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January 31, 2007

Bush's Silly CAFE Proposal

Category: Culture

Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook argues that the President's recent proposal to increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard by 4 percent a year is a brilliant and bold policy that will "reverse [oil] consumption trends". He blames the...

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The Wii and William James

Category: Neuroscience

The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii. The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game...

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January 30, 2007

The McDonald's Diet

Category: Culture

In the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He ended up gaining lots of weight, suffering liver damage, and enduring intense mood swings. But now Spurlock's movie has been repeated...

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Barbaro, Cruelty and Horse Racing

Category: Culture

For some reason, I find the death of Barbaro rather upsetting. The first two horse races I've ever watched on television were his victory at the Kentucky Derby and his injury at the Preakness. I've since followed his medical travails...

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January 29, 2007

Einstein Before Relativity

Category: Culture

There's a new collection of Einstein's personal letters that are about to be published. They give us a portrait of the young scientist before he revolutionized science. At the time these letters were written, Einstein was insecure, poor and struggling...

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Milton Friedman and the Rational-Agent Model

Category: Neuroscience

Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in...

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January 27, 2007

Why is Nutritional Science So Bad?

Category: Culture

It almost seems as if the faddish claims of nutritional science have an inverse relationship with reality. If a nutrient is supposed to be good for us, chances are that later research will contradict the claim. Here's Michael Pollan in...

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January 26, 2007

The Neural Source of Cigarette Addiction

Category: Neuroscience

It's an astonishingly robust finding: Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains. What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes...

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January 24, 2007

Subliminal Advertising?

Category: Culture

Or just a mix-up with the cable feed? Hat Tip: Kottke...

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Steven Pinker is a New Mysterian

Category: Neuroscience

Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the...

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January 23, 2007

Glamorous Science

Category: Culture

Is this true? Are neuroscientists really the cool kids? If so, then what is the "coolest" avenue of neuroscience research? (And please don't say consciousness studies.) Q. Among biologists, is sperm research very respected? A. Well, in biology, all the...

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Reconsolidating the Future

Category: Neuroscience

For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led...

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January 22, 2007

Superbugs and War

Category: Culture

This is an important medical story about the spread of a drug-resistant strain of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. The spread of this superbug - it's known as an opportunistic pathogen, since it preys on the old, young and weak -...

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The Peak-End Rule and the NFL Playoffs

Category: Culture

Last night's Colts-Patriots game was a painful experience. (As you probably guessed, I'm a Patriots fan.) But it wasn't just painful because the Pats lost the game: it was how they lost the game. The Pats dominated the 1st half,...

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January 19, 2007

Crazy Meat Facts

Category:

From Steven Shapin's recent New Yorker article on the history of vegetarianism: A recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused...

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Ian McEwan's Strange Plot Twist

Category: Culture

In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books...

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January 18, 2007

When Promising Cures Are Ignored

Category: Culture

I've got good news and bad news. I'll give you the good news first: A cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to...

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Culture and Near-Death Experiences

Category: Culture

People who have near-death experiences often report a similar set of symptoms: they levitate above their body while being slowly pulled towards a bright white light. Nevertheless, the details of this experience - the particular afterlife that lies beyond the...

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Making Colonoscopies Less Painful

Category: Culture

Good news: cancer deaths have declined for the second year in a row. This trend has a number of causes, including fewer smokers and improved treatment options. But one cancer accounts for more than 65 percent of the overall decline...

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January 17, 2007

Emotional Advertising

Category: Neuroscience

I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything....

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Expensive Wars

Category: Culture

Here is the most depressing lede of the day: $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign -- a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and...

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January 16, 2007

The Cultural Self (East vs. West)

Category: Neuroscience

What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas...

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The Neuroscience of Shopping

Category: Neuroscience

John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron: The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental...

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January 15, 2007

The Cost of Kids

Category: Culture

Having children is bad for your health: A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in...

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Agricultural Subsidies Make Food Taste Bad

Category: Culture

Agricultural subsidies are bad policy on so many different levels. They artificially lower food prices, thus making it harder for farmers from developing nations to compete. (Cutting subsidies would do a tremendous amount of good for the third world.) They...

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January 13, 2007

Math and the Brain

Category: Culture

Is the mathematical avant-garde getting so abstruse that it stretches the limits of the human mind? Is it dangerous when a science becomes entirely dependent upon the calculations of computers? Here's Sharon Begley in the WSJ: Mathematicians have become increasingly...

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January 11, 2007

The Most Influential Neuroscience Book Is...

Category: Culture

So I was talking to a friend of mine, currently working towards his Ph.D in neuroscience, and we got into an interesting discussion about the most influential neuroscience book published in the last 25 years. We defined "influence" as broadly...

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January 10, 2007

The Randomness of Life

Category: Culture

PZ has a great post on a recent Nature Genetics paper that explores the startling connection between longevity and luck. (Or, as scientists like to stay, stochasticity). It turns out that genetically identical worms survive for very different amounts of...

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Pets on Prozac and Animal Rights

Category: Culture

I'm curious how animal rights activists feel about this: They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners'...

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January 9, 2007

Selective Abortion and Homosexuality

Category: Culture

Last week, gay-rights activists led a protest against research being done on sheep at Oregon State University. Andrew Sullivan reports: The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can...

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The Secret of Happiness

Category: Culture

According to a new study published in the BMJ, the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations. That's the dismal secret of happiness: not expecting very much from life in the first place....

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January 8, 2007

Puzzles vs. Mysteries

Category: Culture

In his latest New Yorker article (an otherwise problematic discussion of Enron), Malcolm Gladwell makes an interesting distinction between "puzzles" and "mysteries": Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The...

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Repeating the Milgram Experiment

Category: Neuroscience

I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the...

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January 5, 2007

Public Libraries and Popular Culture

Category: Culture

According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books...

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Prehistoric Climate Change

Category: Culture

Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up: Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at...

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January 3, 2007

The Heuristics of War

Category: Culture

Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon have a great article in the new Foreign Policy magazine on "Why Hawks Win." They describe some of the mental biases discovered by Prospect Theory, and explain how these biases affect our foreign policy decisions....

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The Psychology of Small Cars

Category: Culture

From Dan Neil, the wittiest writer in the newspaper business: Desire, the Buddha informs us, is the root of all suffering -- also, a leading cause of alimony, but let's move on. The craving for comfort, luxury, prestige and me-first...

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January 2, 2007

Dynamic Pricing on Amazon

Category: Culture

Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing: Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the...

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The Neuroscience of Music

Category: Neuroscience

There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music: Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while...

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