December 13, 2013 (table of contents)

Scientist behind 'Drowning Polar Bear' paper settles lawsuit - Charles Monnett settled a lawsuit with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (formerly Minerals Management Service) stemming from a BOEM investigation and a reprimand arising following his paper noting drowned polar bears that was featured in Al Gore's An Inconveneint Truth and attracted scrutiny from climate change skeptics. (p1298)

Diets induce quick change in gut microbes (p1298)

Lick Observatory in trouble as austerity starts to bite. p1299

Advocates protest the cost of a hepatitis C cure (p1302)

Health information and the like (Letters, p1315) concerns social influence bias (see study 9 August, p647) and suggests that social influence bias can be detrimental to public health.

Unnecessary complexity (Daniel W. McShea, p1319), review of Complexity and the Arrow of Time - complex! 

The Bioethics Commission on incidental findings (Amy Gutmann, p1321)

The hidden codes that shape protein evolution (Robert J. Weatheritt and M. Madan Babu, p1325) - "Despite redundancy in the genetic code (1), the choice of codons used is highly biased in some proteins, suggesting that additional constraints operate in certain protein-coding regions of the genome." (Commentary on Andrew Stergachis et al. Exonic transcription factor binding directs codon choice and affects protein evolution, p1367)

* Colloid science collides with liquid crystals (Nicholas L. Abbott, p1326) - Brownian motion.  In a simple solvent, colloid displacement scales linearly with square root of time.  Recent studies of complex systems revealed deviations from this behavior - anomalous diffusion resulting from fluctuations in solvent molecule orientations (more)

*My oldest sister is a sea walnut?  (Antonis Rokas, p1327) - some surprising new findings that "challenge the standard view of early animal evolution".  "With the findings of Ryan et al., we can finally dispense with the teleology-imbued notion that early animal evolution resembled a linear march fo evolutionary forms from the 'simple' to the 'complex.' The advent fo the ctenophore genome suggests that simplification and loss of genes, pathways, and even cell types, and perhaps also their independent evolution, are an integral part of the fabric of animal origins."

Coming to an airport near you (Angela R. McLean, p1330) - global spread of infection can be understood as a simple reaction-diffusion process across the defined transportation network.  "The elegant treatment of a complex problem does involve some simplifying assumptions." (Commentary on The hidden geometry of complex, network-driven contagion phenomena; Dirk Brockmann and Dirk Helbing, p1337)

Improving biologic drugs via total chemical synthesis (Linda C. Hsieh-Wilson and Matthew E. Griffin, p1332)

Finding the right partner in a 3D genome (Pedro P. Rocha et al., p1333))