neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
October 6, 2007
As requested by Jenna, I've transcribed the lyrics to Pinky and the Brain's neuroanatomy song.
To my knowledge, the song is anatomically correct, although I think several terms, such as "neural node" and "limbic lobe", are now obselete. There's also one word that I can't quite make out.
October 6, 2007
The Guardian reports that Craig Venter has created a synthetic chromosome:
[We] can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved…
October 6, 2007
Of the hundreds of photographs I've taken of my son, this is one of my favourites. It was taken when he was about 8 months old.
October 5, 2007
Philosophers Andrew Brook and Pete Mandik provide an uncorrected proof of their paper, The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, which is to be published in a forthcoming special issue of Analyse & Kritic.
The paper gives an overview of how philosophy has increasingly been applied to…
October 5, 2007
The U.S. military has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for its alleged plans to develop the "gay bomb".
The device was proposed in 1994 by researchers from the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The plans for its development are contained in a 1994 document entitled Harassing,…
October 5, 2007
Below is the PowerPoint I presented in the journal club this morning. It's a summary of a recent paper about laterality in the nematode worm:
Poole, R. J. & Hobert, O. (2006). Early embryonic programming of neuronal left/right asymmetry in C. elegans. Curr. Biol. 16: 2279-2292. [PDF]
I…
October 5, 2007
New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) have remarkable tool-using abilities that are at least as sophisticated as those of chimpanzees, if not more so. To date, however, such behaviours have only been observed in contrived experimental conditions.
Using newly-developed miniuatrized animal-…
October 4, 2007
Most organisms are bilaterally symmetrical - that is, along the longitudinal axis, each half of the body is a mirror image of the other. There are, of course, deviations from this basic body plan, the most obvious being large internal organs such as the heart and liver, which, in mammals, are…
October 4, 2007
Now showing on my YouTube channel:
The remarkable cognitive skills and tool-making abilities of crows (see this post)
A documentary about Clive Wearing, who has the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.
The alien jaws of the moray eel (explained here)
Crop-raiding chimps (explained here…
October 3, 2007
The Milken Institute, an independent economics think tank, has just released a large study of the burden of chronic disease on the U.S. economy.
The report provides details on the financial impact of 7 diseases (cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary…
October 2, 2007
A list for the top 100 medical blogs of September is at the Dutch site Medblog.nl. The ranks are determined with an algorithm that uses 8 paramenters, including number of posts and comments, Google pagerank, Technorati rank and number of incoming links.
October 2, 2007
Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on executed criminals in Bologna, from Essai theorique et experimental sur le galvanisme, published in 1804. (Image from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.)
The experiments of Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834…
October 2, 2007
A method for the preparation of rodent hippocampal slice cultures is now available at Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, a comprehensive online database of research techniques for the life sciences.
The full list of freely available protocols is here.
October 2, 2007
One of my favourite bands, Radiohead, releases a new album called In Rainbows on October 15th. The album is not being distributed by a record label, but instead will be available exclusively as a digital download from the band's website.
There's nothing particularly innovative about how the album…
October 1, 2007
A team of researchers from Yamaguchi University in Japan has submitted a patent application for an implantable brain cooling device that would be used to develop a new treatment for severe cases of epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a condition that is characterised by abnormal electrical activity in the…
October 1, 2007
I should have discussed the image that I included in yesterday's post about eugenics. Believe it or not, the scale that is illustrated in that image - with "moron" at the top and "idiot" at the bottom - was used by physicians to aid their diagnoses.
Whether one was a moron, an imbecile (of high-,…
October 1, 2007
For a limited time, the Nature Publishing Group is providing free access to recent research papers and reviews about neuroplasticity from 7 of its journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism and Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews (…
September 30, 2007
The word eugenics immediately makes one think of the racial hygiene programs of the Nazis and the experiments performed by Joseph Mengele on those held in the concentration camps, but far fewer are aware that there was a large and powerful eugenics movement in the U.S. during the first half of…
September 30, 2007
Below are a few quotes from this interview with theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, whose new book, A Many-colored Glass, is about to be published.
On science, religion and Richard Dawkins:
I think it's only a small fraction of people who think that [science and religion are at odds]. Perhaps…
September 30, 2007
According to Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the answer is yes.
September 29, 2007
The former Larsen Air Force Base Complex 1A Titan ICBM Facility is listed on eBay.
The facility comes complete with 16 underground buildings, including three 160 ft. tall missile silos, three 4-storey terminal equipment buildings, two antenna silos and a 100 ft. diameter control dome building.…
September 29, 2007
Ed Boyden, leader of the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group at MIT, has just started a blog.
I wrote about some of Boyden's work earlier this year. His is one of several groups that have used a light-sensitive bacterial protein called channelrhodopsin to develop an "optical switch" that can…
September 29, 2007
I took this photograph about three years ago, while on holiday in the Charente region of central France.
September 29, 2007
Over the past few days, there have been numerous scary news stories about a "brain-eating" amoeba that has killed six boys and young men this year (three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona, the most recent case being that of 14-year-old Aaron Evans, who died on September 17th).
The amoeba…
September 28, 2007
At Wired, filmmaker Ridley Scott discusses the forthcoming remastered final cut of Blade Runner. This classic 1982 film depicts a dystopian futuristic society based on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and was recently voted as the best science fiction film ever made by 60 top…
September 28, 2007
Today's issue of Science contains the winners of the 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the journal's website has an online exhibit that features all of the winning images.
The competition is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who created it with the editors…
September 27, 2007
This image from Google Earth shows the swastika-shaped barracks at the Coronado Naval base near San Diego.
Following objections from the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Navy has set aside $600,000 of its 2008 budget for landscaping and rooftop adjustments that will camouflage the shape of…
September 27, 2007
The new issue of Monitor on Psychology, the American Psychology Association's monthly magazine, has a special feature on the mental health of military personnel.
The feature includes articles about the military's efforts to recruit and train psychologists, and the changes that are being made,…
September 27, 2007
(Image credit: C. Franklin/ PLoS One)
In the first study of its kind, a team of Australian researchers have used satellite telemetry to show that crocodiles can navigate hundreds of kilometres to return to their home rivers after being moved.
Mark Read, of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife…
September 27, 2007
A handful of good blogs that I've found recently:
Neural Dump
Logical Science
Dave's Daily Dose of Science
Scientific Misconduct Blog