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Nobel Science Boycott, Melting Arctic Wandering Stream, Crowdsourced Fungus, Double Action DNA, Colorful Chameleons, Air Pressures Bats, Holography And Gravity, Bubble Crunch Pop Now?, Goldilocks Expansion, Life After Bang, What Is Animal?, Decisions And Memories, And Much More…
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This Week in Science… coming up next
Nobel Science Boycott
Get a Nobel, fight scientific publishers’ strangle hold on scientific information.
Melting Arctic Wandering Jet Stream?
Warmer summers with less sea ice might just be affecting the jet stream and weather in the lower latitudes.
Planetary Heating And Habitability
Goldilock’s says that planets need to be just the right distance from their host star, but that distance depends on the age of the star.
Life After Big Bang
Did the Big Bang support life before the stars?
Blair’s Animal Corner
Global Warming Ruins Everything
Rising temperatures may mess with bats’ baility to echolocate. What else, climate change?!
Flashy Chameleons are Better Fighters
Chameleons with better color-changing abilities and brighter colors proved better at besting another male in a fight. So, does that explain the flashy super hero costumes?
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Crowdsourced Fungus
People help scientists find a cancer-fighting compound in backyard fungus.
A Real Memory Chip
Seriously, DARPA funding is being used to supplement memory with technology.
Decision By Fluctuation
Oh, and you probably don’t have as much control over some of your decisions as you think.
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
Kirsten, I think the word you were looking for was “multiplexing”
The Double Action DNA aspect of this article isn’t news at all.
These so-called “duons” are just codons which simultaneously specify both amino acids and transcription factor recognition sites.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.short
Recognition sites for transcription factors like Sp1 have been studied for over 30 years!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6313230
What the team did that is new and interesting was to map nucleotide resolution TF occupancy across the human exome in 81 diverse cell types.
Abraham Loeb thinks the early universe might have been habitable. Somewhere between the hot big bang and today’s cold vacuum lies a Goldilocks zone in temperature, where the ambient cosmological temperature would allowed for liquid water on rocky worlds (if there were any back then, which there probably weren’t).
But life needs more than 2.317 million years of liquid water.
It needs a stable energy source, and a whole lot more time.
Neat idea, though.
Read more: http://thephysicspolice.blogspot.com/2013/12/not-so-habitable-early-universe.html
Justin is right about the importance of this article. The convergent evolution of a nervous system is expected, like Blair said, but also really important.
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/dec2013/nhgri-12.htm