Brain and Behavior
gregladen | October 22, 2008Homo floresiensis more widely known as the "Hobbit," may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans.
A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have to understand the concept of "Humeral torsion." Humeral torsion is the orientation of the humeral head relative to the mediolateral axis of the distal articular surface. Don't bother reading that sentence again, I'll explain it.
The humerus is the upper arm bone, that runs between your shoulder and your elbow. The humeral head is…
amillikan | October 21, 2008I'm going to try something a bit different with the weekly updates, so consider this the pilot episode. Since I read the majority of the blog posts pretty much every day, I want to use these updates to deliver a compact shot of information from the most important and interesting posts. I'll discuss what's most popular, but I will also try to point out some exceptional posts form lesser-known bloggers. Please use the comment boards and let me know what you like, what you don't like, questions, comments--anything at all!
Brain & Behavior channel photo. Psychologists at work. From Flickr…
pharyngula | October 19, 2008Jesse Bering has an interesting article on why many people have so much difficulty holding a realistic view of death — why they imagine immortal souls wafting off to heaven, and why they can't imagine their consciousness ceasing to exist. He's trying to argue that these kinds of beliefs are more than just the result of secondary indoctrination into a body of myth, but are actually a normal consequence of the nature of consciousness. We never personally experience the extinction of our consciousness, of course, except for the limited loss of sleep — and we always wake up from that (at least,…
gregladen | October 18, 2008You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online.
Here is the summary of the article:
Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…
ddobbs | October 18, 2008The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff.
The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor level. Impressive enough in itself:
Even more riveting, however, is the second video, which can't be embedded but which can be seen on YouTube. It mixes from-the-ground footage with aerial shots taken with infrared cameras to show how a team of five chimps -- a driver, three blockers, and an…
clock | October 18, 2008So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. 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:
Birdsong 'Transcriptomics': Neurochemical Specializations of the Oscine Song System:
Vocal learning is a rare and complex behavioral trait that serves as a basis for the acquisition of human spoken language. In songbirds, vocal learning and production depend…
amillikan | October 17, 2008Next up—the full-sized pictures featured this week on the Politics and Medicine & Health channels and some note-worthy posts.
Politics. Sarah Palin using technology. From Flickr, by asecondhandconjecture
Here we have Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin seated at a flight simulator. Palin also demonstrated her technological skills when she used eBay to put her luxury jet up for sale for $2.7 million. The jet reportedly sold for $2.1 million. Palin also supports using the Internet to promote transparency in government, although when hackers recently exposed Palin's personal email…
purepedantry | October 15, 2008The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain.
Recognizing that I am dealing with a loaded term -- scientists have strong opinions on the meaning of the term hypothesis -- I would like to talk about a study that looked hypothesis generation in the brain. Kwon et al. used fMRI to look at the brain activation associated with hypothesis generation (as opposed to being just told a hypothesis), with and without training.
Before…
cwilcox | October 14, 2008If you're struggling to pick up chicks, perhaps you should change your strategy. Instead of hanging out at bars boasting how much you can bench press, you might spending a few hours with some cute nurses at a Bloodmobile. Why? Because women think that guys who are altruistic are hot.
A new study published in the British Journal of Psychology by researchers at the University of Nottingham has found that being selfless can be sexually attractive, particularly for women. In studies of more than 1,000 people, researchers discovered that women place significantly greater importance on altruistic…
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2008
When David Savage was 19 years old, his right hand was crushed in a metal-stamping machine and subsequently amputated at the wrist by doctors. Afterwards, Savage was fitted with a mechanical cable-hook prosthesis, which he wore until December, 2006, when he became the third American recipient of a hand transplant from a cadaver donor (above).
Amputation of a limb leads to significant reorganization of the primary somatosensory cortex, that part of the brain which processes touch- and pain-related information. The cortical region normally devoted to the amputated body part is suddenly…
clock | October 13, 2008
I rarely jump on the blogging hype of noting the new Nobel Prize winners every year. Exceptions are cases when I have a different slant on it, e.g., when a Prize goes to someone in my neighborhood or if the winners have published in PLoS ONE and PLoS Pathogens (lots of loud cheering back at the office).
But usually I stay silent. Mainly because I am conflicted about the prizes in science in general, and Nobel in particular.
On one hand, one week every year, science is everywhere - in newspapers, on the radio, on TV, all over the internet. And that is good because it is a push strategy (…
oracknows | October 11, 2008NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit's book Autism's False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I…
autismvox | October 9, 2008On the last day of the Science Blogs Book Club discussion about Dr. Paul A. Offit's recently published Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, I'll start by quoting the last paragraph of the book:
The science is largely complete. Ten epidemiological studies have shown MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism; six have shown thimerosal doesn't cause autism; three have shown thimerosal doesn't cause subtle neurological problems; a growing body of evidence now points to the genes that are linked to autism; and despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in…
cortex | October 9, 2008At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence and attention. In this sense, the mind is really an extended argument. This vociferous debate is made clear in this new paper, which shows that different brain areas are activated by risk and reward when people make a risky decision:
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task that simulates risky decisions, we found that…
clock | October 9, 2008There are 11 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:
Evolutionary Signatures of Common Human Cis-Regulatory Haplotypes:
Variation in gene expression may give rise to a significant fraction of inter-individual phenotypic variation. Studies searching for the underlying genetic controls for such variation have been conducted in model organisms and humans in recent years. In our previous effort of assessing…
apalazzo | October 8, 2008From the Nobel site:
8 October 2008
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008 jointly to
Osamu Shimomura, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA, USA and Boston University Medical School, MA, USA,
Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA and
Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
"for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP".
Well I certainly nailed this one. In fact I got up this morning thinking, "let's find out if Tsien got the Nobel".
This is a well…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2008In his 1941 book Man on His Nature, the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern." Little could he have known that within 50 years neuroscientists would have at their disposal techniques for visualizing this pattern.
These techniques are collectively known as calcium imaging. Developed in the 1980s, they use synthetic chemical dyes or genetic constructs whose spectral properties change when they bind calcium ions, leading to a change in fluoresence which can be detected…
grrlscientist | October 7, 2008tags: dopamine, behavior, evolution, rewarding affiliative behaviors, brain reward pathways, songbirds, birdsong, zebra finch, Poephila guttata, neurobiology
A pair of wild Zebra (Chestnut-eared) Finches, Poephila guttata.
Image: Adelaide Zebra Finch Society [larger view].
People have been known to "sing for joy" and we often experience happiness when others sing for us. Additionally, birdsong has often brought joy to those who have listened, but what about the birds themselves? Do birds experience "happiness" when they hear birdsong, or when they sing for others? According to newly…
cortex | October 7, 2008A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and corporations, they aren't willing to lend money. The end result is a frozen credit market. This is precisely what happened during the Great Depression. After Black Friday, the public lost confidence in the economy, and people began to hastily withdraw their money from banks. The result was a rash of bank failures, and an even larger push to withdraw…
clock | October 6, 2008Gene Expression In Alligators Suggests Birds Have 'Thumbs':
The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, October 3, by Alexander Vargas and colleagues at Yale University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Galloping And Breathing At High Speed:
The coordination of two systems are key for any horse to walk, trot, gallop or win a race. The first are the lower limbs, which allow the animal to move along on a "spring-like" tendon. The second is a complicated…