purepedantry
Posts by this author
July 18, 2006
I actually care little about Paris Hilton's antics. I find it difficult to become interested in someone's career when the origins of that career are based on a sex tape that shows that she performs oral sex poorly. There I said it. I have seen that tape, and Paris Hilton is not gifted. Not that…
July 17, 2006
Sleep is an underappreciated thing. Not only does it improve your memory, but now we find it would appear lowers your risk for obesity:
Research by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick has found that sleep deprivation is associated with an almost a two-fold increased risk of being…
July 17, 2006
I love that there is somebody even researching this, but what I love more is that it is imminently more interesting than anything I do. The next time I am at a cocktail party, I am not talking about oligodendrocytes; I am talking about this:
You're ordering dessert and know exactly what you want…
July 17, 2006
God is so tricky. New research reveals that the structure of a DNA replication molecule is similar across all three domains of life:
In two papers that will be concurrently published in the August edition of the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (now available on-line), the…
July 16, 2006
Evil Monkey from Neurotopia posts on face blindness or prosopagnosia, and how they have found a gene that results in a heritable form. They have not, to my knowledge, found a gene for why I can't remember the girl who woke up in my bed's name. He also has an article on pesticide-induced Parkinson…
July 15, 2006
If you go in for a mammogram and they see something that looks suspicious, odds are you are going to have to undergo a procedure called ductal lavage. Ductal lavage uses a fine needle to rinse the ducts of the breast with saline, and then has a pathologist look at the cells that come off to see if…
July 15, 2006
Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject:
"Make the injury," Alam says.…
July 14, 2006
So back in college, Kevin Smith came to talk to us. It has to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He came with no prepared material and spoke expositorily for about 4 hours, just telling stories. All of his stories were absolutely hilarious, and he is just a really personable guy.…
July 14, 2006
I had wanted to avoid being an activist with this blog, but I think it is important enough when it relates to a directly scientific issue to break that rule.
The Society for Neuroscience has issued a petition request via email asking its members to petition their Senators to vote YES for the…
July 14, 2006
Apparently today will be poetry day. I found this poem in a book I was reading. It is by a man named Mortimer Collins (1860):
Life and the Universe show spontaneity:
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.…
July 14, 2006
Just a reminder that I am accepting submission for the other neuroscience carnival on the web called Encephalon. It is due to be published on July 17th (Monday). If possible, please get me the submissions by Sunday night. You can submit here via Blog Carnival, or you can email me at encephalon…
July 13, 2006
As I have promised to do some sort of regular Friday movie review here goes. Incidentally, I don't know if this will be entirely regular -- sometimes I don't see movies. So we will see how it goes.
Pirates of the Caribbean passed swimmingly the low expectations test: everyone thought with good…
July 13, 2006
This week's Ask a Scienceblogger is as follows:
Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?...
In response, I hath composed the following:
An Ode to the Cuter Mammals
If I were Noah, roused from drunken slumber,
forced to choose the duos of animals
of such a sad…
July 12, 2006
The most recent issue of Nature has a paper by the Donoghue lab at Brown about their project implanting an ensemble of electrodes into the motor cortex of a paraplegic. Signals from the electrodes were decoded and used to run a computer program so the patient can literally move the cursor with…
July 12, 2006
Ronald Bailey from Reason Magazine has an article covering one of the more pernicious arguments against genetically modified foods:
Long time anti-biotech activist Jeremy Rifkin has come out in favor of a biotechnology technique. Should beleaguered biotechnologists break out the champagne and start…
July 12, 2006
Is this really necessary?
Castrati played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th century when the bel canto was the rage in Europe. Farinelli, born Carlo Broschi in 1705, was the most famous of them all, in a stage career lasting from 1720 to 1737.
Carlo Vitale of the…
July 12, 2006
Nerdcore is a new genre of music created by nerds for nerds. Feel that music underrepresents your strong feelings about your +2 Chain Mail...well now you have no need to fret. Nerdcore is what happened when people who know what a Hidden Markov Model is started rapping about it. I hadn't heard…
July 12, 2006
What is the deal with the stories showing brain lesions that end addiction? First, there was this one. Then, today in Nature there was another one:
Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may become more impulsive, others depressed. Now researchers have…
July 12, 2006
Parents can rest easy. If your child is a late-talker, it is because your kid is a late-talker, not because you didn't show them enough baby Einstein videos:
New research findings from the world's largest study predicting children's late language emergence has revealed that parents are not to…
July 11, 2006
I was listening to the Leonard Lopate Show yesterday on WNYC (my local NPR affiliate), and I heard this great interview with Sharon Weinberger, a defense reporter, about her new book Imaginary Weapons.
In the book, she details all the crazy, fringe science ideas that they come up with at the…
July 10, 2006
There has been a big debate over the last couple years about whether the adult human brain is capable of generating new neurons.
A new study in Neuroscience by Larsen et al. provides some relevant new evidence to that debate. It used rigorous stereological measurement -- a technique called the…
July 10, 2006
Misha at Mind Hacks has a great update on brain-computer interface advances.
July 10, 2006
The next steak you eat could be grown in the lab:
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle…
July 10, 2006
I haven't had time to read it all yet (it is sort of long and technical), but a new model by Grossberg and Seidman purports to explain how normal cognitive processes go wrong in autism -- a pretty tall order but it looks like they deliver. Here is a description from the press release:
A new model…
July 10, 2006
That will teach 'em:
Social contact helped the Ebola virus virtually wipe out a population of gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, French researchers reported on Monday.
A 2004 outbreak of the virus, which also kills people, killed 97 percent of gorillas who lived in groups and 77 percent…
July 10, 2006
A study in the newest PNAS seeks to quantify the efficiency and resource utilization for various types of biofuels:
The first comprehensive analysis of the full life cycles of soybean biodiesel and corn grain ethanol shows that biodiesel has much less of an impact on the environment and a much…
July 9, 2006
"Why would I ever care about heart attack screening, Jake?" This is a reasonable question so let me put it this way:
The ACS [American Cancer Society] recommends the following screening ages: 20 for breast cancer with mammography from age 40 (at least annually), 21 for cervical cancer (Pap test),…
July 9, 2006
That's not good:
A new analysis that compares two common inhalers for patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) finds that one reduces respiratory-related hospitalizations and respiratory deaths, but the other -- which is prescribed in the majority of cases -- increases…
July 9, 2006
This study from the University of Michigan used eBay to determine whether a seller's reputation helped them get higher prices:
"People with good reputations are rewarded and people with no reputations are not trusted as well as people who have established reputations," said Paul Resnick, professor…
July 9, 2006
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Yes and no.
Yes, cloning has developed the way I thought it would in terms of it continuing to develop. There was much ado in our culture about whether…