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The victory stance of a gold medalist and the slumped shoulders of a non-finalist are innate and biological rather than learned responses to success and failure, according to a University of British Columbia study using cross-cultural data gathered at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In the first study of its kind, UBC psychology researcher Jessica Tracy investigated how pride and shame are expressed across cultures, and among the congenitally blind. She compared the non-verbal expressions and body language of sighted, blind, and congenitally blind judo competitors representing more than 30 countries, among them Algeria, Taiwan, North Korea, the Ukraine and the United States.

To pay tribute to Darwin I propose that we make year 2009 an international Darwin Beard Year. So grow your beards gentlemen!

Scientists are well aware that the majority of the research papers they publish in scientific journals, usually are only read by a few colleagues and fellow specialists in the area. Thus scientists are mostly pleased when their papers reach a wider audience. However, there are situations where this does not fully apply.

I had a review paper about biomimetics and my doctoral research on locomotion in ragworms published in the journal Naturwisseschaften in July. I have just discovered that this paper has been discussed and commented upon in a blog about intelligent design (ID, the idea that living things are so complex and perfectly designed that they cannot have arisen by a random evolutionary process. Instead there must be some non-defined intelligent designer, i.e. God, behind).