My Hobby and Interest - Research

Science Perspective related research article Monkeys have rhythm Groove to the music What can tapping macaques reveal about the evolution of musicality? by Asif Ghanzanfar and Gavin Steingo More than a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin’s ideas about the evolution of music were pitted against those of the sociologist Herbert Spencer ( 1 ). Darwin believed that the ability to make music evolved as a trait with adaptive value across different animal groups before the advent of contemporary humans, whereas Spencer believed that only humans can make true music. Adaptive explanations for the evolution of human music still abound ( 2 ,  3 ). In the absence of compelling fossil or archaeological evidence of music making, however, 21stcentury researchers rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time. On page 940 of this issue, Rajendran  et al . ( 4 ) report that macaque monkeys have the capacity to tap to a musical beat. Might such research on the capacities of n...

 Science Editorial My not-so-favorite year by H. Holden Thorp As 2025 comes to a close, it’s a good time to step back and assess one of the most tumultuous years in the history of American science. The second Trump administration has brought cuts to so many important efforts. Grants aimed at important aspects of science have been abruptly terminated, and the ability of science to welcome talent from all over the world was curtailed. Government attacks on the scientific enterprise have sent a discouraging message to future scientists, raising the specter of a lost generation of scientific talent in the United States. All of this has been compounded by the slashing of programs that allow people who have been traditionally excluded from science to participate more fully. Perhaps even more dismaying is that the primary motivation for these painful losses is the political usefulness of attacking not just science, but higher education more broadly. How has the leadership of American acad...

Thanks to Calvin Vary for this contribution!  The New York Times Mapping the Sense of Whatʼs Going On Inside Scientists are learning how the brain knows whatʼs happening throughout the body, and how that process might go awry in some psychiatric disorders. by Carl Zimmer Nov. 25, 2025 Last year, Ardem Patapoutian got a tattoo. An artist drew a tangled ribbon on his right arm, the diagram of a protein called Piezo. Dr. Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in San Diego discovered Piezo in 2010, and in 2021 he won a Nobel Prize for the work. Three years later, he decided to memorialize the protein in ink. Piezo, Dr. Patapoutian had found, allows nerve endings in the skin to sense pressure, helping to create the sense of touch. “It was surreal to feel the needle as it was etching the Piezo protein that I was using to feel it,” he recalled. Dr. Patapoutian is no longer studying how Piezo informs us about the outside world. Instead, he has turned inward, to examine the flow ...

Tuesday Dec 2 Thursday Dec 4 8:00am-8:30am https://maine.zoom.us/j/4625543963 If you are joining in person in the main conf room in Scarborough, mats are available in the lobby closet. Come early to make yourself a space for practice.

Science Magazine article link NIH shake-up to grant decision-making draws concerns of political meddling Policy drops “paylines” based on peer-review scores and requires geography and other factors to guide approvals by Jocelyn Kaiser In a potentially dramatic change to how it chooses what science to fund, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is ending a long-running practice at many of its institutes of establishing, and making public, a threshold peer-review score needed for a grant application’s approval. Instead of many NIH investigator grant decisions being determined by such cutoffs, known as paylines, all 27 institutes and centers must now consider factors such as an institute’s priorities, the applicant’s career stage and existing funding, and even their geographic location. The policy is drawing concern from some researchers, even though about half of NIH institutes, mostly smaller ones, already don’t use these paylines. The critics fear the new policy will further make age...

 Tuesday this week - Nov 25  8:00am-8:30am https://maine.zoom.us/j/4625543963 If you are joining in person in the main conf room in Scarborough, mats are available in the lobby closet. Come early to make yourself a space for practice.

 Nature news Psychedelics and immortality:  Nature  went to a health summit starring RFK and JD Vance The Make America Healthy Again summit, attended by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and vice-president JD Vance, gave a sense of what’s driving US health policy. by Max Kozlov Washington DC Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House last week. The meeting’s purpose was to discuss the future of health in the United States. Organizers called it the MAHA Summit, referring to US health secretary  Robert F. Kennedy Jr ’s signature ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement. Attendees included Kennedy, US vice-president JD Vance,  NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya , US Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary and the food activist Vani Hari, who blogs under the name ‘Food Babe’. Sessions at the ...