Life Science:
War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse: By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every...
Posted on April 28, 2008 8:58 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got a cockatiel with an inverted beak - it's a pretty funny looking underbite, but doesn't interfere with his eating - and I've often wondered if animals ever get self-conscious about their appearance. Does my cockatiel have any clue...
Posted on April 20, 2008 10:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's a joke I've heard many times from neuroscientists who use monkeys in their research: "There are all these regulations about the treatment of primates, but there are no regulations governing the treatment of post-docs". (Of course, we don't record...
Posted on April 15, 2008 11:29 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Via bookslut comes a heartbreaking excerpt from Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees: [Konrad] Lorenz observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to...
Posted on March 13, 2008 10:47 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a nice overview of recent work on animal cognition in the latest National Geographic. Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and...
Posted on February 18, 2008 10:06 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I always assumed that the best race horses simply had the best genes. It seemed like the kind of domain where nature trumped nurture, where the genetics of fast twitch fibers and heart size was more important than the details...
Posted on December 20, 2007 12:55 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Malcolm Gladwell endorses the use of Human Growth Hormone for athletes, at least when it's used to recover from injury: What, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from...
Posted on December 19, 2007 12:13 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From VSL comes this list of truly weird scientific studies. My favorite was this one, which "assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates": Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems...
Posted on December 5, 2007 12:16 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Daniel Engber should become a full time science critic.* Over at Slate, he eviscerates the latest sloppy fMRI study of the political brain, which was published in the Times on Sunday: To liken these neurological pundits to snake-oil salesmen would...
Posted on November 15, 2007 4:46 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's good to have Gladwell back. I've missed his writing these last few months. (To learn about his next book, check out Kottke.) His article this week was on the (pseudo)science that is criminal profiling: In the case of Derrick...
Posted on November 9, 2007 4:12 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you want to learn about umami, glutamate, veal stock and Auguste Escoffier, check out this story about Chapter 3 of my book on Morning Edition. It was a special thrill getting to do this with Robert Krulwich, who has...
Posted on November 5, 2007 9:41 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The rules of the wine tasting were simple. Twenty five of the best wines under twelve dollars were nominated by independent wine stores in the Boston area. The Globe then assembled a panel of wine professionals to select their top...
Posted on November 2, 2007 10:12 AM • 87 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The latest issue of Science has a special section devoted to decision-making. Alan Sanfey, best known for his influential study of the Ultimatum Game, has written a thorough review (available for free) about recent progress in the field. The takeaway...
Posted on November 1, 2007 10:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ever wanted to fly through a neocortical column? Yeah, me too. The bad news is that, until I manage to shrink myself to the micron level, such a flight is probably impossible. This computer simulated video is probably the closest...
Posted on October 30, 2007 2:42 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I linked to an interesting new paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience last week, but I thought it was worth talking a bit more about the journal itself. It's a brand new publication, which attempts to completely transform the peer review...
Posted on October 29, 2007 11:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract: While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain...
Posted on October 25, 2007 5:06 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The New Yorker recently had a cool short story by T.C. Boyle about a boy who couldn't experience pain. The story is told from the perspective of a doctor who has trouble believing that the symptoms of the child are...
Posted on October 20, 2007 4:39 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As heard recently on The Daily Show: Those guys don't know membrane vesicles from their taint. It's a funny line, but membrane vesicles are serious stuff. Just ask Jack Szostak: Our goal is generate a nucleic acid system that can...
Posted on October 16, 2007 8:15 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients: For four months, Kate Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or...
Posted on October 8, 2007 10:34 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I think the NY Times Style section should invest in a resident evolutionary psychologist. Its pages are often filled with the most blatant examples of human nature and sexual selection. The scientist could also help me understand stories like this:...
Posted on October 4, 2007 4:40 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way: Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches...
Posted on October 4, 2007 2:18 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks about music. I particularly enjoyed this question from Steve Silberman about the joys of combining a good melody with drugs: Wired: You write that there was a time in med school when...
Posted on October 3, 2007 1:45 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation: It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles...
Posted on October 1, 2007 9:24 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's Drake Bennett: In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a...
Posted on September 25, 2007 12:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious? A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience....
Posted on September 25, 2007 10:17 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches...
Posted on September 24, 2007 9:14 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good....
Posted on September 21, 2007 5:27 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to...
Posted on September 19, 2007 8:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad: A team in Silver's HMS...
Posted on September 17, 2007 1:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality: There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore...
Posted on September 17, 2007 7:52 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Brooks makes a really smart macro point today about one of the big themes of modern neuroscience. His op-ed (Times $elect) is about the decline of IQ as a general metric of intelligence: Today, the research that dominates public...
Posted on September 14, 2007 10:16 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted,...
Posted on September 14, 2007 9:15 AM • •
What Kanye West can teach us about the neuroscience of music.
Posted on September 13, 2007 10:58 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories...
Posted on September 12, 2007 10:50 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was...
Posted on September 12, 2007 6:46 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the...
Posted on September 10, 2007 11:25 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point: what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk...
Posted on September 7, 2007 10:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy. It turns out, though, that warm milk...
Posted on September 5, 2007 9:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling: I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks...
Posted on August 31, 2007 10:23 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
