“Pick Your Afro Daddy”

Evolution. Who's your daddy?

T he recognition that birds are theropod dinosaurs has redefined the science of ornithology as extant dinosaur biology (1). The placement of birds in a detailed evolutionary context has led to exciting discoveries about the commonalities birds share with their dinosaur ancestors, including feathers (2) and possibly flight (3). Insights have been gained into both the origins of avian biology and...

Pick Your Flavor of Random Forest

The ModelMap package (Freeman, 2009) for R (R Development Core Team, 2008) has added two additional variants of random forests: quantile regression forests and conditional inference forests. The quantregForest package (Meinshausen and Schiesser, 2015) is used for quantile regression forest (QRF) models. QRF models provide the ability to map the predicted median and individual quantiles. This ma...

Alerting or Somnogenic Light: Pick Your Color

In mammals, light exerts pervasive effects on physiology and behavior in two ways: indirectly through clock synchronization and the phase adjustment of circadian rhythms, and directly through the promotion of alertness and sleep, respectively, in diurnal and nocturnal species. A recent report by Pilorz and colleagues describes an even more complex role for the acute effects of light. In mice, b...

Convergent Evolution: Pick Your Poison Carefully

Genomic and biochemical analyses reveal that two independently evolved serine protease venoms in mammals and lizards have converged on nearly identical protein structures. Likewise, in two groups of frog, an identical toxin, caerulein, has arisen repeatedly from unique genes in those lineages.

It's all in the genes, so pick your parents wisely.