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.
August 31, 2006
Category: Pop culture
I don't even want to know how he got it: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have yet to show their baby daughter off in public, but eager fans were given an unusual preview with the chance to see a bronze...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:35 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Aging and Longevity
I have posted before about how I think that the role of genetics, at least in popular culture, has been overemphasized. Rather, the really interesting and important parts of genetics are the ways in which your genes interact with environmental...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:31 PM • 1 Comments •
August 30, 2006
Kyra, Kyra, Kyra... Note to self: turn off mic in the john. Kyra Phillips, anchor of CNN's "Live From...," unwittingly upstaged President Bush's speech in New Orleans with on-the-air analysis of her husband and the marriage of her brother --...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:24 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
The Synapse #6 is being hosted on The Mouse Trap on Sunday, September 3rd. Submission guidelines here....
Posted by Jake Young at 3:17 PM • •
Those of you who read an earlier post here noted that I was somewhat skeptical of the technical aspects of the so-called ethical stem cells. I felt that there were several technical hurdles that had to be surmounted before this...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:14 PM • 3 Comments •
August 29, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
The Neurophilosopher has a fabulous long post on the discovery of the neuron as the fundamental unit of the nervous system. I would note when you get to the part about Ramon y Cajal that his picture of the neurons...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:38 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Science politics
There is an excellent discussion on Prometheus about whether it is OK to distort the means of science to justify certain ends. Money quote: This is of course an issue much broader than climate change, and at its core is...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:50 AM • 0 Comments •
August 28, 2006
Category: Biology
Wouldn't we all like to know how to control hairiness? Women complain that they have too much, and spend half their lives eradicating the little bastards. Men have too little on the tops of their heads, and, let us say,...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:59 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Carnivals
Encephalon #5 is up at Developing Intelligence....
Posted by Jake Young at 2:25 PM • •
You be the judge? Meanwhile, Cruise has been busier pushing Scientology than anyone knew. According to a just-declassified State Department schedule, Cruise visited then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on June 13, 2003, just an hour after Armitage had met...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:13 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Astronomy
So Pluto is no longer a planet (totally destroying everything I learned in elementary school), and I get the feeling the little guy is bummed out about it. I have a list of suggestions of things Pluto can do to...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:45 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Environment
First, I would note that I think Jared Diamond is a fabulous scientist, and a brilliant man. His work in Guns, Germs and Steel was genius, and well qualifies him in my book as someone we should all listen to....
Posted by Jake Young at 12:10 AM • 7 Comments •
August 27, 2006
Category: Science policy
This is completely unacceptable: The constant calls, the people frightening his children, and the demonstrations in front of his home apparently became a little too much. Dario Ringach, an associate neurobiology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles,...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:32 PM • 19 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
I have talked before about evidence that there is no new neurogenesis in the adult cortex, but that paper used stereological techniques. A new paper in PNAS shows a more direct method to demonstrate that there are no newly created...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:24 PM • 1 Comments •
August 23, 2006
Category: Embryonic Stem Cells
The press is all in a tizzy about so-called ethical stem cells, but this still indicates a really limited understanding of how embryonic stem (ES) cells work. (Frankly, if I had a dollar for every time I read bad reporting...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:34 PM • 8 Comments •
I don't really know why, but for some reason this Flickr page makes me want to buy an "I [Brain] Cognitive Science" T-shirt. Brainy women are hot. Hat-tip: Mind Hacks....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:15 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Aminals
Did you know that ants snap their mandibles together so fast that they can throw themselves in the air? Check out this (click on the video link to watch it): When trap-jaw ants need to get out quick, they use...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:09 PM • 0 Comments •
August 22, 2006
OmniBrain has a funny post on the secret of antigravity. The Neurophilosopher has a interesting post on how neuropathic pain could be treated with menthol, which activates cold receptors. The American Scientist Online publishes an interview with Marc Hauser on...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:15 PM • •
Category: Depression
Before, I talk about a mouse model that is resistant to depression, I think I had better talk about mouse models of depression so that everyone is on the same page. If you ask a nonscientist whether they think there...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:58 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Physics
Right: An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy. The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:37 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Physics
Dark matter definitely exists: New observations of a great big cosmic collision provide the best evidence yet that invisible and mysterious dark matter really does exist. The collision, between two huge clusters of galaxies, is the "most energetic cosmic event,...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:44 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
BMI or Body Mass Index is a measure of obesity that is used to approximate the health problems associated with being overweight. It is really easy to calculate. The formula for it is weight in kilograms divided by height in...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:59 AM • 8 Comments •
August 21, 2006
Category: Schizophrenia
OK, so I am not actually on this paper, but my boss is. It is also what I am doing my thesis on, so I thought I might mention it. The article is entitled "Convergent evidence that oligodendrocyte lineage transcription...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:51 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
Babies smarter than average high school student: In a discovery that could shed light on the development of the human brain, University of Oregon researchers determined that infants as young as six months old can recognize simple arithmetic errors. The...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:02 AM • 1 Comments •
I run down the Hudson a lot, and I am utterly amazed by people who fish there. It just seems like a unpleasant place to fish. But I had no idea that people were actually eating what they caught: For...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Technology
The Clocky Alarm Clock is an alarm clock designed to flee the scene when it wakes you up so that you have to go search for it to turn it off: Clocky (patent pending) is an alarm clock that runs...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:31 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
Synapse #5 is up at Retrospectacle. The next Synapse is going to be hosted at The Mouse Trap on September 3rd. Submission info here....
Posted by Jake Young at 1:19 AM • •
August 20, 2006
Category: Public Health
I found this article interesting, if for no other reason than people seem to be misunderstanding what it says and what it does not say. The article by Leigh and Jencks for the Kennedy School of Government is entitled "Inequality...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:56 PM • 7 Comments •
August 18, 2006
Quotes of the Day from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: "I know that astrology isn't a science,' said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what's that strange thing you...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:02 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Academic Bias
Is Arabic language instruction biased? Frank Salameh, writing in RCP, says yes (but not in the way that you would think):...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:00 AM • 0 Comments •
Interesting reading for today: The Neurocritic has a very good article on cognitive effects of socio-economic status. There are three important points: 1) the effects are not genetic, 2) there are a variety of different cognitive consequences, and 3) the...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:10 AM • •
Category: Culture War
Lawrence Krauss has this essay in the NYT where he argues against irrational exuberance about the recent school board elections in Kansas and the ouster of some Creationist school board members. Money quote: I have recently been criticized by some...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:24 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
LTP activated genes are clustered on chromosomes -- or so says some work by Park et al in JBC. LTP -- or long-term potentiation -- is a process by which synaptic strength -- the ability of one neuron to talk...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Regeneration
This is rather clever. Houle et al at Case Western show in the Journal of Neuroscience that you can use a bacterial enzyme called chondroitinase to degrade scars in spinal cord lesions and enable regeneration of axons. Just for background,...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:45 AM • 3 Comments •
August 17, 2006
I haven't been posting much because I am defending my Quals today. 81 slides...I am so the Power Point God. UPDATE: Triumph! I have passed. One more hurdle between me and occupational recognition overcome. And, yes, 81 slides was a...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:45 AM • 3 Comments •
August 16, 2006
How fantastic is this: A 25-million-year-old whale fossil from southeastern Australia has revealed a bizarre early type of 'baleen' whale. The creature was an ancient cousin of our modern blue whales and humpbacks, but it was hardly a gentle giant...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:51 AM • 0 Comments •
August 14, 2006
Category: Carnivals
Encephalon #4 is up at the Neurocritic....
Posted by Jake Young at 2:36 PM • •
Every time I think the human species has fully exploited all the ways one species can suck donkey balls -- found just every reason for all the other species be like "Yeah, we're not with them." -- we find newer,...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:45 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Astronomy
Scientists meet in Prague to discuss whether Pluto is a planet: Nearly 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries gathered in Prague Monday to come up with a universal definition of what qualifies as a planet and possibly decide whether Pluto should...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 PM • 1 Comments •
August 11, 2006
Category: Gender
Keeping to my week long theme of gender differences in cognition (here and here), here is an article by Diane Halpern in eSkeptic. It not only summarizes a lot of what is known about gender differences (even though it is...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:24 AM • 0 Comments •
August 10, 2006
Category: Terrorism
Watching the news coverage today, I found myself wondering what type of explosive the terrorists were trying to use on the UK planes. I did a web search, and many news services are speculating that the chemical in question could...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:01 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Poems
...it is one of my favorites. Snow The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:57 PM • 0 Comments •
Hi all, Blogging is going to be sporadic til Monday. I am in transit to see the Fam until then. (Don't even get me started on the pooch screw that was security at JFK this morning. Have you ever seen...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:51 PM • 0 Comments •
August 9, 2006
Category: Video Games
Apparently the sexual drive is insufficient at motivating many people to leave their apartments: Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:59 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Astronomy
Why do we lose all the good ones? Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91. The University of Iowa,...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:54 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Gender
Earlier this week I argued that the gender differences in cognition, while real, are not substantial enough to explain gender disparities in science. We talked about the work of Janet Hyde; it shows that -- contrary to the popular conception...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:50 AM • 9 Comments •
August 8, 2006
Category: Aminals
That's a lot of Panda: A giant panda in China has given birth to the heaviest cub born in captivity after the longest period in labor and elsewhere twin pandas each gave birth to twins, Xinhua news agency reported. Six-year-old...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:24 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Astronomy
It's all the lying that really gets me: The universe could be 2 billion years older than thought, according to a new report by an international team of astronomers. The scientists have found that a nearby galaxy is 15% farther...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:04 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Technology
Look, an Israeli inventor has patented the McDonald's playland as a way to escape fires: A specialised emergency truck would carry an extendible boom that could be raised to a window in a burning building. Jaws at the top of...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:44 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Aminals
There is a manatee in the Hudson; which is interesting because I had always associated the Hudson with industrial waste, bad smells, the periodic dead person, and kayakers who seem to have no problem floating amongst those things: Over the...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:34 PM • 0 Comments •
August 7, 2006
Category: Law
Yikes. You just can't win with embryos: Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice,...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:15 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Evolution
The traditional Darwinian view of evolution holds that evolution occurs through the selection of the most successful members of a group. Each member of the group is stable over its lifetime. This view was later modified to include the idea...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:49 PM • 3 Comments •
Bedbugs say "I'm back baby!": After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton could not sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of insecticide with him in bed. "We were afraid to even...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:31 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
Wasn't here to mention it yesterday, but the Synapse #4 is available at Neurotopia. The next Synapse is on August 20th at Retrospectacle. Submission guidelines here....
Posted by Jake Young at 1:25 PM • •
Category: Gender
I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition? OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:14 PM • 5 Comments •
August 4, 2006
Sorry folks. Heading to a wedding for the weekend. Blogging light to nonexistent til Monday morning. Have a good weekend!...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:31 AM • •
August 3, 2006
Category: Neurodegenerative disease
Neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, were for many years regarded as exclusively diseases of molecular crud. You would look at brains of patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and notice that there were all these aggregates of protein crud forming in...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:22 PM • 0 Comments •
The Synapse #4 is being hosted by Neurotopia on Sunday. He asks that you get your submissions in by midnight on Saturday. Information for submitters is available here....
Posted by Jake Young at 1:17 PM • •
Category: Medicine
It is like sweat and balls hot out, so I have a little personal story -- or rather my Dad's personal story -- to tell about heat waves. My Dad is an Emergency Room doctor, and he has been working...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:02 PM • 0 Comments •
August 2, 2006
Some students at UCSD have too much time on their hands: A group of grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are in the process of creating what one of the students calls the "most over-designed soda...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:22 AM • 0 Comments •
The biggest object in the Universe is glimpsed, and everyone is surprised: An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say....
Posted by Jake Young at 1:01 AM • 4 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
August 1, 2006
Category: Sleep
Muahaha. It has now been proven that men should not sleep over: If you have ever thought you were stupid to sleep with someone, consider this. Sharing your bed could actually make you stupid if you are a man -...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:28 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Sports Doping
As some of you may have noticed, I have been keeping up with the science of Floyd Landis's failed drug test in a rather long post here. In the post, I mentioned that there is another test besides the Testosterone...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:50 PM • 21 Comments •
Category: Carnivals
I have been falling down on the job on my carnivals updating. Encephalon #3 is up at Thinking Meat. Grand Rounds is up at Inside Surgery....
Posted by Jake Young at 4:47 PM • •
You've taken a Myers-Briggs personality inventory before right? They are usually strings of yes-or-no questions that give you a result like INTJ or ENTP. These kinds of tests populate the internet, and for what they are worth they are fun...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:30 PM • 1 Comments •
This is huge. Jackson et al. have identified that the adult stem cell in the human brain for both neurons and oligodendrocytes are the PDGFR-alpha expressing cells and that PDGF-AA causes proliferation of these cells and a shift towards the...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:46 AM • 1 Comments •