Brain and Behavior
razib | May 28, 2009
Nick Wade in The New York Times reports on new research where they inserted human FOXP2 genes into the mouse genome. Here are some of the findings:
Despite the mammalian body's dependence on having its two FOXP2 genes work just right, Dr. Enard's team found that the human version of FOXP2 seemed to substitute perfectly for the mouse version in all the mouse's tissues except for the brain.
In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure and produced less dopamine, a chemical…
clock | May 28, 2009
Giant Dinosaur Posture Is All Wrong: Sauropods Held Their Heads High, Research Finds:
Famous depictions of the largest of all known dinosaurs, from film and television to museum skeletons, have almost certainly got it wrong, according to new research.
Oldest Evidence Of Leprosy Found In India:
A biological anthropologist from Appalachian State University working with an undergraduate student from Appalachian, an evolutionary biologist from UNC Greensboro, and a team of archaeologists from Deccan College (Pune, India) recently reported analysis of a 4000-year-old skeleton from India bearing…
gregladen | May 27, 2009Regarding home schooling mom Vanessa Mills, of Wake County, NC, USA:
...Mills ... grew alienated from her husband and parents after joining a religious group that some former members call a cult, the judge in the case said Tuesday...
...Judge Ned Mangum ruled March 6 that it would be in the best interests of Venessa Mills' three children to go to public school this fall.
That ruling, in an ongoing divorce case between Venessa and husband Thomas Mills, sparked national attention from conservatives who maintain that Mangum overstepped his bounds.
"Based on all of the evidence, the court finds…
oracknows | May 26, 2009One of the claims of the anti-vaccine movement that most irks me is that their actions do not risk harm to anyone other than their own unvaccinated children. Given that vaccination against many infectious diseases also depends on the concept of herd immunity to provide protection to members of the population who either cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, are too young to be vaccinated, or who belong to the minority who do not develop adequate immunity to vaccination, such claims are patently false. However, another frequently stated belief is that vaccines are ineffective, that they are…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2009In response to my recent post on being mauled by the PA at my annual gyn exam, reader Danimal was moved by my saying this
I say if it hurts, you should feel free to yelp. And no doctor or PA should be shushing you. I am ashamed to say that when my PA shushed me, I let her make me feel embarrassed, and I actually apologized to her. That is just messed up.
to comment thusly:
You disappoint me Zuska. On the bloggesphere you have no problem barfing over someones shoes, usually when appropriate, including mine. Yet here it was entirely appropriate, yet you did not. Come on, you can do better.…
sb admin | May 22, 2009Alison Bass directs our attention to the tragic story of Denis Maltez, a 12-year-old Miami boy who died of serotonin syndrome after being given two anti-psychotic medications (Seroquel and Zyprexa) plus an anti-seizure drug and tranquilizer. Serotonin syndrome occurs when a combination of drugs causes the brain to produce excess serotonin. Denis had severe autism and was living in a Rainbow Ranch group home; the lawsuit just filed by his mother, Martha Quesada, says the drugs were used as a "chemical restraint to control Denis's behavior."Â Florida shut down Rainbow Ranch shortly after Denis…
clock | May 22, 2009Genital Stimulation Opens Door For Cryptic Female Choice In Tsetse Flies:
By snipping off parts of male genitalia and reducing genital sensation in both male and female tsetse flies, researchers induced a suite of changes in female reproduction, including reduced ovulation, reduced sperm storage and increased re-mating attempts by the females.
Bird Songs Change With The Landscape:
When the going gets rough, the tough apparently sing slower. As vegetation reclaimed formerly cleared land in California, Oregon and Washington over the last 35 years, male white-crowned sparrows have lowered their…
oracknows | May 22, 2009I originally joined this wild and woolly collective known as ScienceBlogs back in February 2006. I was not part of the very first wave of bloggers who made up ScienceBlogs when it launched, although I potentially could have, mainly because I had to work out policies about outside employment with my university before I could join up. In any case, one of the very first posts that I did back then that made a bit of a splash was a little ditty I called in my usual inimitable and restrained fashion, Why not just castrate them?
It was the dark saga of an even darker father-and-son tag team of…
clock | May 20, 2009Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought:
The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that.
Some People Really 'Never Forget A Face:' Understanding Extraordinary Face Recognition Ability:
Some people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who've discovered a group they call "super-recognizers": those…
cortex | May 20, 2009The Economist summarizes a new study looking at the link between living abroad and increased creativity:
Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.
As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of…
nisbetmc | May 20, 2009
As we discuss in a current working paper, the "going broad" strategy of using entertainment media to reach wider audiences was first pioneered in the area of health.
For example, working in collaboration with experts, screenwriters for the series ER purposely inserted plot scenarios intended to raise attention to beneficial health behaviors. Evaluation of the efforts found important impacts in raising awareness, discussion, and interest in the featured health topic among viewers. More recently, a special issue of the American Journal of Bioethics evaluated the use of programs such as House…
zooillogix | May 19, 2009
by Katie the Lowly Intern
Does the sinking feeling of knowing you could have gotten what you wanted had you made better choices in life sound familiar? Like how if in college, had you gotten a real degree, set goals for yourself, and not tried to buy friendships with your credit card, you could possibly now have a steady job, ambition, and friends? If it does, then you may rest easier tonight knowing there is a term for that: "fictive thinking". And guess what... monkeys get it too!
Researchers at Duke University have concluded that monkeys don't respond solely to direct punishment or…
jstemwedel | May 19, 2009Yesterday, I posted the first part of my interview with Sean Cutler, a biology professor on a mission to get the tribe of science to understand that good scientific competition is not antithetical to cooperation. Cutler argues that the problem scientists (and journal editors, and granting agencies) need to tackle is scientists who try to get an edge in the competition by unethical means. As Cutler put it (in a post at TierneyLab):
Scientists who violate these standards [e.g., not making use of information gained when reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication] are unethical - this is…
cwilcox | May 18, 2009 Ah, there's nothing that makes a good horror movie or sci-fi flick like the living dead. So it's no wonder that this little fly makes it on my list of sci-fi-worthy parasites. It's claim to fame is that it eats the brains of ants while turning them into living zombies for a bit before decaptating the unfortunate insects and moving onward.
Yeah, they're pretty bad ass.
These flies, from the genus Pseudacteon, are small and resemble fruit flies. They are quite different, though, in life cycle and behavior. As adults, they've earned the name "scuttle fly" because they tend to run on a surface…
cortex | May 15, 2009An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of daydreaming: essentially, subjects were given an extremely tedious task and, when their mind started to wander (this was confirmed with subjective reports and measurements of task performance), had changes in their brain activity recorded in the scanner. It's been known for nearly a decade that daydreaming is a metabolically intense mental process,…
gregladen | May 14, 2009Why does a soldier throw himself on a hand grenade to save the lives of a half-dozen unrelated fellow soldiers? Why does someone run into a burning building they happen to be passing to save a child they don't know? From a Darwinian perspective these seem to be enigmatic behaviors that would "select against" such individuals (or more properly, select against the heritable component of this behavior).
There are several possible explanations for this....
...The most important one might be that this sort of behavior doesn't really happen very often. It is so rare that it can be ignored and…
razib | May 13, 2009
When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a…
clock | May 12, 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, 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:
Ants Sow the Seeds of Global Diversification in Flowering Plants:
The extraordinary diversification of angiosperm plants in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods has produced an estimated 250,000-300,000 living…
pontiff | May 12, 2009The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009Jerry Coyne offers some further thoughts on the Richard Lewontin essay I discussed in yesterday's post. Specifically, he addresses the question of why natural selection deserver pride of place among evolutionary mechanisms. He writes:
First of all, yes, it's true that the evidence for natural selection as the cause of most evolutionary change in the past is not as strong as the evidence that evolutionary change occurred. It cannot be otherwise. We can see evolution happening in the fossil record, but it is infinitely harder to parse out the causes of that change. We weren't around when…