ScienceBlogs

Brain & Behavior

• July 29, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Parental Verbal Abuse and Why I'm Not ROFL Have you heard about NCBI ROFL? It's a previously-independent blog that has been incorporated into "Discoblog," one of the blogs at Discover Magazine. What they do is find amusing or funny abstracts by searching Pubmed (which is run by the...

• Greg Laden's Blog

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  A headset that reads your brainwaves? Tan Le's astonishing new computer interface reads its user's brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications....

• A Few Things Ill Considered

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  Eating their own Dr Roy Spencer, normally a darling of the septics, is getting the full denialist savaging over at his own blog for daring to defend the physical basis for the greenhouse effect. CanadaFreePress saw "NASA" in his job title and must...

• July 27, 2010

• Developing Intelligence

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  SyNAPSE: In Pusuit of The Cognitive Platform "What we're seeking is not just one algorithm or one cool new trick - we're seeking a platform technology. In other words, we're not seeking the entirety of a collection of point solutions, what we're seeking is a platform technology...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Editor's Selections: Methods FAIL, Empathic Robots, Gorilla Tag, and MDMA for PTSD Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: EcoPhysioMichelle explains a giant methods FAIL on a recent paper that "claims that women who are approaching menopause become 'more willing to engage in a variety of sexual activities to...

• DrugMonkey

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  Why Pain Research Matters a new information campaign from juniorprof's blog.

• The Weizmann Wave

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  Sniff Once for "Yes": New Neurobiology Papers Even severely paralyzed people on respirators can do it: They can sniff. That is, they can at least partially control the movement of air through their nostrils. And if they can sniff, they can use this action to write on...

• July 26, 2010

• Uncertain Principles

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  The Western Undergraduate Problem A few years ago, we ended up trading some classroom space in the Physics part of the building to Psychology, which was renovated into lab space for two of their new(ish) hires. This turned out to be a huge boon...

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  A horse is a horse, of course of course In general, the ability to attribute attention to others seems important: it allows an animal to notice the presence of other individuals (whether conspecifics, prey, or predators) as well as important locations or events by following the body orientation or...

• July 23, 2010

• DrugMonkey

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  MDMA for PTSD: The first peer-reviewed clinical trial report Did it work?

• Developing Intelligence

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  A Backseat Driver in The Brain? dPFC helps you find your way; vlPFC may just say "wrong turn!" Decisions can be hard: the conflict you face in any decision can be increased if option A is not that much better than option B, or if option A is newly worse than option B. And then there are are...

• July 22, 2010

• Developing Intelligence

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  Two varieities of reinforcement learning: Striatal & Prefrontal/Parietal? Recent work has leveraged increasingly sophisticated computational models of neural processing as a way of predicting the BOLD response on a trial-by-trial basis. The core idea behind much of this work is that reinforcement learning is a good model for...

• Mike the Mad Biologist

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  Dogs and Adaption to Humans Dogs are not 'wild animals' anymore: people are an integral part of their environment. Activists who think dog ownership, by itself, is cruel and who want to 'liberate' dogs don't understand the biology.

• Neurophilosophy

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  Feeling blue, seeing gray: Reduced contrast sensitivity as a marker for depression A new study by a group of German researchers shows that depressed people have reduced sensitivity to contrast, and may actually perceive the world differently from others.

• July 20, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Editor's Selections: Urine, Clowns, Vodka, and Dogs Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: Scicurious delights and entertains while explaining a study all about rat urine, in song and rhyme. She instructs: If You're Happy And You Know It, Smell Some Pee. Christian Jarrett...

• July 19, 2010

• The Frontal Cortex

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  Stress I've got a new article in the latest Wired on the science of stress, as seen through the prism of Robert Sapolsky. The article isn't online yet (read it on the iPad!), but here are the opening paragraphs: Baboons are...

• The Weizmann Wave

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  A Test of Courage An experiment at the Institute to identify the brain mechanisms that take control when the call to action conquers fear involved a live snake on a remote-controlled trolley and volunteers with a fear of snakes in an fMRI.

• July 18, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Mickey Feels Your Pain (In His Brain) From the archives... Figure 1: Does Mickey feel empathy? It probably depends on how you define empathy. Empathy, by any definition, implies emotional sensitivity to the affective state of another. Sometimes the empathy response is automatic or reflexive, like when...

• July 16, 2010

• The Thoughtful Animal

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  Dogs on the 'Net Only a few minutes today to get out a few interesting links, because I'm busy writing up an IACUC proposal. First, a post on dogs from one of the Psychology Today blogs. I think he's mostly wrong. And will probably...

• July 15, 2010

• Developing Intelligence

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  Links: Blogging on the Brain 7/15/2010 Swarming Quadrocopters? Nanomagnetic remote control of animal behavior. Blogs are data-mined for personality research. Vote for method of the year! (My vote is for induced pluripotency) If you think that the less competent you are, the more competent you think...

• Neurophilosophy

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  Researchers create 'lesbian' mice by deleting a single gene DELETION of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene, which encodes an enzyme called fucose...

• July 14, 2010

• The Frontal Cortex

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  Smart Babies Over at Sciam's Mind Matters, Melody Dye has a great post on the surprising advantages of thinking like a baby. At first glance, this might seem like a ridiculous conjecture: A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities...

• Developing Intelligence

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  Destination: Computational Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience How can we enhance perception, learning, memory, and cognitive control? For this we need a rigorous integration of neurobiological development with cognitive change - that is, a computational developmental cognitive neuroscience.

• Mike the Mad Biologist

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  Facts Don't Always Backfire: The Estate Tax Edition Often, you won't change many people's mind. But the good news is, that in a democracy, you often don't have to.

• The Weizmann Wave

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  The Physics of Finding Food Bats may be using an innate understanding of physics to track their prey in the dark. Institute neurobiologists trained Egyptian fruit bats to fly to food in a dark lab. They found that in some situations the bats sweep their...

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