“We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years”

Three Hundred Million Years of Attentional Selection

In this issue of Neuron, Winkowski and Knudsen reveal striking parallels between the attentional systems of the barn owl and the rhesus macaque. The observation of close similarities between the attentional systems of such distantly related organisms strongly suggest that key computational principles are at work.

Four hundred million years of silica biomineralization in land plants.

Biomineralization plays a fundamental role in the global silicon cycle. Grasses are known to mobilize significant quantities of Si in the form of silica biominerals and dominate the terrestrial realm today, but they have relatively recent origins and only rose to taxonomic and ecological prominence within the Cenozoic Era. This raises questions regarding when and how the biological silica cycle...

A hundred million acts of whimsy?

A world overview--one-hundred-twenty-seven years of research on toxic cyanobacteria--where do we go from here?

CyanoHABs are an intermittent but repeated occurrence throughout the world. They have been documented to impact water quality through production of compounds affecting taste and odor. Selected species within about 40 genera can produce potent toxins that can cause chronic, acute and acute lethal poisonings to wild and domestic animals and humans. Direct and indirect evidence indicates that the ...

One hundred million years of skin feeding? Extended parental care in a Neotropical caecilian (Amphibia: Gymnophiona).

Maternal dermatophagy, the eating of maternal skin by offspring, is an unusual form of parental investment involving co-evolved specializations of both maternal skin and offspring dentition, which has been recently discovered in an African caecilian amphibian. Here we report the discovery of this form of parental care in a second, distantly related Neotropical species Siphonops annulatus, where...