Brain and Behavior
clock | August 13, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
This is also the first in what I hope will be a long series of interviews with researchers in my field of Chronobiology.
Today, I asked John Hogenesch, my chronobiologist colleague who moderated the 'Community intelligence applied to gene annotation' session at ScienceOnline'09, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock.…
clock | August 11, 2009There are 29 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:
The Apollo Number: Space Suits, Self-Support, and the Walk-Run Transition:
How space suits affect the preferred walk-run transition is an open question with relevance to human biomechanics and planetary…
clock | August 10, 2009Let's see what's new in PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 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:
Long-Term Functional Side-Effects of Stimulants and Sedatives in Drosophila melanogaster:
Small invertebrate animals, such as nematodes and fruit…
gregladen | August 4, 2009The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore's site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) is a human evolution Theory of Everything (TOE) and thus explains, as it should, everything. That is a dangerous way for a theory to act, because if it tries to explain everything then it is going to be wrong in a number of places, and it is going to seem (or even be) right in a number of places but only by chance. (Unless, of course, the TOE is totally rad and really…
razib | July 30, 2009Megan McArdle has a post, Thining Thin, a follow up to America's Moral Panic Over Obesity. She says:
1. Obesity is increasing in the population, so it can't be genetic.
Well, average height is also increasing in the population. Does that mean that you could be as tall as me, if you weren't too lazy to grow?
Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.…
esiegel | July 29, 2009After just finishing my series on the last 100 years in astrophysics, I was surprised to read an article in Bust Magazine that seems like it ought to be from 100 years ago.
You see, 100 years ago, segregating boys and girls was commonplace in schools. Not only that, but girls took "girl classes" like home economics, while boys took "boy classes" like trigonometry. One would think that we're past that by now.
One would hope so.
But clearly, this isn't true everywhere. The Mobile, Alabama county school system went way over the line starting last fall (2008). From the ACLU's site:
Without…
developingintelligence | July 28, 2009Children assigned to chew sugar-free gum purportedly score 3% higher on standardized tests of math skills (as widely reported in the press). But is this just one of the 5% of all possible untrue hypotheses statistically guaranteed to have some significant result in its favor (in fact, it's worse than that)? Is the effect due to some other aspect of gum chewing (as Michael Posner asks)? Or might there be a real effect here of chewing (i.e., "mastication"), and if so, how can you use it to your maximum advantage?
What we know - and what we don't - about gum and cognition
To cut to the chase…
j7uy5 | July 27, 2009Natalie Angier has another
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/21angier.html?sq=behavior%20what%20animals%20do&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print">interesting
article in the NYT. In the article, she discusses the meaning
of the word behavior. Apparently, this all came from the
realization that even standard works on the subject did not contain a
"point-by-point definition."
The realization came to
href="http://dlevitis.org/dlevitis/Research.html">Dan Levitis, a
grad student in zoology at Berkeley. Levitis happens to have a
Blogspot blog: Blog of
Science; he's…
pharyngula | July 27, 2009Sam Harris has published a piece in the New York Times decrying the appointment of Francis Collins to head the NIH. It's strong stuff; he points out that Collins isn't just a Christian, he's an active science-denier who has set aside whole blocks of scientific inquiry as inaccessible to study because they are a product of a divine being. As he asks at the end, "Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?"
The strongest part of the essay, in my opinion, was that…
neurotopia | July 24, 2009You attended 5 classes of your Brain and Behavior course out of an 8 week summer session that meets daily, and stop going after the first exam. Which you failed. Repeating the exact same pattern from the previous semester when you were in my class.
And then.... your MOM shows up at my class to fight your grade battles for you, without you even being aware of it.
Yesterday, I had a student's mom show up at my classroom right before class. Apparently Precious Daughter was going to fail out while on academic probation. Mom just couldn't let that happen, and wanted to know if there was any…
cortex | July 24, 2009Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain project, recently delivered a talk at TED that's gotten lots of press coverage. (It was the lead story on the BBC for a few hours...) Not surprisingly, all the coverage focused on the same stunningly ambitious claim, which is Markram's assertion that an artificial brain is "ten years away". I haven't heard the talk, so I don't know the context for the remark, but I did spend a few days with Markram a few years ago. The first thing to note about Markram is that he's incredibly brilliant and persuasive. I might be skeptical about the singularity,…
cortex | July 23, 2009I've got a feature article in the latest Psychology Today on neuroaesthetics, the ambitious attempt to interpret art through the prism of neuroscience. Here's the beginning of the article:
Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull chicks. When they're first born, these baby birds are entirely dependent on their mother for food. As a result, the chicks are born with a very powerful instinct: Whenever they see a bird beak, they frantically peck at it, begging for their favorite food: a regurgitated meal.
What's interesting is that this reflex can be manipulated.…
razib | July 23, 2009Earlier today I linked to a Jonah Leher post on food that hooks into the role that dopamine plays in our decision making. Dopamine looms in the neuroscience angle of Jonah's book How We Decide because the chemical's role in cognition is established. Dopamine related genes are often fingered in behavior genetic studies as the causal root of some observed psychological variation. So a new paper in Nature Neuroscience is in perfect position to stand astride the literal slush pile of this research, Prefrontal and striatal dopaminergic genes predict individual differences in exploration and…
emjohnson | July 23, 2009Primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds.
Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, research suggests that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it's doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why.
In the journal Science Robin Dunbar revisits the question with a unique perspective as to why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of…
emjohnson | July 20, 2009Mark Hemingway, the Conservative "tough-guy" for the National Review, has just posted a rant against health concerns for the endocrine disruptor Bisphenol A.
I've seen some estimates that over a billion people have had exposure to BPA and there isn't proof of anything. So why the big scare? I assume trial lawyers are involved in the fear mongering. That's a given. But then I saw that last year two reporters from the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel won a George Polk Award-- a major journalism honor -- for reporting on the "dangers" of BPA. It's another reminder that there are some perverse…
clock | July 19, 2009This is a summary of my 1999 paper, following in the footsteps of the work I described here two days ago. The work described in that earlier post was done surprisingly quickly - in about a year - so I decided to do some more for my Masters Thesis.
The obvious next thing to do was to expose the quail to T-cycles, i.e., non-24h cycles. This is some arcane circadiana, so please refer to the series of posts on entrainment from yesterday and the two posts on seasonality and photoperiodism posted this morning so you can follow the discussion below:
There were three big reasons for me to attempt…
clock | July 18, 2009One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output.
In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei are anatomically close to each other and have direct nerve connections between them, so it is not difficult to imagine how the two clocks manage to remain continuously coupled (syncronized) to each other and, together, produce a single output, thus synchronizing all the rhythms in the body.
In the…
clock | July 18, 2009One of the assumptions in the study of circadian organization is that, at the level of molecules and cells, all vertebrate (and perhaps all animal) clocks work in roughly the same way. The diversity of circadian properties is understood to be a higher-level property of interacting multicellular and multi-organ circadian systems: how the clocks receive environmental information, how the multiple pacemakers communicate and synchronize with each other, how they convey the temporal information to the peripheral clocks in all the other cells in the body, and how peripheral clocks generate…
sa smith | July 17, 2009WEIRD COOL EXPERIMENT ALERT!
Proviral integrations and expression of endogenous Avian leukosis virus during long term selection for high and low body weight in two chicken lines
For some reason, I have no idea why (Im sure they have a good reason-- obesity research, farming research), scientists were playing a selection game with chickens.
Select the skinniest chickens. Breed them. Select the skinniest chickens. Repeat.
Select the fattest chickens. Breed them. Select the fattest chickens. Repeat.
Keep doing that until you get a population of skinny chickies and another population of fat…
oracknows | July 17, 2009I realize that this week in practically every new post I've been mentioning TAM7. It hasn't exactly been intentional, believe it or not, at least aside from my recap a on Tuesday and my request for photos from those of you who attended. Oddly enough, although I mentioned how proud I was to be part of the Anti-Anti-Vax Panel discussion, where I joined Joe Albietz, Steve Novella, Mike Goudeau (skeptic, juggler, entertainer, producer, and writer who has an autistic child), Harriet Hall, and Derek Bartholomaus, I didn't really discuss some of the thoughts that the panel's discussion inspired in…