Brain and Behavior
pharyngula | January 24, 2010I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie 'medicine'. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.
Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.
He is outraged at being…
oracknows | January 23, 2010Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it!
My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it:
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…
oracknows | January 22, 2010One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the "autism biomedical" movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan, examined Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol for autism (which I had written about three years ago under the title Why not just castrate them?), and the second shone a light under the rock…
cortex | January 14, 2010There's a new and very timely paper out this week that looks at the cortical mechanics of charitable giving. While it's been known for a few years that giving away money activates the dopamine reward pathway - that's why doing good feels good - this latest paper attempted to investigate the philanthropic system in detail. In a world full of need, how do we choose where to give?
The larger goal of the scientists was to better understand a core feature of the human brain, which is the ability to assign value to alternatives. How do we know that X is better than Y? How does the cacophony of…
thusspakezuska | January 14, 2010I've been reading a lot of Casaubon's Book lately. I usually come away from it feeling like I ought to convince Mr. Z to move back to southwestern PA with me so the two of us can become gentleman farmers and live sustainably after peak oil - maybe we can live out our days in mom's house and garden in the backyard, as my grandfather used to, or buy some nice cheap land out in the countryside in Greene County, and I'll raise chickens, and maybe we'll even have goats, or...
I think FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!!!!! we are all so fucking SCREWED!!!!!!!!! Even those crazy ass folks who are moving out…
clock | January 12, 2010The time has come....the moment many of you have been waiting for, for months!
The most amazing 2009 guest editor Scicurious and I are ready to announce the 50 posts that have made it through a grueling judging process to emerge as winners to be included in the Open Laboratory 2009, the anthology of the best writing on science blogs of the past year.
Out of 760 posts, all of amazing quality (we could have collected something like ten anthologies, all good), the survivors of all the rounds, the posts that will actually get printed on physical, dead-tree paper, are:
Breastatistics, by Dr.…
razib | January 12, 2010Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals:
Two sites of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Iberia, dated to as early as approximately 50,000 years ago, yielded perforated and pigment-stained marine shells. At Cueva de los Aviones, three umbo-perforated valves of Acanthocardia and Glycymeris were found alongside lumps of yellow and red colorants, and residues preserved inside a Spondylus shell consist of a red lepidocrocite base mixed with ground, dark red-to-black fragments of hematite and pyrite. A perforated Pecten shell, painted on its external…
sb admin | January 12, 2010
A number of sessions at the Conference are looking at sociological aspects of the Web and science. I have already pointed, in quite a lot of detail, to the session on civility and politeness, as well as several other sessions that touch on the topics of language and trust. Let's look at several others that approach the social aspects of science online (and offline) from different angles:
Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM - D.N.Lee and Anne Jefferson
Description: We will introduce programs that attract wider audiences to science, math, and engineering at…
cortex | January 11, 2010The paperback of How We Decide is now shipping from your favorite online retailers and should be in local bookstores. To celebrate the occasion, I thought I'd repost an interview I conducted with myself when the hardcover was published last year. If you'd like more, there's also this interview on Fresh Air, and this interview on the Colbert Report.
Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?
A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying to choose between the apple-cinnamon and…
clock | January 10, 2010
A number of sessions at the Conference are looking at sociological aspects of the Web and science. I have already pointed, in quite a lot of detail, to the session on civility and politeness, as well as several other sessions that touch on the topics of language and trust. Let's look at several others that approach the social aspects of science online (and offline) from different angles:
Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM - D.N.Lee and Anne Jefferson
Description: We will introduce programs that attract wider audiences to science, math, and engineering at…
gregladen | January 9, 2010As previously noted, J. Philippe Rushton has made the argument that the brain size of "Blacks" is about 1267 cc's, and for whites it is about 1347 CC's. It has also been noted that Rushton claims that the average IQ of Blacks is 85 and he average IQ of whites is 100. But does Rushton say that there is a link between the two?
Yes, explicitly so. In his widely distributed editions of Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), Rushton makes the claim that the African IQ is 70, and that the reason that "Black" American IQ is 80 is because of the…
gregladen | January 7, 2010Philipe Rushton, in his book Race, Evolution and Behavior, reports average brain size for the three races. The following is the graph from Rusthton's book:
I put this post here for reference in a couple of conversations. The data are bogus and any conclusions that might be drawn from it are equally bogus.
developingintelligence | January 7, 2010A fascinating paper from Gradinaru et al describes a genetically engineered mouse model of Parkinson's disease that expresses a photoreceptor in the neurons of a particular part of the brain - the subthalamic nucleus (STN). This area is widely thought to be the central target of the immensely therapeutic technique for Parkinson's known as deep brain stimulation. With this photoreceptor in place, the authors could direct laser light to that area of the brain and direactly affect neural activity - in particular, whether the behavioral symptoms of Parkinson's would disappear following…
terrasig | January 5, 2010
On October 8, 2009, paramedics responded to a 911 call at a mystical retreat being held at Angel Valley Spiritual Retreat Center in West Sedona, Arizona, a stunningly beautiful area known widely as a mecca for New Age enthusiasts. Eyewitness accounts compiled in this October 21 New York Times article describes what medics encountered upon arriving at a 415-square-foot "sweat lodge" on the center's grounds:
Midway through a two-hour sweat lodge ceremony intended to be a rebirthing experience, participants say, some people began to fall desperately ill from the heat, even as their leader,…
oracknows | January 3, 2010In general, one of the biggest differences between those defending science-based medicine and those defending pseudoscience, quackery, and anti-science is that science inculcates in its adherents a culture of free and open debate. In marked contrast, those advocating pseudoscience tend to cultivate cultures of the echo chamber. Examples abound and include discussion forums devoted to "alternative" medicine like CureZone, where never is heard a discouraging word--because anyone expressing too much skepticism about the prevailing view on such forums invariably finds himself first shunned and…
clock | January 1, 2010That is, among 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Distinct Functions of Period2 and Period3 in the Mouse Circadian System Revealed by In Vitro Analysis:
The mammalian circadian system, which is composed of a master pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic…
gregladen | January 1, 2010Well, yes. But the question raises some interesting points.
Does a person endorse near slavery, horrific working conditions, the purchase of moral "indulgences" by the privileged, and the manipulation of the population with religious woo-woo when appreciating the architecture of a medieval European cathedral? Because that bad stuff is what happened to make that cathedral exist. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame in Paris you endorse all that is connected to the creation of these edifices. You might as well have personally carried out the inquisition! Especially if you pay to…
revere | December 30, 2009The caves in the Dordogne department in southwest France are most famous for paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux (the Dordogne is also famous for the being the home of microdot, whose blog The Brain Police is one of my daily reads). Now it has yet another claim to fame: the discovery of the first bat outside of the northeastern United States with White Nose Syndrome (WNS) Fungus (Geomyces destructans):
Biologists are struggling to understand a recent emerging infectious disease, white-nose syndrome (WNS), which potentially threatens >20% of all mammalian diversity (bats). WNS is a deadly…
cortex | December 28, 2009Apologies for the light blogging: I'm enjoying a little vacation from my computer. But here is a recent little article about willpower in the WSJ:
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.
Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the…
grrlscientist | December 27, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…