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 29, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of different ways. Selecting which one is appropriate is...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:57 PM • 0 Comments •
August 27, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
I have been meaning to update about this, but Presh at Mind Your Decisions blog discusses another example of Game Theory in the movie the Dark Knight. He talks about the first scene where the robbers are let us say...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:38 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Aging and Longevity
There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi. Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:30 PM • 3 Comments •
August 25, 2008
Category: Alcohol
I talked last week about the pros and cons of lowering the drinking age back to 18. One of the cons that I had assumed was that lowering the drinking age would increase the number of traffic fatalities in the...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:40 PM • 17 Comments •
August 20, 2008
Category: Words and Writing
This is funny. Andrew Sullivan has a discussion going on whether the use of semicolons is (ahem) gay. It references an article in the Boston Globe documenting a variety of semicolon-haters. But here is the best comment from Bryan Appleyard:...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:27 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
The fit-fat fight -- whether someone can be obese but still healthy -- has reignited (if it ever really stopped) with an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine that was reported in the NYTimes. Wildman et al. used data...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:46 PM • 8 Comments •
August 19, 2008
Category: Alcohol
I have talked a little before about alternative strategies to lowering college alcohol abuse -- alternative meaning as opposed to outright bans like the 21 drinking age. Now a set of college presidents are circulating something called the Amethyst Initiative...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:42 PM • 34 Comments •
August 18, 2008
Category: Medicine
The University of Georgia has started doing health screens to check their football players for possible arrhythmias or heart abnormalities: Makiri Pugh is not your typical college freshman. At age 18, he knows more than most young adults about the...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:54 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Psychology
There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:14 AM • 1 Comments •
August 14, 2008
Category: Medicine
I was distressed to hear that Bernie Mac died last Saturday of pneumonia at the age of 50. I always thought he was pretty funny, and I was a big fan of the Ocean's Eleven movies where he played a...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:57 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Haha, a funny
One of my students in LSE's summer school microeconomics class sent me this video. At least I know something's sinking in when I talk about things happening on the margin......
Posted by Kara Contreary at 7:03 AM • 3 Comments •
August 12, 2008
Category: Technology
Engineers at Penn State have developed a new method of running a refrigerator that doesn't require a compressor. Rather, it changes the level of organization in a solid to change the temperature. This change in entropy results in heat-transfer. Conventional...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:23 AM • 4 Comments •
August 11, 2008
Category: Funding
Michael S. Teitelbaum has an editorial in Science about scientific funding that echoes a point that I have been making for a while: the issue with scientific funding is as much about volatility (bigs ups and downs) as it is...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:37 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Sports Doping
A Spanish cyclist, Maria Isabel Moreno, became the first person at the Beijing Olympics to test positive for a banned substance. It's cycling, so no shocker that the banned substance was Epo. No word on whether it is the new...
Posted by Jake Young at 6:01 PM • 1 Comments •
August 7, 2008
Category: Reproduction, Birth Control, and Abortion Politics
Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:28 AM • 3 Comments •
August 5, 2008
Category: Carnivals
It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry. At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:00 AM • 11 Comments •
August 1, 2008
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants: The significance of the New York City...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:21 PM • 7 Comments •
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