Brain and Behavior
clock | April 16, 2008In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting.
Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence.
Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…
purepedantry | April 16, 2008Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for changes in trader profits and market volatility.
Let's file this paper under "wildly over-interpreted" because there are some big caveats that you have to remember before you can make a claim anything like that.
Coates and Herbert measured morning levels of testosterone and daily levels of cortisol (average of two measurements) in 17 male traders in the City of…
tsmith | April 14, 2008 This is the second of 6 guest posts on infection and chronic disease.
By Rachel Kirby
In light of April being Autism Awareness Month it is only natural that certain topics be brought about in the media. Until now I was not aware of the controversy behind the "risk factors" of autism. Let's begin with the basics. Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. Having autism may or may not involve all three characteristics. Some may even have symptoms that…
clock | April 13, 2008Shift Work Linked To Organ Disease, Study Suggests:
Disruption of an individual's natural sleep-wake cycle has been determined to be a contributing factor in the development of organ disease. The findings of U of T researchers were recently published in the Journal of American Physiology.
Mass Media Campaigns Can Convince Young Adults To Adopt Safer Sex Practices, Study Shows:
-- Two University of Kentucky researchers from the department of communication in the UK College of Communications and Information Studies have learned that targeted mass media campaigns alone can be effective in…
clock | April 13, 2008 I wrote this post back on January 23, 2005. It explains how clock biologists think and how they design their experiments:
So, are you ready to do chronobiological research? If so, here are some of the tips - the thought process that goes into starting one's research in chronobiology.
First, you need to pick a question. Are you interested in doing science out of sheer curiosity to discover stuff that nobody knew before (a very noble, but hard-to-fund pursuit)? Or would you prefer your work to be applicable to human medicine or health policy, veterinary medicine, conservation biology, or…
ejohnson | April 11, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the plus-size versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by emdot
Physical Science. A geyser in Yellowstone National Park. From Flickr, by jurek d.
Environment. From Flickr, by jurvetson
Humanities & Social…
clock | April 11, 2008There are 39 new articles in PLoS ONE this week - here are my picks and you go and look around for more:
The Cayman Crab Fly Revisited -- Phylogeny and Biology of Drosophila endobranchia:
The majority of all known drosophilid flies feed on microbes. The wide spread of microorganisms consequently mean that drosophilids also can be found on a broad range of substrates. One of the more peculiar types of habitat is shown by three species of flies that have colonized land crabs. In spite of their intriguing lifestyle, the crab flies have remained poorly studied. Perhaps the least investigated of…
gregladen | April 10, 2008
Methamphetamine use in pregnancy changes learning ability of the offspring from PhysOrg.com
Studies have suggested that infants exposed to methamphetamines while in the womb can suffer irreversible brain damage, although the exact effects of these drugs during pregnancy have been hard to pinpoint due to many other negative behaviors that often occur in meth users.
[...]
How fast you'll age is written in the bones, research finds from PhysOrg.com
Perhaps the aging process can't be stopped. But it can be predicted, and new research from Tel Aviv University indicates that people may live…
bleimanb | April 10, 2008Here is a transcript of our exclusive interview with Dr. Jane Goodall...enjoy.
Jane spoke with Zooillogix at a teacher's conference in New York City, where she had given a speech to educators about living in harmony with the Earth and ingraining youngsters with community service experience early and often, just like her "Roots and Shoots" program happens to do. Here are Zooillogix's brilliant, thought provoking questions and Dr. Goodall's titillating answers.
Zooillogix: You came into science and research as a relative outsider. What advice can you give to others on the outside of the…
oracknows | April 9, 2008I don't much like The Huffington Post.
My dislike for The Huffington Post goes way, way back--all the way back to its very beginnings. Indeed, a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington's little vanity project hit the blogosphere, I noted a very disturbing trend in its content. That trend was a strong undercurrent of antivaccination blogging, something I wrote about nearly three years ago. At the time, I pointed out how Santa Monica pediatrician to the stars and "vaccine skeptic" Dr. Jay Gordon had found a home there, long with David Kirby, author of the mercury militia Bible Evidence of…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Developmental dyslexia is a disorder affecting as many as 17% of school children. This neurological disorder involves an impairment in reading skills, and has been found to be "associated with weak reading-related activity in left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal regions" in English speakers. However, different abnormalities in the brain are associated with dyslexic readers in the non-alphabetic Chinese language, according to research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is not terribly surprising. Earlier research had shown that individuals…
clock | April 8, 2008
This is the second in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. See the first part: ClockTutorial #1 - What Is Chronobiology and check out the rest of them here - they will all, over time, get moved to this blog.
Here is a brief overview of the concepts and terms used in the field of chronobiology. I will write much more detailed accounts of various aspects of it in the future.
Seasons of the year, phases of the moon, high and low tides, and alternation between night and day are examples of cyclic changes in the environment. Each presents a different…
clock | April 7, 2008Bioethics Grows Up:
When I taught my first course in bioethics to first-year students at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in the spring semester of 1981, bioethics was still in its formative years. There were scant few textbooks around and even fewer anthologies, and I could not assume that any of my students had ever read anything by a bioethicist or about bioethics. The key institutions in the field at that time, the Hastings Center, then in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and the Kennedy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, were barely over a decade…
pharyngula | April 5, 2008I'm going to get off a quick summary of this afternoon's talks, then I have to run down to the poster session to find out what the grad students have been doing. Are we having fun yet? I'm going to collapse in bed tonight, and then unfortunately I have to catch an early flight back home, so I'm going to miss a lot of cool stuff tomorrow.
First up after lunch was Deneen Wellik, who summarized her work with Hox genes and patterning the vertebrate axial skeleton. I'm spared some effort here — I already wrote up her paper, so read that for the whole story. In short, one of the confounding things…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008[More blog entries about podcasting; podcasting, webbradio.]
I've been laid low all day with a cold. To entertain myself while unable to read, I've listened to podcasts, and when I ran out of shows I subscribe to I started checking out Podcast Alley's top-10. Unfortunately, most people being morons after all, the top-10 aren't any good. Take it from me: you needn't really bother with Keith and the Girl, Red Bar Radio or Nobody Likes Onions.
So, Dear Reader, you clearly aren't a moron: in aggregate, Aard's readers should be a much better authority than the unwashed masses when it comes to…
ejohnson | April 4, 2008Yep, you've seen these photos before on our channel pages- but have you seen them THIS BIG?
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by JennyHuang
Physical Science. Arenal volcano in Costa Rica. From Flickr, by guano
Environment. An icy tunnel through New Zealand's Fox Glacier. From Flickr,…
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
clock | March 30, 2008American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World, New Analysis Shows:
The American West is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, according to a new analysis of the most recent federal government temperature figures. The news is especially bad for some of the nation's fastest growing cities, which receive water from the drought-stricken Colorado River. The average temperature rise in the Southwest's largest river basin was more than double the average global increase, likely spelling even more parched conditions.
Are You What You Eat? New Study Of Body Weight Change…
clock | March 28, 2008This week's PLoS Computational Biology is chockful of interesting articles, including these:
Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content:
This Journal and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) at large are standard bearers of the full potential offered through open access publication, but what of you, the reader? For most of you, open access may imply free access to read the journals, but nothing more. There is a far greater potential, but, up to now, little to point to that highlights its tangible benefits. We would argue that, as yet, the full promise of open access has not been…
ejohnson | March 28, 2008If you like your cheeseburgers double and your redwoods giant, you may just like the large versions of this week's channel photos.
Several of the photos—those featured on the Life Science, Physical Science, Environment, Humanities & Social Science, and Technology channels—come from Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides' new book, On the Surface of Things; you can read more about the inspiration behind these spectacular images in Page 3.14's interview with Felice Frankel here.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to…