Seed Media Group

July 31, 2006

Testosterone and Euphoria

Category: Culture

I'm still puzzled over why Floyd Landis might have taken testosterone. After all, bicyclists are supposed to be svelte, and injecting yourself with a little hormone the night after a tough ride probably wouldn't lead to increased muscle recovery in...

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July 29, 2006

Neurofeedback Wins World Cup!

Category: Neuroscience

Well, sort of. A well-timed insult by Materazzi also helped. But the WSJ reports today that several members of the Italian team used neurofeedback earlier this year to help hone their powers of concentration: In February, months before the tournament...

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July 27, 2006

Are Scientists Productive?

Category: Culture

After my last post on the frustrating inefficiencies of experimental failure, I recieved an interesting comment: I discovered in the late stages of graduate school that my extremely long hours (upwards of 80/week) were extraordinarily unproductive. I was doing cell...

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July 26, 2006

Adoption and IQ

Category: Neuroscience

The NY Times Magazine described an interesting study that I'd never heard about before: A study of French youngsters adopted between the ages of 4 and 6 shows the continuing interplay of nature and nurture. Those children had little going...

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Mirror Neurons Redux

Category: Neuroscience

Small Gray Matters has an insightful post on the recent mirror neuron debate here at Scienceblogs. While I think a dose of skepticism is always helpful (especially when big mysteries like "empathy" and "theory of mind" are being tossed around),...

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July 25, 2006

Why do scientists have to work so hard?

Category: My So-Called Life

Scienceblogs is abuzz with discussion over the difficulty of melding family life and an academic career in science. Having worked for several years as a tech in an ambitious neuroscience lab, I'm amazed that post-docs even contemplate a family life....

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July 24, 2006

Are Mirror Neurons Too Cool?

Category: Neuroscience

Mixing Memory tosses a helpful bucket of cold water on the mirror neuron frenzy. The post focuses on the hypothesis that mirror neurons were a crucial ingredient in the development of human language. While I think much of the skepticism...

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July 22, 2006

The Stem Cell Debate of 2007

Category: Culture

So we lost the stem cell battle this year. Moral self-righteousness once again defeated pragmatic common sense. Of course, important political progress was made: Congress supported science, and Bush was forced to veto a popular bill. So what should we...

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July 20, 2006

Electric Cars Are Not Dead

Category: Culture

The new Tesla has officially been unveiled. Wired has already taken it for a test drive: He releases the brake and my head snaps back. One-one-thousand: I get a floating feeling, like going over the falls in a roller coaster....

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A World In A Grain of Sand

Category: Culture

The Wellcome Trust just announced the winners of the 2006 Biomedical Image Awards. The pictures are absolutely stunning: Here is a goblet cell, which line the inside of the intestine and respiratory system. And here is a cerebellar granule cell,...

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July 19, 2006

Sam Brownback Has Lost His Mind

Category: Culture

I can't believe this man is a senator. Listen to his speech on stem cells yesterday in the Senate: it's scary. [Hat tip: Mimms]...

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New Seed Article

Category:

My new Seed article is now online. I wanted to use the neuroscience of learning to draw some connections between a lot of different things, from mirror neurons to Algebra teachers to Toyota factories. Take a look, and tell me...

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Car Buyers Are Dumb v.2

Category: Culture

In response to my blog yesterday about America's continued love affair with horsepower and V8 engines, I recieved an excellent comment. It's worth a read: If you ask people why they drive 4WD SUVs you get a number of answers,...

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July 18, 2006

How Dumb are Car Buyers?

Category: Culture

So dumb that we're still buying SUV's. Despite the fact that gas is now almost $3 a gallon, the average fuel economy of new 2006 models was virtually flat with a year ago at 21 miles per gallon, according to...

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The Upside of Global Warming

Category: Culture

We should all move to Greenland. From the WSJ: Greenland represents one of the largely unrecognized paradoxes of global warming. In former Vice President Al Gore's recent film "An Inconvenient Truth," the melting of Greenland's ice cap, along with a...

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Evolutionary Psychology and the Gender Gap

Category: Culture

Judge Richard Posner has stepped into the tedious debate over innate cognitive differences between men and women. While I'm usually a fan of Posner's contrarian streak, he indulges here in some terrible evolutionary psychology. He manages to justify a blatant...

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July 17, 2006

Global Warming Explains the Heat Wave

Category: Culture

Well, not really. But there has definitely been a shift in public perception since last summer. As I was watching my local news this morning, the anchor alluded to global warming as a way of "explaining" the record setting heat...

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July 15, 2006

Nature and Homosexuality

Category: Culture

First of all, anyone who argues that homosexuality isn't "natural," and that being gay is just a strange human perversion, is clearly wrong. As I wrote in my article on Joan Roughgarden: Having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of...

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July 14, 2006

Is the Hockey Stick Real?

Category: Culture

The WSJ editorial page - a very suspect source - opines on a new statistical study which seems to cast doubt on the hockey stick model of global warming. This model began with Michael Mann's 1999 paper, and is the...

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Air-Conditioning Makes You Fat

Category: Culture

A new paper in The International Journal of Obesity explores several of the ignored factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic. Sure, corn syrup and lethargy are bad, but other suspects include: 1) The decrease in smoking. Apparently, the Virginia...

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July 13, 2006

My Next Car

Category: Culture

If the hype is accurate, then I'm skipping the hybrid and going straight for the Tesla...Imagine an electric car that accelerates like a Corvette and can get 250 miles per charge....

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Is Science Sexist?

Category: Culture

I'm not so sure, but two prominent scientists, both of whom are transgendered, allege that scientists regularly discriminate and "ostracize" ambitious female scientists. This is the latest twist of the Larry Summers Debate, which has grown a wee bit tiresome....

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July 12, 2006

Do Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves?

Category: Culture

Not if you read the fine print. According to an analysis by the Treasury Department, Bush's tax cuts may raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%. But is that enough to pay for the tax cuts? Not...

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Neurogenesis and the Neocortex

Category: Neuroscience

Jake over at Pure Pedantry links to a recently published article which shows that the adult neocortex has roughly the same number of neurons (but more glial cells) than the neocortex of a newborn. This is an interesting study and...

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July 11, 2006

Mushrooms and Spirituality

Category: Neuroscience

Sometimes science experiments smack of the obvious. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave 36 people with deep religious convictions hallucingenic mushrooms (active ingredient psilocybin) they experienced a deep, and lingering, sense of spirituality.Furthermore, as every day tripper knows, about a...

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July 10, 2006

Another Reason Not to Live in the Midwest

Category: Culture

They have lots of bugs....

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Happiness Books

Category: Culture

There's currently a glut of good books on happiness. If you don't have the time to wade through them all, Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine has a helpful summary of the latest developments in positive psychology....

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Religion, Mystery and Quantum Physics

Category: Culture

I've always wondered why evangelicals obsess over evolution and not quantum physics. If their intent is to undermine materialist science, the surreal conclusions of modern physicists - multiple universes, 11 stringy dimensions, the invisible weight of dark matter - strike...

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July 8, 2006

Talking Apes

Category: Neuroscience

These bonobos can even invent metaphors...The secret, at least according to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, head scientist at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, is to expose primates to language when they are still infants. Of course, this isn't the first...

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July 7, 2006

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky

Category: Culture

It's pretty damn funny. I especially like the part where Ali G connects being bilingual with bisexuality. Chomsky doesn't even flinch. [Courtesy Andrew Sullivan]...

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Kinsley on Stem Cells

Category: Culture

Just read it. Common sense wrapped in lucid prose is a powerful tool....

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The Lure of Determinism

Category: Culture

Sharon Begley has another wonderful column today in the WSJ. She focuses on the so called "violence gene" as an example of the hopelessly complicated relationship between genetics and real life. In the late 1980s, a number of men in...

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Money Can't Buy You Love

Category: Culture

Money also can't buy you happiness. It's been reported before, but it's always worth repeating: the rich aren't happier than the rest of us. In the last issue of Science, a team of researchers (including Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman), reported...

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July 6, 2006

Conservatives and Global Warming

Category: Culture

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg alleges that if global warming were an entirely natural phenomenon - as opposed to a man-made problem caused by greenhouse gases - then "the reluctance on the part of some on the right to...

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Mice, Empathy and Animal Experimentation

Category: Culture

Much ink has been spilled about the recent paper in Science documenting empathy in mice. The experiment was rather simple. The scientists noticed that mice given a painful injection displayed increased writhing behavior (a reflexive response to pain) in the...

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July 5, 2006

Shamu, Marriage and Behaviorism

Category: Neuroscience

This charming article, on Shamu, positive reinforcement, and the malleability of men, has been one of the NY Times' most emailed articles for the last 10 days. (Is that some kind of record?) The basic message is very straightforward: The...

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July 3, 2006

Ask A Scienceblogger

Category: Neuroscience

This week's question is "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?" That's a tough question. I'm going to go with mental health. Until relatively recently (i.e., the 1960's), our mental...

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Memory is a Liar

Category: Neuroscience

The NY Times Magazine had an interesting article on deja vu and memory. It's about a group of cognitive psychologists who are using patients afflicted with a continual sense of deja vu (sounds a little hellish to me) in order...

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