Emerging trends: I did it, I did it, I did it, but. . .

Replication Licensing: Oops! … I Did It Again

All eukaryotes use multiple controls to restrict DNA replication to once per cell cycle. Nevertheless, inactivation of a single gene, cul-4, causes massive re-replication in Caenorhabditis elegans. A novel study explains this dramatic phenotype by demonstrating that the CUL-4 E3 ligase simultaneously controls two critical licensing factors: CDT-1 and CDC-6.

It shouldn't have happened, but it did.

Whoops, I did it again: commission errors in prospective memory.

Prospective memory research almost exclusively examines remembering to execute an intention, but the ability to forget completed intentions may be similarly important. We had younger and older adults perform a prospective memory task (press Q when you see corn or dancer) and then told them that the intention was completed. Participants later performed a lexical-decision task (Phase 2) in which ...

The Hippi did it

and colleagues have identified a protein called Hippi as one possible mediator of Huntington disease (HD) neuronal cell death. HD begins with expansion of the polyglutamine repeats in the huntingtin protein (Htt). This frees up Hip1 protein, which normally binds to Htt. Free Hip1 can then bind to the Hippi protein identified by Nicholson, and the two proteins join in a complex with procaspase 8...

“I did it because I trusted you”: Challenges with the Study Environment Biasing Participant Behaviours

We recently replicated and extended a 2009 study that investigated the effectiveness of SSL warnings. Our experimental design aimed to mitigate some of the limitations of that prior study, including allowing participants to use their web browser of choice and recruiting a more representative user sample. However, during this study we observed and measured a strong bias in participants’ behaviou...