Cancer is one of the scourges of modern society. An increasing number of people are fighting it, and a lot of research is being done in order to understand it better, hopefully leading to treatments or cures.

At present, the dominant theory is that cancer arises from a handful gene mutations. But recently, Peter Duesberg and his colleagues at UC Berkeley have launched the idea that cancer instead arises from chromosome disruptions, and that this, in fact, constitutes a form of speciation. So, according to this view, cancers are newly evolved species, as they have new chromosomal karyotypes. On top of this, cancers are autonomous and don’t need other cells for survival.

Age does  a lot of things to us. And to our brains, which shrink when we grow older. Those incredibly complex neural networks inside our skulls not only shrink, but they also become more susceptible to scourges such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. People who do not suffer from these cognitive dysfunctions, also show aging effects in their brains, such as the accumulation of amyloid-beta plaques.

To trace the evolutionary roots of the aging brain, researchers have previously investigated whether similar effects occur in the brains of rhesus monkeys (which diverged from the ‘human lineage’ about 30 million years ago). These primates showed only very limited effects of age in their brains. So, the mystery remained.

A perhaps somewhat lugubrious study, published in PLoS ONE, set out to investigate whether decapitation is a humane method of euthanasia in small animals, such as rats and birds. To do this, they used 22 rats that were decapitated while an EEG was recorded. Of these rats, 9 were awake and 8 were anesthetized (5 rats lost the electrodes during the experiment).

Not surprisingly, the EEG lost power fast and globally and decreased to about half the initial value in about 4 seconds after the decapitation. Where the EEG markedly differed between both groups before the ‘death sentence’ was carried out, it did not appear different post decapitation.  The authors present two hypotheses to explain this phenomenon:

Evolutionary psychology is a field that examines human psychological traits through evolutionary glasses. Most human psychological traits are considered adaptations, the functional products of natural or sexual selection. This is tidily summarized in a quote from Cosmides and Tooby, two of the founders of the field:

Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.

The field, however, is quite controversial. Proponents tend to explain every aspect of the human psyche through evolutionary adaptation, whereas opponents often express the criticism that these are ‘just-so stories’. Between these two positions, of course, many more moderate ones are possible.

Most previous neural networks consisted out of a physically connected network of neural cells. But can a soup of interacting molecules also show brain-like behavior? Apparently, it can.

Rock-paper-scissors (henceforth, it shall be known as RPS) is a game, or method to determine who has to do something nobody really wants to do. The rules are pretty well-known. The players simultaneously form a rock, paper or scissors gesture with their hands, and rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock. The same gesture results in a draw. Since one person’s win means the other one’s loss, it can be considered a zero-sum game. Players can only achieve optimal outcomes if they do not imitate each other.