ScienceBlogs

Brain & Behavior

• September 6, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Extra, Extra Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week. Science Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna...

• September 4, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  "Smells Like Mass Extinction" - Deconstructing Bad Universe As I'm sure many of you did, I recorded Phil Plait's (twitter, blog) Bad Universe pilot last week, and it was so good that I watched it twice. And then two more times as I tried to figure out why...

• September 3, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  7 Questions with... Eric M. Johnson Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or...

• September 2, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Carnival of Evolution #27 The 27th edition of the Carnival of Evolution is being served up at 360 Degree Skeptic. Lots of great posts included as usual, including my two part series on social dynamics in hyena groups: Silver Spoon Hyenas? and Silver...

• August 31, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Wolves Are Smart, but Dogs Look Back Dogs are pretty smart. They can have huge vocabularies, they can infer meaning in the growls of other dogs, and they can effortlessly figure out if other dogs want to play or fight with them. But their intelligence might...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Editor's Selections: Psychedelic Drugs, Narcissism, Cephalopods, and Friendship Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: "Distorted perceptions and an altered state of mind: two reasons why psychedelics have always attracted not only fascination, but also controversy for decades." Noah Gray at Nature Blogs has curated...

• August 30, 2010

• Neurophilosophy

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  The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders, by Franz Vollenweider...

• Uncertain Principles

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  Nobody Ever Remembers Being a Cow There was a deeply silly New York Times article about "Past Life Regression" over the weekend: In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and...

• August 28, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Extra, Extra Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition. Science Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in. Of Pronghorns and Predators. It's an interesting look into the predator-prey...

• August 27, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Silver Spoon Hyenas: Maternal Social Status Affects Male Reproductive Success Figure 1: A mother hyena with her cubs. Early developmental experiences can have significant implications for the growth, behavior, survival, and reproductive success of an individual. In many species, one of the most important factors that affects an individual's early...

• August 26, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Silver Spoon Hyenas? A fascinating new paper just came out in Nature Communications and I intend to blog it in the usual manner, but I thought I'd try something new first. Check it out: The Research Question...According to life history theory, mothers...

• August 24, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Editor's Selections: Visual Noise, Aplysia, and Psychopaths Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: Livia Blackburne asks what something called "visual noise exclusion" has to do with dyslexia. She classifies the post as "intermediate-advanced," but it's a good concise explanation of this complicated research...

• August 23, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  To Hear A Mockingbird: The Plight of the Iguana Predator-prey interactions are often viewed as evolutionary arms races; while predators improve their hunting behaviors and their ability to sneak up on their prey, the prey improve upon their abilities to detect and escape from their predators. The problem, of...

• August 22, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Extra, Extra Here's your weekly round-up of fun and fascinating: To start with, I did a 6-part series on numerical cognition and the development of math skills, here and at Child's Play: 1. The Developmental Origins of Numerical Cognition 2. What is...

• August 20, 2010

• DrugMonkey

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  Harvard found Marc Hauser guilty of misconduct, his lab claims he manipulated data The ScienceInsider blog published a letter from Harvard's Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences which states that Marc Hauser was indeed found guilty of scientific misconduct under their investigation process. it is with great sadness that I confirm that...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  The Meta-Aggregator Two important notes for today - the full link round-up, as per usual, will come over the weekend. First, the meta-aggregator to end all aggregators. Go check out scienceblogging.org - a fantastic tool built by Anton Zuiker, Blogfather Bora, and...

• Neurophilosophy

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  Illusions of bodily awareness adapted for the pub Dazzle your drinking buddies by distorting their bodily perceptions using nothing more than the items commonly found in pubs and bars

• August 19, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  The Origins of Small Number Representation Earlier this week I wrote about the developmental and evolutionary origins of large number representation. A series of studies in human infants, monkeys, rats, and fish demonstrated that animals and humans spontaneously represent large (>4), abstract, approximate numerosities. Animals, human...

• August 17, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Editor's Selections: Apologies, Fish Markets, and Addictions to Video Games and Cocaine Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week! At BPS Research Digest, Christian Jarrett asks what makes for an effective apology? Krystal D'Costa of the Urban Ethnographer blog describes an afternoon at a fish market in New York...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  What Are The Origins of (Large) Number Representation? This post considering the evolutionary origins of numerical cognition, specifically in terms of the approximation of large numbers, is meant as a companion to this week's series on the developmental origins of numerical cognition and developmental dyscalculia, at Child's Play....

• August 16, 2010

• Science is Culture

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  Rare Sharing of Data Led to Results on Alzheimer's From the New York Times The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data,...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Did Dogs Gain Their Social Intelligence By Accident? I will be reposting some dog-related posts from the archives in the coming few weeks as I prepare for the course I'm teaching this semester on dog cognition. Please let me know if you find something inaccurate or unclear. Domesticated...

• August 15, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Extra, Extra Science and Science Writing Colin Schultz has committed science blogging! Science bloggers link more often to original research than do mainstream journalists. Not surprising, but good to know there's empirical research. Hannah Waters of Culturing Science ponders the place of...

• August 13, 2010

• Developing Intelligence

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  Supertaskers, The Act of Doing Nothing, and Other Recent Papers of Interest There are a few fascinating papers to come out recently that I won't have time to cover in detail, but which people may find interesting. References and abstracts after the jump:...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Book Review: The Invisible Gorilla If there is one book that every human should read, it is The Invisible Gorilla, by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. I suppose that's a pretty bold statement to make. Let me explain. As a student of psychology, and as...

Synthetic Biology

Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:

Pharyngula May 30, 2007

“Playing God”

The Loom January 31, 2008

"Frankenstein Was Here": Synthetic Biology as Graffiti

Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006

Build your own virus