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.
December 29, 2006
Category: Cloning
The FDA -- after years of twiddling their thumbs because of the irrational fears of "consumer" groups -- has finally approved cloned food for human consumption: After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:23 AM • 11 Comments •
December 28, 2006
Category: Politics
Wired Magazine has the Foot-in-Mouth Awards for 2006. My personal favorite: "They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:47 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
The Economist has an article that wonders whether new knowledge into neuroscience and more particularly social pathologies will erode our belief in free will. I roll my eyes every time I read an article like this one, mostly because they...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:43 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Poems
Poem of the Week is a bit late because of the holiday, but I think it is worth it. The World Is a Beautiful Place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:51 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Law
A 17-year-old man under suspicion for attempted murder is refusing to have a 9-mm bullet removed from his forehead. Prosecutors claim that the bullet, which is lodged just under the skin, could prove that the man was involved in a...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 8:10 AM • 0 Comments •
December 21, 2006
Category: Blogging
If you hadn't heard yet, Time's Person of the Year is...well...You. The thrust of their argument is that New Media is user-generated media, and sites like blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are changing the way that we create and distribute information....
Posted by Jake Young at 9:42 AM • 5 Comments •
December 20, 2006
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
This is never going to end: A lawmaker introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make Massachusetts the first U.S. state to ban artificial trans fats from restaurants, closely following New York City's ban of the artery-clogging oils. "We have...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:11 AM • 1 Comments •
There is some good stuff on Scienceblogs right now: Evolgen has an article about how the oft quoted 1% genetic difference between chimps and humans may hide much larger differences due to copy number and expression differences. Jonah Lehrer reports...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:45 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Physics
German scientists have created a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for far red light: The trick is to assemble an array of electronic components that resonate with the electric and magnetic fields of the light waves as they pass...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:26 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Reproduction, Birth Control, and Abortion Politics
Americans are not waiting until marriage to have sex: More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s,...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:18 AM • 4 Comments •
December 19, 2006
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
I wrote before about how I think the NY trans-fat ban is scientifically supportable but not particularly the government's business. Here is interesting speculation in Free Exchange: Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn't make sense....
Posted by Jake Young at 10:45 AM • 3 Comments •
They must have interesting Christmas parties: A tiny, six-legged critter that suspends all biological activity when the going gets tough may hold answers to a better way to cryopreserve human eggs, researchers say. Tardigrades, also called water bears, can survive...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:37 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Environment
This has to be one of the funnier press releases I have ever read, but it is also about something of environmental importance. Researchers in Australia are experimenting with marine life in coral reefs to see how to prevent weeds...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:25 AM • 1 Comments •
December 18, 2006
Category: Drugs
Yet again, a drug company is playing damage control for failing to come clean about a drug's side effects. It makes me so mad when companies do stuff like this because it is such a preventable problem. In this case,...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:11 AM • 3 Comments •
December 17, 2006
Category: Poems
In honor of the holidays, here is a poem by Robert Frost. My English teacher in high school used to have this theory that this poem is actually about Santa Claus. Look closely and you will catch the references. Stopping...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:52 AM • 0 Comments •
December 16, 2006
Check out the caricature of all the ScienceBloggers in the new issue of Seed. I would be the one in the top right with the tie -- the only with a tie. That will teach me to send them a...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:53 PM • 1 Comments •
December 15, 2006
Category: Medicine
On Wednesday evening, Senator Tim Johnson (D) -- the junior Senator from South Dakota -- suffered what appeared to be a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with intracerebral hemorrhaging as the result...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:21 AM • 4 Comments •
December 14, 2006
Category: Synapses
There has always been a bit of a debate as to whether the vesicles in the presynaptic nerve terminal that contain transmitter are just near the presynaptic membrane or are in fact hemifused with it. At the presynapse, vesicles containing...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:33 AM • 7 Comments •
December 13, 2006
Category: Women's Health
This is actually not a silly question. Birth control pills on the market such as Seasonale allow women to postpone having their period for three months and to only have four periods total per year. The way these oral contraceptives...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:52 AM • 10 Comments •
December 11, 2006
Category: Libertarian politics
Everyone always emphasizes the evangelical Right as running the Republican Party, but David Kirby and David Boaz -- writing in TCS -- argue that Republicans ignore the libertarian vote at their peril: In the past, our research shows, most libertarians...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:19 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Poems
You know the story of Persephone right. Here is a clever poem about it by Louise Gluck. A Myth of Devotion by Louise Gluck When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:44 AM • 1 Comments •
Here is what I am reading: In honor of the 100th anniversary of the FDA, the Scientist has a look at its long-term prospects in light of recent scandals. Best Buy has decided to go to totally flexible scheduling. I...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:38 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
The Synapse #13 is capably hosted at Neurocontrarian. Thanks Nick. I have a Synapse-related announcement. The Neurophilosopher, host of the other neuroscience carnival Encephalon, and I have noticed a decline in the number of posts coming into the carnivals. We...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:28 AM • 0 Comments •
December 10, 2006
Category: Consumer Theory
The Economist has a thought-provoking article out on the implications of "green" food. The newspaper takes on the recent trendiness of organic, fair trade, and locally-produced food, arguing that these practices may perpetuate or even worsen the global status quo...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 10:49 AM • 10 Comments •
December 9, 2006
Category: Music
You know the scene from Old School where they wedding band is playing. The band from the movie is called The Dan Band, and I saw them last night. They were awesome, and in honor of that I have a...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:41 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival)
The last Synapse of the year is tomorrow, so remember to submit. It is being hosted at Neurocontrarian. Submission details here....
Posted by Jake Young at 10:33 AM • 0 Comments •
December 8, 2006
Category: Haha, a funny
Falling under the broad category of "papers I never thought I'd see written" comes this article by Hammad Siddiqi about the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down and whether or not it represents a Nash Equilibrium. He models...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 7:15 AM • 5 Comments •
December 7, 2006
Category: Ethics
Your gut reaction is probably that the question is irrelevant; what parent would choose for their child to have a genetic disease. That was my reaction. Apparently, however, some parents with genetic diseases that make them lead relatively normal lives...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:04 AM • 4 Comments •
December 6, 2006
Category: Haha, a funny
CNN's headline reads Flatulence on plane sparks emergency landing: It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane. An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:00 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Game Theory
A favorite professor of mine once told me that it's always impressive to start with an example from the 18th century. So in deference to him and with a nod to Jonah Lehrer's forthcoming book, I'd like to mention Goethe's...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 3:27 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
Yesterday, the NY Board of Health voted to ban trans fats -- after a phase-out period -- in restaurants in the city: New York City's board of health on Tuesday voted to phase out most artificial transfats from restaurants, forcing...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:37 PM • 5 Comments •
December 5, 2006
Category: Oligodendrocytes
Scienceblogs welcomes OmniBrain, a neuroscience blog that I am quite fond of. I am particularly fond of this cartoon, which has to be the funniest one ever made about oligodendrocytes. Granted that is a small group, but still...a very good...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:45 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Movies
In order to raise money for schools in India, Christie's auctioned one of the black dresses that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's: The iconic black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" sold...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:59 PM • 0 Comments •
Encephalon #12 is up at AlphaPsy. The Neurophilosopher has a cool article on Phineas Gage -- a patient that is often used as an example in neuroscience classes because he had a railroad spike tamping iron go through his head...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:18 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Economics
The Stern Report -- a report by Sir Nicholas Stern, head of Britain's economic advisory panel -- that came out last month urged action on climate change in terms of future economic loss. I reported on people like Richard Tol...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:27 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Race
In light of the incidents with Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, Malcolm Gladwell posits some criterion by which we could judge the severity of racism: 1. Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:05 AM • 3 Comments •
December 4, 2006
So I have a spectacular announcement. Very soon this blog will be taking on a co-blogger, the lovely and wonderful Kara Contreary. Kara Contreary is currently a Economics PhD student at the London School of Economics. I am excited that...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:52 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Parkinson's
Totally effective, side-effect free treatment of Parkinson's continues to elude physicians, but a study by Deuschl et al in the NEJM shows that we are definitely making progress. Deuschl et al performed a randomized study that assigned patients into one...
Posted by Jake Young at 8:24 PM • 3 Comments •
December 3, 2006
Funny: 2) If you have children, you will save yourself and everyone else a lot of time if you laminate some picture(s) of your offspring and staple them to your forehead. 3) That person you had a crush on in...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:51 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Poems
To His Coy Mistress By Andrew Marvell Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day. Thou by the Indian...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:17 AM • 2 Comments •
December 1, 2006
Category: Neurodegenerative disease
Trushina et al from the Mayo Clinic have made a big advance in understanding the etiology of Huntington's disease. Huntington's disease is a progressive and ultimately fatal disease that is characterized by uncontrollable limb movements and progressive dementia and psychosis....
Posted by Jake Young at 10:53 AM • 2 Comments •
