Brain and Behavior
tqa | March 25, 2008
It's been just over 5 years since the start of the Iraq war, and we've just passed another of those morbid little milestones that get so much attention in the press. This particular milestone has a nice round number on it - 4,000 - which apparently makes it somehow more important, or significant, or something than less neat numbers like 2526, or 3981, or 1135. The media's spent a little while circling over the battlefield, waiting for the 4,000th American corpse to hit the ground. The milestone arrived and passed more or less on schedule, and the media will settle back down and wait for the…
ejohnson | March 21, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the larger 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 one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be…
cortex | March 21, 2008Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" - it still manages to carefully dissect the data. In short, the author concludes that the earlier behavioral work was more interesting and definitive than the more recent study that looked inside the black box of the brain. Anyways, it's worth a read. (Longtime readers will know that I've got a few quibbles with brain imaging boom myself.) What I'd really…
gregladen | March 21, 2008A new study out of Cornell measures gender balance, or lack thereof, across the 100 largest publicly held companies in New York State. The findings indicate that while about half the workers in these companies are women, less than 15 percent of the board and executive officer positions are held by women.
Figure Caption: Women still comprise less than 15 percent of the total board director and executive officer positions in the 100 largest public companies headquartered in New York state, according to a new study on women leaders in New York published by the Women's Executive Circle of New…
mixingmemory | March 20, 2008You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of like my constantly telling myself, as I ride the bus to campus in the morning, that I'm going to stop drinking coffee. As soon as I get off the bus, I walk 30 or so feet to the little coffee stand where they have my 16 oz. coffee waiting for me, 'cause they know as well as I do that I ain't quittin'. Cognitive neuroscience is like coffee.
Anyway, one of the imaging papers I've read since…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008Mind Hacks discusses an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry that argues that the DSM-IV -- the diagnostic manual that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders -- should include internet addiction. Vaughan is quite legitimately skeptical:
Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with 'internet addiction' have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.
In fact, 'internet addiction', however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-…
clock | March 17, 2008Loss of Egg Yolk Genes in Mammals and the Origin of Lactation and Placentation:
Egg yolk contains the nutrients required for the development of the nonmammalian vertebrate embryo. These nutrients derive by and large from a single set of proteins, vitellogenins, which are produced in the liver and provide or transport amino acids, lipids, phosphorous, and calcium to the egg. Mammals have evolved new nutritional resources for their developing and early offspring, such as lactation and placentation. However, the evolutionary timing and molecular events associated with this major phenotypic…
clock | March 16, 2008Early Bird Doesn't Always Get The Worm:
Competing against older brothers and sisters can be tough work, as any youngest child will tell you. But new research from a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that when it comes to some birds, you should reserve any underdog sympathies for the first born -- or rather, first laid -- siblings as well.
Many Teens Spend 30 Hours A Week On 'Screen Time' During High School:
While most teenagers (60 percent) spend on average 20 hours per week in front of television and computer screens, a third spend closer to 40 hours per week…
mixingmemory | March 16, 2008That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any circumstances, going to read another imaging study. If you read my last post, or have been hanging around here for a while, you may have realized that I'm not a big fan of cognitive neuroscience. More often than not (I'd argue, always), you can learn the same thing and more by doing behavioral studies, and in most cases it'll cost you several hundred dollars less per participant. For…
mixingmemory | March 15, 2008I really do love illusions of all sorts, in large part because they fit nicely into my narrative about the fallibility of human thought, but illusions are also great as windows into the ordinary working of our brains. For example, color afterimages provide direct evidence for opponent-processing theories of color vision, and when we find aftereffects for a particular class of stimuli, we can be pretty certain that class of stimuli has particular neurons or populations of neurons that encode it. And speaking of aftereffects, there's a really cool paper in the March issue of the journal…
clock | March 15, 2008
Bird Brains Suggest How Vocal Learning Evolved:
Though they perch far apart on the avian family tree, birds with the ability to learn songs use similar brain structures to sing their tunes. Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center now have an explanation for this puzzling likeness.
Alligators' Muscles Move Lungs Around For Sneaky Maneuvers In Water:
Without a ripple in the water, alligators dive, surface or roll sideways, even though they lack flippers or fins. University of Utah biologists discovered gators maneuver silently by using their diaphragm, pelvic, abdominal and rib…
ejohnson | March 14, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the larger 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 one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be…
clock | March 13, 2008Snakes Vault Past Toxic Newts In Evolutionary Arms Race:
Snakes don't eat fugu, the seafood delicacy prepared from blowfish meat and famed for its poisonous potential. However, should a common garter snake wander into a sushi restaurant, it could fearlessly order a fugu dinner.
Bipolar Disorder: Manic Mouse Made With One Gene Missing:
Bipolar Disorder (BPD or manic-depressive illness) is one of the most serious of all mental disorders, affecting millions of individuals worldwide. Affected individuals alternate between states of deep depression and mania. While depression is characterized by…
clock | March 11, 2008There are 48 new articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Rate, comment, send trackbacks....
The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies:
Only a limited number of complete mitochondrial genome sequences belonging to Native American haplogroups were available until recently, which left America as the continent with the least amount of information about sequence variation of entire mitochondrial DNAs. In this study, a comprehensive overview of all available complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of the four pan-American…
cortex | March 11, 2008I've always been morbidly fascinated by examples of choking. It doesn't matter if it's Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, or Shaq at the free-throw line, there's something unbelievably poignant and nightmarish about watching a world-class performer get sabotaged by their own brain. I can't bear to watch, and yet I can't look away.
Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has helped illuminate the anatomy of choking. She uses putting on the golf green as her experimental paradigm. When people are first learning how to putt, the activity can seem daunting…
cortex | March 11, 2008This whole Spitzer affair got me thinking about the psychology of power. When you look around the world, it's clear that so many of our problems are due, at least in part, to abuses of power. From Mugabe to Putin, Chavez to Cheney, there's obviously something deeply intoxicating and dangerous about positions of power. (Especially when that power feels absolute.) Being in complete control - or having the illusion of complete control - can seriously warp our sense of morality, fairness and ethics. (Of course, the case of Eliot Spitzer, and perhaps Bill Clinton, would argue that a sense of power…
cortex | March 10, 2008Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control:
Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the video required subjects to ignore salient stimuli, much like the stroop task]. Half the students were told to ignore the words, while the rest weren't required to exercise any self-control. Blood glucose levels were measured before and after this task. The students exercising self-control had significantly lower glucose levels…
purepedantry | March 10, 2008MarkH, SciBling at denialism blog and fellow MD-PhD student, takes issue with my post about a move to ban "poaching" of doctors from African countries. I can't say I am entirely surprised, since I knew that post would be controversial. I want to respond to his -- in my opinion very substantive -- criticisms.
(You might notice that people on ScienceBlogs don't always agree. No worries. I have no expectation that a group of smart and diverse people will agree on everything, particularly in science. I respect the opinion of everyone who blogs here including Mark, so I don't lose sleep in…
oracknows | March 10, 2008Damn you, mercury militia.
I had had another topic entirely in mind for this week's post, but, as happens far too often, news events have overtaken me in the form of a story that was widely reported towards the end of last week. It was all over the media on Thursday evening and Friday, showing up on CNN, Larry King Live, the New York Times, and NPR. It happens to be the story of a girl from Georgia named Hannah Poling whose case before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which had originally part of a much larger proceeding known as the Autism Omnibus, was settled. This settlement…
denialism | March 8, 2008Has anyone noticed how my sciblings are really ornery at the moment?
We've got PZ bringing out the angry stick over Wilkins' criticism of Dawkins. Physioprof is getting ready to pop Greg Laden in the nose over this thread (and I tend to agree it needs a rewrite).
And then Shelley broke my heart by posting
this video mocking anesthesiologists that I posted a couple months ago. And here I thought my sciblings paid attention to me *sob*.
Mommy and Daddy fighting and my sciblings ignoring me are making me feel insecure and frightened and as a result I'm going to lash out at Jake for this…