Brain and Behavior
clock | November 20, 2009Friday - PLoS Genetics, Pathogens, Computational Biology and ONE published 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:
Circadian KaiC Phosphorylation: A Multi-Layer Network:
Circadian clocks are endogenous timing mechanisms that allow living organisms to coordinate their activities with…
razib | November 18, 2009
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's…
cortex | November 13, 2009Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure:
Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.
Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to…
clock | November 10, 2009Let's take a look at recent papers in PLoS ONE and other PLoS journals. 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:
Chemically-Mediated Roostmate Recognition and Roost Selection by Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats (Tadarida brasiliensis):
The Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) is an…
agelman | November 10, 2009One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused.
Curious, I looked up "Martin Voracek" on the web and found an article about body measurements from the British Medical Journal. The title of the article promised "trend analysis" and I…
I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic
ddobbs | November 10, 2009
The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website -- and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping -- about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics.
This emerging hypothesis, which draws on substantial data, much of which has gone simply unnoticed or unremarked, I call the "orchid-gene hypothesis," for lack of a better name. Some of the researchers have other offerings. It's been around for several years but is now blooming as evidence accumulates. When I came across it at a conference this…
emjohnson | November 9, 2009Reciprocity is an intrinsic feature of human beings as well as most species of ape. Chimpanzees and bonobos regularly engage in granting gifts of food and expect a return on their generosity (those who don't reciprocate are less likely to receive such gifts in the future) (de Waal and Brosnan 2006). This "tit-for-tat" basis of exchange exists in all human societies and becomes ritualized based on the cultural norms that are present. One of the most well known descriptions of reciprocity among indigenous societies is that of the Kula among the Trobriand Islanders near Papua New Guinea that…
clock | November 5, 2009There are 22 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:
Improvements of Sound Localization Abilities by the Facial Ruff of the Barn Owl (Tyto alba) as Demonstrated by Virtual Ruff Removal:
When sound arrives at the eardrum it has already been filtered by the…
jstemwedel | November 4, 2009At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that…
cortex | November 3, 2009Why are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral.
Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on the righteous path. Because they're better than us, they don't eat too much cake or cheat on their taxes…
pharyngula | November 2, 2009I am so disappointed. The little evangelical goober has a new book that promises to provide evidence of life after death — it's right in the title, Life After Death: The Evidence — but he doesn't seem to have, you know, actually provided any evidence. Newsweek has a summary of his arguments.
The "evidence," of necessity, is indirect: D'Souza doesn't claim to have communicated with anyone who has died, and he doesn't expect to. Instead, he looks to the human heart, and finds therein a universal moral code underlying acts of self-sacrifice and charity that appear to run counter to the Darwinian…
pharyngula | October 30, 2009Whoa. This was a data-rich talk, and my ability to transcribe it was over-whelmed by all the stuff Hauser was tossing out. Unfortunately, I think the talk also suffered from excess and a lack of a good overview of the material. But it was thought-provoking anyway.
One of the themes was how people resolve moral dilemmas. He began with a real world example, the story of an overweight woman in South Africa who insisted on joining a tour exploring a cave, and got stuck in the exit tunnel, trapping 22 people behind her. Do you sacrifice one to save many? One of the trapped people was a diabetic…
oracknows | October 30, 2009The little matter of finding out that the actor who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation appears to have anti-vaccine proclivities sidetracked me from something that I had actually wanted to blog about yesterday. Specifically, it's something that my blog bud Abel Pharmboy has been hitting hard over the last couple of days. It may also, sadly, because I've become a bit jaded at the nastiness that anti-vaccine groups such as Generation Rescue (i.e., "Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization"--at least days) and its erstwile founder J.B. Handley can lay down. I'm referring,…
pharyngula | October 22, 2009Karen Armstrong has once again published a pile of meaningless twaddle in defense of religion. In this mess, she takes a series of statements about god that she says need rethinking…but as always, her "rethinking" is merely a reworking of apologetics for maintaining the status quo. It's almost as if she thinks it is a new and brilliant idea to just keep going to church and accepting Jesus into your heart. It's not.
Here's her little list of truisms that she aims to puncture.
"God Is Dead."
Armstrong says this isn't true, and points to fundamentalist upheavals as evidence that "God has proven…
clock | October 22, 2009There are 19 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:
Experimental Infection of a North American Raptor, American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus (H5N1):
Several species of wild raptors have been found in Eurasia…
cortex | October 22, 2009David Brooks has written yet another wonderful column on the mind. This time he explores the nagging gap between our intuitions about personality - we each express a particular set of character traits, which can be traced back to our early childhood - and the scientific facts, which suggest that the vague personality traits measured by the Myers-Briggs are too vague to mean much of anything. Here's Brooks:
In Homer's poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one picture of character and conduct.
In this view, what you might call the philosopher's…
dmunger | October 21, 2009In case you missed them, here are my picks from ResearchBlogging.org's Psychology and Neuroscience posts from the past week.
Mice navigate a virtual-reality maze. Go for the amazingly cute video. Stay for the science!
Brain imaging for lie-detection doesn't live up to the hype. Remember all those stories about fMRI lie detectors a couple years back? BPS Research Digest shows why fMRI is no better than an old-fashioned polygraph.
How good are you at trading stocks? Apparently the length of your fingers can do a good job predicting your success as a stock trader. Honest.
Many people (…
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2009THE humble fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has the ability to learn and remember, and to make predictions about the outcome of its behaviours on the basis of past experience. Compared to a human brain, that of the fruit fly is relatively simple, containing approximately 250,000 cells. Even so, little is known about the anatomical basis of memory formation. The neural circuitry underlying memories in these insects has now been dissected. In an elegant new study published in the journal Cell, researchers from the University of Oxford show that aversive memories are dependent on a tiny…
emjohnson | October 18, 2009Grand evolutionary dramas about human origins capture our imagination and the stories provide context as to how we view ourselves. They are the scientific version of creation myths. However, unlike Adam and Eve being fashioned in the garden or humanity being vomited up by the giant Mbombo (as the Bakuba people of Congo believed), scientific origin stories are rigorously critiqued based on the best available evidence.
Friedrich Engels, a sociologist and future collaborator with Karl Marx, wrote one of the earliest scientific human origin tales in 1876. In his essay "The Part Played by…
clock | October 18, 2009Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my Facebook wall where they are seen by quite a different set of people):
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.
@cshirky: "After teaching 10 years, the only good measure of student progress I know is the number of open problems they can successfully characterize."
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