Peer Review 1945
For all those who've had the pleasure of going through peer review - this video shows us that it affects even the worst of us: Related Posts:Barbarisation: My loony bun is fine Benny LavaThe Grand Canyon - caused by Noah's flood,

The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme
One way to help protect dying languages - SpecGram—Call For Proposals—The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme: It is well known that a “language” is just a dialect with an army. Furthermore, it is well-known that endangered languages today are endangered because they are being replaced by encroaching majority languages. The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme recognizes these facts, and aims to provide the means for minority speech communities to attain the status of “languages,” while simultaneously providing for their active defence against the encroachment of their majori

Tuberculosis in Dr Granville’s mummy
Tuberculosis in Dr Granville's mummy: a molecular re-examination of the earliest known Egyptian mummy to be scientifically examined and given a medical diagnosis: ‘Dr Granville's mummy’ was described to the Royal Society of London in 1825 and was the first ancient Egyptian mummy to be subjected to a scientific autopsy. The remains are those of a woman, Irtyersenu, aged about 50, from the necropolis of Thebes and dated to about 600 BC. Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783–1872), an eminent physician and obstetrician, described many organs still in situ and attributed the cause of

Universal motifs in color naming
World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity: We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six “motifs,” where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary

A Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River
An interesting paper on the origin of dogs in the forthcoming issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution - mtDNA Data Indicate a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, Less Than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves: There is no generally accepted picture of where, when, and how the domestic dog originated. Previous studies of mitochondrial DNA mtDNA have failed to establish the time and precise place of origin because of lack of phylogenetic resolution in the so far studied control region CR, and inadequate sampling. We therefore analyzed entire mitochondrial genomes for 169 dogs to ob