of Dust has been on hiatus for more than five years. It's time to resurrect it. Why now? Because it's 2017, and 2017 is not a time to be quiet. The first project involves some remodeling. Quintessence of Dust was built almost ten years ago, with a set of themes and goals that don't all fit in 2017.

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.

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.