Brain and Behavior
gregladen | February 12, 2009... and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident.
That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then accidentally run…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009Alzheimer's research is an ongoing field. Although we know a lot more than we used to, we still don't entirely understand why the accumulation of proteins in Alzheimer's disease kills neurons or renders them non-functional. One intriguing part of the explanation may be offered by Varvel et al. who show that the active proteins in Alzheimer's disease (more on this in a second) cause neurons to re-enter the cell cycle in a mouse model of the disease.
Introduction
I have variously described Alzheimer's -- and other neurodegenerative diseases -- as a disease of molecular crud. The pathological…
oracknows | February 11, 2009Stick a fork in Keith Olbermann. He's done.
He has now officially degenerated into a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush Limbaugh is occasionally funny. Maybe he's more like Sean Hannity, particularly in his apparent dedication to the truth, or, rather, lack thereof. Hannity detests liberals and will immediately attack on the slightest pretense, even if the information given to him of "liberal wrongdoing" is dubious or outright wrong. Like Hannity, Olbermann will never turn down an opportunity to attack Bill O'Reilly or his paymaster Rupert Murdoch. Somtimes it's justified, but…
cortex | February 11, 2009One of the perverse pleasures of spending too much time in airports is getting to people watch. I put on my "anthropologist from Mars" glasses and pass the time by staring at strangers, watching what they eat, read and how they struggle to nap in uncomfortable positions. This morning, while waiting on a very delayed plane in the Portland airport, I watched a woman perform yoga by the gate.
But if I really were an anthropologist from Mars I'd be most puzzled by something else that people in airports do: drink lots of diet soda. I write this in the San Francisco airport, where I'm sitting on a…
neurophilosophy | February 10, 2009Bones have been big news recently, following the publication of two papers which document remarkable fossil finds. First, a group of palaeontologists led by Phil Gingerich of the University of Michigan described Maiacetus inuus, a primitive whale which lived in the water but gave birth on land, and which marks the transition between modern whales and their terrestrial ancestors. This was quickly followed by the report, from Jason Head's group at the University of Toronto, of Titanoboa cerrejonesis, a prehistoric snake which is estimated to have grown to 13 metres and to weigh more than a…
razib | February 9, 2009Nick Wade's Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential is a good complement to the strained Darwin-skepticism I pointed to earlier. From the perspective of this weblog this comment was interesting:
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. "People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior," Dr. Cronin says. "But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin's tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies -- that's quite an influential body that's still rejecting…
clock | February 9, 2009There are 15 new articles published Friday night and 15 new articles published tonight in PLoS ONE. 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:
Impact of Climate Change on the Relict Tropical Fish Fauna of Central Sahara: Threat for the Survival of Adrar Mountains Fishes, Mauritania:
Four central Sahara…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Pity Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…
clock | February 6, 2009Ecologists Report Quantifiable Measures Of Nature's Services To Humans:
The idea of ecosystem services is a promising conservation concept but has been rarely put into practice. In a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers use novel tools to report some of the first quantifiable results that place values on nature's services to humans.
15-year-old Theory About The Nervous System Disproved:
A delay in traffic may cause a headache, but a delay in the nervous system can cause much more. University of Missouri researchers have uncovered clues identifying…
clock | February 4, 2009Personal Touch In Farming: Giving A Cow A Name Boosts Her Milk Production:
A cow with a name produces more milk than one without, scientists at Newcastle University have found. Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson have shown that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual, farmers can increase their annual milk yield by almost 500 pints.
Wild Boar Given Plenty Of Food And Shelter Do Not Live As Long As Struggling Wild Boar:
Lack of shelter and the large amount of food available from crops in the mid-valley of the Ebro reflect primarily how human beings influence the…
clock | February 3, 2009From SCONC:
Even if you haven't heard of Bisphenol A (BPA), you've likely been exposed to it. The endocrine disrupting compound is common in plastic infant bottles, water bottles, food cans and lots of other products. Scientists debate its dangers but the National Toxicology Program (based in RTP) acknowledges BPA as a source of "some concern" due to its possible harm to the brains and behavior of fetuses, infants and children.
On Wed. Feb. 18, at noon, come hear NCSU assistant biology professor Heather Patisaul share what she's finding about BPA's potential permanent effects in a talk…
pharyngula | February 2, 2009The NY Times ran an interesting article on sexology a short while ago, focusing on the differences in arousal between men and women. Like any guy, I read it hoping to discover the magic switch that turns women on, but as expected, the message is that female arousal is very, very complicated. This was not a surprise. One of the curious results, though, was that not only do men and women differ in the specificity of stimuli that induce arousal, but women's brains (measured by self-reporting) and women's bodies (measured by plethysmograph) don't agree — vaginal arousal was measured when subjects…
clock | February 1, 2009Long-time readers of this blog remember that, some years ago, I did a nifty little study on the Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish. The department has moved to a new building, the crayfish lab is gone, I am out of science, so chances of following up on that study are very low. And what we did was too small even for a Least Publishable Unit, so, in order to have the scientific community aware of our results, I posted them (with agreement from my co-authors) on my blog. So, although I myself am unlikely to continue studying the relationship between the…
clock | February 1, 2009Bird Song Discoveries May Lead To Refinement Of Darwinian Theory:
For Williams College biology professor Heather Williams, the songs birds sing are more than a pleasant part of a spring day. They are a window into how communication works in the natural world. A birdsong is more than just an encapsulated package of information, it is "a behavior frozen in time." One of her projects is to record and map out the songs of Savannah sparrows that spend the warmer months on a small Canadian island, Kent Island, in the Bay of Fundy. With the help of microphones, binoculars, and a well-documented set…
clock | January 30, 2009How Does A Dog Walk? Surprisingly, Many Of Us Don't Really Know:
Despite the fact that most of us see our four-legged friends walking around every day, most of us-including many experts in natural history museums and illustrators for veterinary anatomy text books-apparently still don't know how they do it. A new study published in the January 27th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that anatomists, taxidermists, and toy designers get the walking gait of horses and other quadruped animals wrong about half the time. That's despite the fact that their correct walking…
edyong | January 29, 2009Serotonin is a chemical jack-of-all-trades. It relays messages between the cells of the brain and in doing so, controls everything from anger to sleep, body temperature to appetite. But in one insect, it is the key to Pandora's box, periodically unleashing some of the most destructive swarms on the planet. It is the chemical responsible for turning solitary desert locusts into massive plagues.
With desert locusts, you get two insects for the price of one. For most of their lives, they are positively antisocial and will avoid other locusts - a far cry from the devastating swarms that farmers…
jstemwedel | January 28, 2009Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children's toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children's products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether.
I've been meaning to post on this for awhile, but I've finally been spurred into action by my…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009Researchers at Boston University have done an autopsy on another former football player and found evidence of severe neurological damage that would likely lead to dementia later in life:
Leading medical experts at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) reported today that nine-year NFL veteran, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Tom McHale was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, when he died in 2008 at the age of 45.
In addition, the CSTE has discovered early…
developingintelligence | January 27, 2009
Reductionism in the neurosciences has been incredibly productive, but it has been difficult to reconstruct how high-level behaviors emerge from the myriad biological mechanisms discovered with such reductionistic methods. This is most clearly true in the case of the motor system, which has long been studied as the programming of motor actions (at its least reductionistic). However, as pointed out by Mars et al., the brain is almost constantly enacting motor plans, and so the initiation of actions is more likely preceded by motor reprogramming than anything else. However, that process has…
neurophilosophy | January 26, 2009What sensory cues do we rely on during the perception of speech? Primarily, of course, speech perception involves auditory cues - we pay close attention to the sounds generated by the speaker. Less obviously, the brain also picks up subtle visual cues, such as the movements of the speakers mouth and lips; the importance of these can be demonstrated by the McGurk effect, an auditory illusion in which the visual cues accompanying spoken words can alter one's perception of what is being said.
Integration of these auditory and visual cues is essential for speech perception. But according to a…