Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
Jake is joined periodically by two wonderful guest bloggers: Kara Contreary and Kate Seip. See the About Page.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own or those of my co-bloggers. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments we currently attend.
June 30, 2006
Category: Movies
Who Killed the Electric Car? opened this evening. As Seed has a nice interview with the filmmaker, Chris Paine, I thought I would see it and write of a review....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:45 PM • 2 Comments •
How does that even work? Former "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff had surgery after severing a tendon in his right arm in an accident in a London gym bathroom, his spokeswoman said Friday. The 53-year-old actor, who played lifeguard Mitch Buchannon...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:22 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
This article in The Scientist describes a paper where the authors claim to have found empathy in mice. The problem is that what you define as empathy may be more a matter of semantics than of science:...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:43 PM • 2 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Haha, a funny
If you have gone to college in the past 20 years, odds are you went to about a thousand more A Cappella concerts than you bargained for. I was an RA in college, and frankly by the end I started...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:59 AM • 5 Comments •
I love this article from Seed debunking the latest "We are falling behind in science!" hysteria. Here is my favorite line though: Wadhwa and Gereffi found that the oft-quoted numbers didn't filter for expertise. Using data from the National Center...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:13 AM • 0 Comments •
June 29, 2006
Category: Game Theory
How does cooperation evolve? It is in an organism's best interest to screw its competitors in order to best convey its genes to the next generation, yet we see a variety of human and animals examples of cooperation. The answer...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:48 PM • 4 Comments •
I like my milk pasteurized like everyone else, but the Department of Agriculture is now actually conducting raw milk stings:...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:54 PM • 3 Comments •
June 28, 2006
I recieved early release from the New York penal system. As I noted earlier, I had jury duty today, which normally lasts 3 days. However the guy came in after like 3 hours and says that they are letting us...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:40 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Movies
Warning SPOILERS below the fold!...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:06 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:50 AM • 2 Comments •
Blogging may be light as I am currently a ward of New York state as a juror. Live-blogging the jury system...see what I have been reduced to... We saw this great little video at the beginning called "Your Turn" that...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:32 AM • 3 Comments •
June 27, 2006
In contrast to neuroscience journals who Shelley reveals are still mortally under-representing women, James Lileks is at least trying to bring out some feminism in his daughter. He has this little episode about trying to teach his daughter to go...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:07 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Geek News
In unrelated geek news, there is a new trailer for Spider-Man 3. Ooooh...I am giddy as a school girl....
Posted by Jake Young at 7:48 PM • 2 Comments •
Oh you! Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose was arrested in Stockholm early Tuesday after allegedly biting a security guard in the leg outside his hotel, police said. Rose -- who performed in the Swedish capital on Monday evening --...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:31 PM • 1 Comments •
Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:54 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Global Warming
This could be very interesting: The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment. The...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:57 AM • 0 Comments •
June 26, 2006
Category: Blogging
Matthew Yglesias has a great satire on the hysterionics in the MSM about blogging:...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:46 PM • 1 Comments •
Ed Brayton and Mike Dunford have been talking about a Washington Post article on a study that is concerned with the ill effects the Daily Show and Jon Stewart are having on our democracy. Basically people who watch the Daily...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:24 PM • 3 Comments •
I am not doing this because the Seed Overlords will be happy -- even though they probably will be. I am doing it because I think it will help you out. I wanted to plug a link that our happy...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:46 PM • 0 Comments •
A Japanese boy burned down his home, killing his stepmother and two younger siblings, for fear his parents would find out he had lied about his score on an English test. Talk about your high pressure testing environments....
Posted by Jake Young at 2:30 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Ethics
Keith Burgess-Jackson questions in his TCS column whether we should listen to people like Noam Chomsky's opinions on politics -- a realm notably outside their stated occupational expertise. I must admit that I haven't read what Noam Chomsky's opinions are...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:41 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Ethics
Janet has been discussing why scientists are reluctant to discuss ethics in science. One of her arguments is that scientists feel that the majority of ethical standards are being imposed from the outside rather than being adopted internally. So here...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:58 AM • 1 Comments •
June 25, 2006
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
Hi all and welcome to the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival). Thanks to everyone who participated for their fabulous submissions. Remember that The Synapse is a biweekly carnival, and the next carnival will be hosted by Coturnix at...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:36 AM • 0 Comments •
June 24, 2006
Are Shelley Batts' magnetic brain stimulators the first step in creating the sex helmets from Demolition Man? You be the judge. [after futuristic, contact-free "sex"] John Spartan: I was thinkin' we could do it the old-fashioned way. Lenina Huxley: You...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:00 PM • 1 Comments •
World's oldest living turtle dies: The giant tortoise, known as Harriet, died at the Queensland-based Australia Zoo owned by "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin and his wife Terri. Irwin said he considered Harriet a member of the family. "Harriet has been...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:03 PM • 2 Comments •
June 23, 2006
Just reminding everyone that the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnvial) is rapidly approaching on Sunday. To submit send your neuroscience related posts to the.synapse.carnival@gmail.com by 9 am Sunday. More information is available at The Synapse....
Posted by Jake Young at 12:00 PM • 0 Comments •
June 22, 2006
I can't manage to find anything related to Philosophy of Science. This may have something to do with the fact that it is now nearly 4 in the morning, and philosophy of science is not something I do at 4...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:34 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Cell Biology
I remember for a couple years, it was "lipid rafts this" and "lipid rafts that." The idea of the lipid rafts -- for the uninitiated -- was that there were microdomains in the plasma membranes of cells defined by their...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:16 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Science policy
We have all (meaning Scienceblogs) been talking about this whole free access model for publishing papers. Nick and I even had a nice little debate about it. Not to belabor the issue to much, but this news story in Nature...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:16 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Learning and Memory
I must admit that in general I like David Brooks. He seems to lack the stridency of many pundits, and I don't generally like people who shout. He also tends -- like Walter Bagehot -- not to think that people...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:51 AM • 4 Comments •
CNN reports on Norway's new seed menagerie. This whole business smacks of a Raiders of the Lost Ark action movie. Too bad the payoff is a rare strain of alfalfa: Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:25 AM • 0 Comments •
New Scientist's Invention blog reports on a new way to save lives during crash landings. An inventor in Bangkok thinks it would be a good idea to load the planes with explosives on one wing to slow the sliding of...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:14 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Medicine
Future Pundit reports on research that demonstrates -- shockingly enough -- that vegetables are good for you. Alert the media I say! Anyway, I wouldn't even mention it, but I love this line by him: Most people do not eat...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:06 AM • 0 Comments •
June 21, 2006
Category: Science policy
Will Jake be doing all these posts from this issue of Nature? Perhaps... This issue of Nature also has an editorial related to some Asian countries' recent decision to pay researchers for publishing papers:...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:07 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
For some reason I have been seeing lots of neuroeconomics articles lately. Maybe it is because people enjoy using that prefix. This article caught my eye because I have been reading off the reservation -- a history of economics by...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:35 PM • 1 Comments •
I am doing an all-nighter at the lab -- I know, how deliciously freshmen history paper of me. I also have a lot of free time as I am waiting for RT-PCRs to finish. Thus, I have decided to post...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:22 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Space
Ooooh, pretty....
Posted by Jake Young at 8:47 PM • 2 Comments •
June 20, 2006
I have a bagillion things to do this week, but I would note that many of the other bloggers on this site are running a fundraiser for DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose raises money so that teachers can do science projects with kids...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:10 AM • 0 Comments •
June 19, 2006
Category: Medicine
A study by researcher David Holben in the latest Preventing Chronic Disease (never heard of it) shows that so-called "food insecure" Appalachians are more likely to be obese and have obesity-related disease....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:56 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Medicine
PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated:...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:37 PM • 3 Comments •
Hot. I want some, and I am not even a girl....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:22 PM • 0 Comments •
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... We can answer this with a multiple choice question... Jake...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:07 PM • 2 Comments •
June 18, 2006
The Scientific Activist has a post on chemistry to create little people looking chemicals. I don't remember chemistry being nearly this cool....
Posted by Jake Young at 8:35 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Movies
There are Nerd Gods in the movie Word Play. I am not talking about rock gods or leaders of men or even Adonises of the human form. I am talking about Nerd Gods. Nerds of such startling nerditry that when...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:55 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
As promised I have a response to this article in the New York Times (I had to spend a couple days marshalling my evidence). I thought I would summarize some evidence about what we know from behavioral genetics so you...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:10 PM • 10 Comments •
June 16, 2006
The Synapse now has a permanent page with some kickass clip art for icons. Click on The Synapse at the top of this page. Check back often for the newest issue and submission guidelines. The current submission date is the...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:04 AM • 5 Comments •
June 15, 2006
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
I was totally incensed by this article in the New York Times, largely because the science quoted -- what little there was in between the anecdotes -- was truly attrocious, ignorant of alternative views, and completely missing the point. When...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:10 PM • 1 Comments •
I love science. New Scientist reports a study looking at brain activation during the female orgasm. The results are let us say interesting. His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:00 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Technology
SciAm's Invention is reporting the filing of a patent for a vomit ejector -- a ultrasonic pulse that irritates the wall of the trachea triggering the patient too cough: Patients who overdose on drugs or alcohol can easily drown on...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:48 AM • 0 Comments •
This article points out that trans-fats not only clutter up your arteries but also make you fatter over the long run. That is unfortunate. What is more unfortunate however is the picture in this article. How sad is it to...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:03 AM • 2 Comments •
June 14, 2006
Category: Science policy
I think that the Miller Amendment is well intentioned, but I have some concerns. If you don't know what the Miller Amendment is Nick is all over that. Here is my concern. How is such an amendment to be enforced?...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:13 PM • 1 Comments •
Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:02 PM • 0 Comments •
A new International Labor Organization (which I don't think is part of the Communist Party but sure as hell sounds like it is) study shows that at-work violence is increasing in basically every country surveyed except England and the US:...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:48 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Language
Baboons show handedness in communicative gestures, tending to be right-handed. This paper analyzed the handedness of baboons to see if they were more likely to use their right or their left hands for communication....
Posted by Jake Young at 2:48 PM • 0 Comments •
GrrlScientist displays one of her favorite animals -- the Okapi. Personally I think it looks suspiciously similar to the result of a profane, drunken hookup between a zebra and a giraffe. I wonder who rolled over only to be shocked...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:11 PM • 2 Comments •
June 13, 2006
Category: Learning and Memory
This paper shows that leptin injections into the hippocampus improves memory in a T-maze footshock avoidance and step down inhibitory avoidance tasks. It caught my eye because I just finished a course in behavioral neuroscience, but I have never for...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:22 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Drugs
Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason. The report from...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:28 PM • 0 Comments •
When life gives you transgenic chickens, make a transgenic chicken sandwich....
Posted by Jake Young at 9:23 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Global Warming
Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found. The study reviewed three examples...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:12 AM • 5 Comments •
June 12, 2006
Category: Healthcare
Focus on the Family, a conservative social organization located in Colorado Springs, CO, has decided to oppose the mandatory vaccination of young girls for Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a virus linked to the formation of cervical cancer. Recently the FDA...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:34 PM • 8 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Science policy
Nick from The Scientific Activist has busted out a salient article from the archives related to the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. I think he gives a fair treatment to the Act and its implications. As he is...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:18 AM • 1 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
June 11, 2006
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
Hi all you Neuroscience bloggers out there. I -- and many of the other neuroscience-related bloggers on this site -- sense a strong need for a neuroscience carnival -- a way to regularly collect all of our valuable posts in...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:07 AM • 3 Comments •
A 28-year-old woman has been cited for lewdness for exposing herself inside a store. The woman was riding a motorized cart inside Lin's Market Place on Thursday with her pants around her ankles and not wearing underwear. Customers didn't notice...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:00 AM • 0 Comments •
Why do people run for office? Is it because -- as I would guess -- of some psychological trauma they endured as children? Or do they possess a gene variant common in the Kennedy's? A study in the American Political...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:40 AM • 0 Comments •
Dr. Robert Singer and colleagues at Albert Einstein have observed transcription in single eukaryotic cells -- that's right single cells. I will divide how into two groups for the initiated and the uninitiated so you can both see how cool...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:25 AM • 1 Comments •
June 10, 2006
CNN reports on a survey of the increasing number of people getting tats: The American University employee is among about 36 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 with at least one tattoo, according to a survey. The study, scheduled...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:50 PM • 12 Comments •
A sheriff's deputy who is accused of going topless at a campground has been fired and charged with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. Dawn Rene Roberson, 38, of Royal, was fired Wednesday after she turned herself in on the misdemeanor...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:39 PM • 0 Comments •
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? I guess if I had to go back and do it all again, I would...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:15 PM • 0 Comments •