“Explain it like I’m five”

For a starter, it might be interesting to see what my classmates (undergrad period) are doing with their research, and try to explain it with my shameless, shallow, short-sighted, lack-of-common-sense point of view.

1. Natural selection can favor the evolution of ratchet robustness over evolution of mutational robustness (1)
   • I read about the abstract and didn’t get it. What’s Muller’s ratchet and epistasis?

2. Resting-state functional connectivity between the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and thalamus is associated with risky decision-making in nicotine addicts (2)
   • Conclusion: people smoke more tends to make bold moves. they used fMRI to show that bold moves are associated with
     • heavy smoker
     • stronger connectivity between some brain areas
   • What is “risk level-related activation”?

3. Simulating Large-Scale Conformational Changes of Proteins by Accelerating Collective Motions Obtained from Principal Component Analysis (3)
   • Molecular dynamics, great…
   • So it uses modes found in PCA to guide structural sampling, which solves some kind of bias called “tip effect” in the elastic models.