That's life

Life has been intruding -- not in a bad way, but it's intrusive nonetheless. What more appropriate way to offer a prospectively interesting post despite those distractions than with a post about ... life.

Onward, then, to some recent items from the life sciences.

Given the number of forecasts, dating back, at the least, to Thomas Malthus, that humanity will breed itself to disaster, it's nice(!) to read a counter-argument. As in: "The Population Bomb Has Been Defused: The Earth and humanity will survive as fertility rates fall almost everywhere." This is, unequivocally, Good News.

After a spate of reports about unreproducible and/or statistically questionable psychology experiments, it's also encouraging to see, "Psychologists Have a Plan to Fix the Broken Science of Psychology." There may be a whole new paradigm emerging for performing psychological research.

Some headlines just speak for themselves. Such as: "Caught on camera: the cells eating your brain." (But catchy phrasing aside? This is interesting stuff about a heretofore only theorized neurological function.)

With all this talk about life ... what better thought to leave you with than a speculation about the very origins of the phenomenon. (Because evolution deals with how life changes, not how it began.) For a possible, partial answer to the riddle, see " 'Nuclear geyser' may be origin of life: The perfect for conditions for life – including a handy power source – may have been a natural nuclear reactor on the early Earth."

See you soon, when -- hopefully -- life isn't being quite so intrusive.