Now on ScienceBlogs: Oxytocin: Starting with the basics
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.
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
Publishing in Science, Gormley et al. compared the benefits of Oklahoma's TPS pre-K program to Head Start. Conclusion: preschool matters in cognitive development. Early childhood education programs in the United States face enormous challenges. The overwhelming majority of Head Start...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 10:55 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 5:36 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Economics
Nicholas Wade reports in the NYTimes about a UCD professor, Gregory Clark, and his theory of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is that high fertility rates in the upper classes caused them to steadily supplant lower classes. They brought productive...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 10:18 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
The NYTimes ran an excerpt of a book called Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss -- and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata. Having read the excerpt -- I haven't read the whole book --...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:43 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
I just thought this paper was kind of cool. It reviews the evidence from twin studies that shows that certain regions of the brain show very high levels of genetic heritability. Heritability, as I discussed in an earlier post, is...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:36 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Eating Disorders
Recently this model, Gisele Bundchen, speculated that the fashion industry is not to blame for anorexia. Rather parents are to blame: Gisele Bundchen has entered Brazil's growing debate over anorexia, saying families are to blame _ not the fashion industry....
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:18 AM • 3 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 NotoriousLTP at 10:43 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Autism
I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 9:38 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
Rebecca Saxe of MIT reviews Encounters with Wild Children by Adriana Benzaquen about historical confrontations with so-called wild children -- children raised outside of society without supervision or what the author calls the forbidden experiment. The occurence of wild children...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:35 AM • 2 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 NotoriousLTP at 1:31 PM • 1 Comments •
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
