Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.
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.
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. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments I currently attend or attended in the past.
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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP at 3:30 PM • 5 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 NotoriousLTP at 6:40 PM • 19 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP 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 NotoriousLTP at 5:57 PM • 21 Comments •
Orac 02.13.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
Orac 01.26.2012
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
