Brain & Behavior
March 18, 2010
Gene Expression
We be symbolic The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background...
Neurotopia
Basics: Guest Post 3: Sperm maturation and ejaculation What you all were waiting for has finally come! Yeah. Sperm maturation and ejaculation OK!! So the last time I was over here at Neurotopia we were talking about sperm in their infancy. We discussed spermatogenesis -- how we got...
March 17, 2010
The Frontal Cortex
Randomness and God The world is a confusing place. Causation looks like correlation; the signal sounds like the noise; randomness is everywhere. This raises the obvious question: How does the human brain cope with such an epistemic mess? How do we deal with...
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
USA Science & Engineering Festival volunteer Stacy Janis wins NSF 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Stacy Jannis, who has been working tirelessly for the Festival to get the Kavli Science Video Contest up and running, was recently honored by AAAS and the National Science Foundation 2009International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for her video "Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer's Disease", which she produced for the National Institute on Aging. See her video..
Neurophilosophy
'Wasabi receptor' is snake's infrared sensor SNAKES have a unique sensory system for detecting infrared radiation, with which they can visualize temperature changes within their immediate environment. Using this special sense, they can image the body heat radiating from warm-blooded animals nearby. This enables them to...
March 16, 2010
Neuron Culture
Notables from Out-n-About 03/17/2010 (a.m.) Reading, ants, reading about ants, and Ezra Klein fact-checks David Brooks
Gene Expression
The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong Over the past week I've been asked via email and on message boards about about David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. Since I haven't...
The Frontal Cortex
Mayan Morality Here's a moral scenario: A man is sitting near the side of the road when he sees a truck speeding along. It is headed towards a group of five men, who do not hear or see it, and if nothing...
Omni Brain
A scientific excuse for why I gained weight working on my dissertation It seems that if you eat on a full brain you are more likely to make poor eating decisions. So here's the schtick via Weighty Matters: Simple experimental design. Take 165 undergraduate students and enroll them in a study you tell them is about memory and where as part of...
Omni Brain
OMG! 'The' inattentional blindness video is FINALLY available on youtube In an amazing turn of events the most famous video of all time not on youtube is now on youtube... omg! omg! haha... Follow the instructions if you actually haven't seen this before (which I would be surprised if you have not). oh and look... Dan and Chris have a...
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
TEDTalks: Eric Mead: The Magic of the Placebo Sugar pills, injections of nothing -- studies show that, more often than you'd expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something's not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. (Warning: This talk is not suitable for viewers who are disturbed by needles or blood.)
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Tour of Chirpendale I have never seen nor heard of Bill and Coo (1948), but it's a real treat. It features an all-bird cast (trained by George Burton) acting out a story involving Taxi Driver Bill Singer wooing his beloved Coo whilst fighting off a parakeet-devouring crow! This clip features a tour of the town of Chirpendale and its inhabitants. Oddly enough, the film won a special Academy award "In which artistry and patience blended in a novel and entertaining use of the medium of motion pictures".
March 15, 2010
DrugMonkey
Discriminating Cathinone Analogs A quick scan over at PubMed finds little reported on the effects of 4-MMC (aka mephedrone, MMCAT, Meow-Meow) in animal models or in humans. I did, however, run across an article on other cathinone analog drugs that caught my attention.
Neuron Culture
From Out-N-About: latest web notables We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust. Genetic material Willful...
Not Exactly Rocket Science
Pocket Science - a psychopath's reward, and the mystery of the shark-bitten fossil poo The impulsive nature of psychopaths may stem from a hyperactive reward system and high levels of the signalling chemical dopamine. A piece of fossil dung includes a bite mark from a shark, which probably bit through the maker's bowels during an attack.
The Corpus Callosum
WSJ: Incompetent Ranting At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then I decided that was too strong. Then I read the article again, and went back to the original title. Mind you, this is not intended to be...
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Could Beatbox Girl Learn to Speak !Kung? This woman is ridiculously awesome: she beatboxes for the camera. I have never seen anyone better than her. Which of course, makes me wonder if she might be the one Westerner who is able to learn to speak !Kung fluently?
March 14, 2010
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Scientology Escapee Breaks her Silence This woman describes what the average non-Travolta non-Cruise scientologist has to do to leave the cult .. it's not as simple as walking out the door
March 13, 2010
Neurophilosophy
Brain scans read memories A neuroimaging study by UCL researchers shows that individual memory traces can be decoded and distinguished from one another
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
This is Why Futbol (Soccer) Players Desperately Need Acting Lessons I love futbol, but OMG, these boyz are such crybabies and drama queens! These soccer/futbol players demonstrate the reasons why I think they all are in desperate need of acting lessons: their ridiculous overblown theatrics.
March 12, 2010
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
Gender-Bending Chickens: Mixed, Not Scrambled Sexual identity is genetically imposed on the male and female chicken cells at fertilization and is the major factor in determining the adult sexual phenotype -- gonads have limited effects on the avian sexual phenotype. This fascinating finding is prompting a reassessment in our understanding of the evolution of sex determination
A Blog Around The Clock
ScienceOnline2010 - Trust and Critical Thinking (video), Part 6 Saturday, January 16 at 4:40 - 5:45pm C. Trust and Critical Thinking - Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods)...
A Few Things Ill Considered
(OT) Amazing ant engineering feat Not really apropos to climate change, but I saw this and just had to share. Ever wondered what it would look like if you could actually see the entire network of tunnels that make up a large ant colony? Well,...
Not Exactly Rocket Science
Subliminal flag shifts political views and voting choices Subliminal exposure to national flags can shift a person's political views and even who they vote for. They can even affect the attitudes of volunteers to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
A Blog Around The Clock
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
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“The average Russian male, however, seems to be vacillating between wanting to be with with the Russian female and wanting to be with the Italian male, while the Russian female is slowly moving away from him...This graph is 'dancefloor, viewed from above', right?” Phillip IV on Another Reason for the Russian Bride Phenomenon
Top Lists
- 1How to make a snake : Pharyngula
- 2Dendro Dissidents : Aardvarchaeology
- 3The Great Pacific Garbage Patch : Greg Laden's Blog
- 4Gender-Bending Chickens: Mixed, Not Scrambled : Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
- 5The little-known subgenre of Talpanas tribute art : Tetrapod Zoology
- 1A clarification of Dawkins' comments
PZ Myers 03.17.2010
- 2Episode XL: An Australian romance
PZ Myers 03.17.2010
- 3"Censorship." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Orac 03.17.2010
- 4The empirical evidence for man-made global warming
Tim Lambert 03.01.2010
- 5Why I am not a primatologist
PalMD 03.17.2010
From NYTimes.com
Latest science stories | More at nytimes.com
SB Basics
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
