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purepedantry | August 6, 2007It's mad, I tell you, madddd! Mad scientists these days. Always going around saying, "Hey, you know how that animal could be better? If it had another head. Muahahaha!"
Anyway, the (possibly mad) scientists Wolfgang Jakob and Bernd Schierwater wanted to know more about the genes that determine the body plan of multicellular organisms. In mammals, these genes are called Hox genes, and in organisms that have circular symmetry like jellyfish they are called Cnox genes. We know that these genes broadly pattern the body plan of multicellular organisms because in a variety of settings if you…
purepedantry | June 5, 2007A great article in the NYTimes about the debate over a sensory integration disorder:
The problem, these therapists say, is in the brain, which is not properly integrating the onslaught of information coming through the senses, often causing anxiety, tantrums and problems in the classroom. Such difficulties, while common in children with developmental disorders like autism, also occur on their own in many otherwise healthy youngsters, they say.
No one has a standard diagnostic test for these sensory integration problems, nor any idea of what might be happening in the brain. Indeed, a diagnosis…
purepedantry | May 16, 2007No, this is not like voodoo prediction where they will know what will happen 12 years hence.
All of us, however, are capable in degrees of predicting what is going to happen over short time scales. This predicition falls into two general categories. First, we can predict the behavior of inaminate objects such as knowing how a ball will flight when we hit it just-so with a bat. That implies that we understand how physics work on some inituitive level.
Second, we can understand how animate objects such as people behave. For example, if I see someone removing objects from a container…