Now on ScienceBlogs: Oh, no! School wi-fi is making our kids sick! (2012 edition)
David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.
You're encouraged to check out my third book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career; subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my work at my main website; or track Twitter feed, my Google Reader shared items, or my Tumblr log, which gets it all.
Category: Brains and minds
I've got an q&a interview up over at Research Digest, one in their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:24 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Genetics & genomics (incl behav genetics)
I love this. The history of science is almost always richer and more variant-rich than we imagine.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
To mark the 150th anniversary of Gage's death (which came 12 years after his accident), the Cavendish Historical Society is taking what sounds like a phenomenal two-hour walking tour that includes the accident site, the home and office of the surgeon who treated him, the boarding house where he was taken, presumably to die, and the carpenter's shop in which was built the coffin he turned out not to need.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:39 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Genetics & genomics (incl behav genetics)
I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter...
Posted by David Dobbs at 6:41 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Genetics & genomics (incl behav genetics)
Despite all the complexity, it's that simple: Sometimes, for some people, depression ramps up constructive thinking; for other people (or at other times for the same people for whom depression sometimes brings insight), it smothers it. Did Virginia Woolf's bipolar depression bring her insight and creativity? Quite possibly. Yet in the end it drowned her.
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:16 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
This Wired story from Jonah Lehrer examines something that too often goes unexamined: The monumental messiness of science. This merely puts science on a par with many other serious endeavors that people try to pursue with rigor and ambition -- like, say, writing.
Posted by David Dobbs at 4:38 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
That people in earlier times experienced a lot of stress shouldn't be a surprise. Yet, like Ford, I am surprised at how many people assume that stress is mainly a modern phenomenon, and an exception rather than the rule.
Posted by David Dobbs at 7:03 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
Ray Tallis takes to those who paint all things neuro.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:03 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong.
Posted by David Dobbs at 6:57 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Books
Adrienne Mayor's riveting (if queasy-making) biography of Mitradates, "Poison King," is a finalist for the National Book Award. It's wonderful to see a skillfully executed and absorbing account of an obscure bit of history get this sort of well-deserved attention.
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
