Brain and Behavior
clock | November 23, 2008
Crafting Your Image For Your 1,000 Friends On Facebook Or MySpace:
Students are creating idealized versions of themselves on social networking websites -- Facebook and MySpace are the most popular -- and using these sites to explore their emerging identities, UCLA psychologists report. Parents often understand very little about this phenomenon, they say.
Oh, What A Feeling! Regaining Ability To Interpret Emotions After Severe Brain Injury:
People who have lost the ability to interpret emotion after a severe brain injury can regain this vital social skill by being re-educated to read body…
cwilcox | November 19, 2008In medical terminology, addiction is a state in which the body relies on a substance for normal functioning and develops physical dependence. This is what you might call a "chemical" addiction - that is, if you're addicted to a substance, your body has altered its natural processes to require whatever substance you're addicted to. Substance abuse, a.k.a. 'drug use', is presumed to fall under this classification because sudden removal of said drug causes "withdrawal" and a characteristic set of signs and symptoms. New research, however, shows that drug addiction is not purely chemical.
Read…
clock | November 15, 2008
Dinosaur Whodunit: Solving A 77-million-year-old Mystery:
It has all the hallmarks of a Cretaceous melodrama. A dinosaur sits on her nest of a dozen eggs on a sandy river beach. Water levels rise, and the mother is faced with a dilemma: Stay or abandon her unhatched offspring to the flood and scramble to safety? Seventy-seven million years later, scientific detective work conducted by University of Calgary and Royal Tyrrell Museum researchers used this unique fossil nest and eggs to learn more about how nest building, brooding and eggs evolved. But there is a big unresolved question: Who was…
amillikan | November 13, 2008Welcome to another Channel Update. In this post, you will find the large versions of the Medicine & Health and Brain & Behavior channel photos, and also the contextualized versions of the reader reactions from the aforementioned channels.
Medicine & Health
Medicine & Health channel photo. Image captured with an electron microscope of a six-day-old human embryo implanting in a womb. From Flickr, by LoreleiRanveig
Often in the scientific world, work and play intermingle. In this case, it appears to be especially so. Putting in the time to learn a specialty science can be…
neurophilosophy | November 11, 2008Every autumn, millions of songbirds embark upon long distance southerly migrations to warmer climes. Some species migrate during the day, but the majority - including sparrows, thrushes and warblers - do so at night, leaving their daytime habitats just after dusk and spending the next 8-10 hours on the wing.
Nocturnal migration has several benefits. Cooler temperatures reduce the risk of overheating; reduced turbulence allows for a smooth flight with minimal energy expenditure; and the cover of night provides good protection from predators. These fly-by-night migratory species lose…
clock | November 6, 2008Seeing A Brain As It Learns To See:
A brain isn't born fully organized. It builds its abilities through experience, making physical connections between neurons and organizing circuits to store and retrieve information in milliseconds for years afterwards.
Looming Ecological Credit Crunch?:
The world is heading for an ecological credit crunch as human demands on the world's natural capital reach nearly a third more than earth can sustain.
Extreme Weather Postpones Flowering Time Of Plants:
Extreme weather events have a greater effect on flora than previously presumed. A one-month drought…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2008Now that the big election is over, it's time to get away from political blogging for a while and return to what this blog was created to do: bash creationists. So have a look at this article from The New Scientist:
“You cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a…
cortex | November 6, 2008Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I've read in a while. It's the story of one man's attempt to systematically disrupt the cycle of poverty, and fundamentally alter the nature of childhood in Harlem. Fixing the schools is only a small part of the solution: Canada realized that it was also crucial to change the typical parent-child interaction, and so he developed a Baby College where new parents are given lessons on how to speak to their child in the supermarket.…
oracknows | November 5, 2008One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…
purepedantry | November 5, 2008Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has a great article in Scientific American about the limits of interpreting fMRI scanning studies -- particularly how they are presented in the media. The biggest point is that the brain is not a collection of modules isolated from one another; rather, it is a collection of interconnected systems with diverse roles in diverse tasks:
A number of interconnected neural networks may in some cases be localized and bundled into modulelike units, but in most ways they are better described as being splayed out over, under or through the brain's crevasses…
j7uy5 | November 3, 2008
This is an image of a human brain. It is constructed using an
imaging method known as diffusion spectrum imaging.
The technique has been discussed at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/07/hi_res_brain_topology_map.php">Neurophilosophy
and
href="http://anthropology.net/2008/07/01/diffusion-spectrum-imaging-used-to-map-the-structural-core-of-human-cerebral-cortex/">Anthropology.net;
both posts were based upon a paper in
href="http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159">PLOS
Biology.
The image above is…
clock | October 28, 2008There are 25 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Overall Alteration of Circadian Clock Gene Expression in the Chestnut Cold Response (see this for previous work):
Cold acclimation in woody plants may have special features compared to similar processes in herbaceous plants. Recent studies have shown that circadian clock behavior in the chestnut tree (Castanea sativa) is disrupted by cold temperatures…
clock | October 27, 2008PLoS Biology at 5: The Future Is Open Access:
On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders--working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly…
clock | October 25, 2008Phony Friends? Rejected People Better Able To Spot Fake Smiles:
"There are hundreds of languages in the world, but a smile speaks them all." It's true too--next time you are lost in a foreign country, just flash a smile and the locals will be happy to help you find your way. An honest smile can convey a wide range of meanings, from being happy to having fun. Although, not all smiles are genuine. All of us have "faked a smile" at some point. Now, a new study might make us think twice about sending out a phony grin. It has been shown that individuals who are experiencing rejection are better at…
neurophilosophy | October 24, 2008Erasing memories has long been a popular plot device for Hollywood scriptwriters. In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play a separated couple who undergo a radical treatment in order to abolish every trace of the relationship from their brains.
The ability to erase memories is no longer confined to the realms of science fiction. In the current issue of Neuron, researchers from the Medical College of Georgia, in collaboration with others from the Shanghai Institute of Brain Functional Genomics, report that they have rapidly erased…
sb admin | October 24, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust and her colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The…
gregladen | October 24, 2008Welcome to the 22 October Edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. The previous edition of this carnival was on Clashing Culture. The Home Page of Four Stone Hearth is here, and the next edition will be at Archaeoporn.
And now, on with the show!
Archaeology
What is "The relevance of archaeology?" According to A very remote period indeed...
archaeology is the only discipline that can provide us with a relatively objective measure of how things were in the past, even following the advent of writing.
"But don't archaeologists, being academics, often eat their own…
revere | October 24, 2008Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…
cwilcox | October 23, 2008The plot of M. Night Shyamalan's movie 'The Happening' is that plants mysteriously start releasing a neurotoxin that causes people to kill themselves. Originally I thought it was too ridiculous, but maybe, just maybe, it is possible.
A new study by by Drs. Michael Poulter and Hymie Anisman and colleagues in the October 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry found that the DNA of people who committed suicide is altered epigenetically compared to people who died suddenly of natural causes.
Let me explain. The human genome has tens of thousands of genes, but not all are expressed in every cell. To…
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2008The fourth dimension - time - is essential for many cognitive processes, and for rhythmic movements such as walking. Recent research has begun to elucidate how neuronal activity encodes events that occur on the timescale of tens to hundredths of milliseconds (hundredths of a second) and contain cues which are required for processes such as visual perception, speech discrimination and fine movements.
Many organisms time events on much larger scales. However, next to nothing is known about the mechanisms by which the brain encodes longer periods of time. A new study now sheds some light on…