Brain and Behavior
clock | January 2, 2008Holidays slightly altered the publication dates at PLoS this week, so I had to wait until Wednesday to bring you my picks from PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS ONE. Of course, look beyond my own picks and look at all the new articles to see what you are interested in:
Recurring Ethanol Exposure Induces Disinhibited Courtship in Drosophila:
Alcohol has a strong causal relationship with sexual arousal and disinhibited sexual behavior in humans; however, the physiological support for this notion is largely lacking and thus a suitable animal model to address this issue is instrumental. We…
cortex | January 2, 2008Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section:
In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people who come out as gay almost always stick with that gay identity for the rest of their lives. Diamond's research reveals that - at least for some females - that story might be wrong.
She followed dozens of women for 10 years, as they graduated from college, worked their first jobs, fell in love, changed their minds, and tumbled into the arms of…
ddobbs | January 1, 2008A backlash is brewing against the mirror neuron theory, or at least its overextension. (Fair disclosure: I was part of the alleged problem.) I picked this up distinctly at the Society of Neuroscience meeting last November. I've seen it in the literature since. Last week, I convinced Greg Hickok, a cogsci/language researcher at UC Irvine, to make his case in Scientific American's Mind Matters for checking mirror-neuron-theory overreach. An excerpt is below, and you can check out the whole thing at Mirror Neurons -- Rock Stars or Backup Singers?
Sorry, couldn't resist the photo.
Hickok, I…
developingintelligence | December 31, 2007Originally posted on 12/16 2006:
The term "executive function" is frequently used but infrequently defined. In attempting to experimentally define executive functions in terms of their relationship to age, reasoning and perceptual speed, Timothy Salthouse reviewed the variety of verbal definitions given to construct of "executive function." Although these differ in terminology and emphasis, they are clearly addressing a similar concept:
"Executive functions cover a variety of skills that allow one to organize behavior in a purposeful, coordinated manner, and to reflect on or analyze the…
zooillogix | December 28, 2007As many of you might have noticed, Benny and I have been off for the week for Christmas in San Francisco. The plan was to visit the Zoo on Wednesday, which obviously did not happen, so we checked out the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a twelfth time. Anyway, our apologies for the lack of posts. We will pick up next week but we leave you with this piece, directly lifted from this Wired article.
Genetic engineering isn't just for scientists in ivory towers or corporate R&D labs anymore. Researchers are still creating new mice and crops every week, but the tools and knowledge necessary to create…
clock | December 27, 2007There are 30 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. Here are my picks:
Ultrasonic Communication in Rats: Can Playback of 50-kHz Calls Induce Approach Behavior?:
Rats emit distinct types of ultrasonic vocalizations, which differ depending on age, the subject's current state and environmental factors. Since it was shown that 50-kHz calls can serve as indices of the animal's positive subjective state, they have received increasing experimental attention, and have successfully been used to study neurobiological mechanisms of positive affect. However, it is likely that such calls do not only reflect…
oracknows | December 26, 2007The whole post-Christmas thing left me without time to do anything other than a couple of brief bits. Consequently, given Deirdre Imus' two recent appearances on the Huffington Post, I thought it would be as good a time as any to resurrect this post from June 27, 2005. For those of you who haven't been regular readers that long (and I'm guessing that's most of you), this should be a good primer about why I consider the Huffington Post to have been a bastion of antivaccination misinformation and propaganda since its very inception. With the exception of Arthur Allen's occasional posts, the…
oracknows | December 23, 2007I've mentioned before that it irritates me that Don Imus is back on the air. It's not that I give a rodent's posterior that he made an offensive comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team that lead to his being fired from his previous gig. It's actually more because he somehow managed to displace the radio show that I usually listened to on my way to work in the morning (and in my office on mornings when I didn't have any clinical responsibilites), Curtis & Kuby, which may have been getting a little bit long in the tooth but was still usually far more entertaining on its worst day…
clock | December 20, 2007Thursday night is a good time to see what is new on PLoS Pathogens, Computational Biology, Genetics and Neglected Tropical Diseases. Here are my picks for the week:
Hemolytic C-Type Lectin CEL-III from Sea Cucumber Expressed in Transgenic Mosquitoes Impairs Malaria Parasite Development:
Malaria is arguably the most important vector-borne disease worldwide, affecting 300 million people and killing 1-2 million people every year. The lack of an effective vaccine and the emergence of the parasites' resistance to many existing anti-malarial drugs have aggravated the situation. Clearly,…
cortex | December 20, 2007Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few interesting studies. The basic moral of these experiments is that we are built to be altruistic. We are social animals that have evolved the ability to care about each other.
Consider a paper recently published in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists at Duke University imaged the brains of people as they observed a computer play a simple video game. Because the subjects were told that the…
sb admin | December 20, 2007 Fortune has announced the year's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, including Prozac for dogs.
"Thank God. We've been so worried since Lucky dyed his hair jet black and started listening to the Smiths."
"Eli Lilly wins FDA approval to put Prozac into chewable, beef-flavored pills to treat separation anxiety in dogs."
It's not just dogs - cats are treated with SSRI antidepressants, along with psychotherapy. If treatment fails to calm behaviour, the next step is neutering. Imagine that veterinary approach integrating with current practices for humans. Patients who have trouble with adhering to…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia.
Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of our neighbors might keep us up at night, though, there's a good reason why they do it (just as there's a good reason why there's a whole business based upon the proclivity of some men to drop loads of cash to listen to a woman pretend to have orgasms over the phone), at least if we're anything like Barbary Macaques (Macaca sylvanus). In a new study published…
retrospectacle | December 19, 2007A commentary today in Nature, by Sahakian and Morein-Zamir, poses the question: if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you?
But I ask, why wouldn't you?
Interest in potions and drugs which increase awareness and "brain power" has been around for thousands of years. Many natural compounds from ginseng to coffee to cocaine have been touted as a dubious panacea for a muddled mind. However in the pharmaceutical age, we are now in possession of agents which actually do enhance cognition through changes in neurotransmitter release. For…
purepedantry | December 19, 2007Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research.
There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable avenues of research by preventing any sampling of geologically interesting localities, but you also don't want to cheat current and future geologists out of seeing these things in their original context, which is still the heart and soul of learning and doing good geology. Many times, these conflicts…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Homo 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…
jrice | December 18, 2007We bring you, as always, the large-scale 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 suneko
Physical Science: Jupiter and its moon Io. From NASA, via pingnews.com
Environment: Oil-covered ruddy duck in Oakland, CA, 11/11/07. From Flickr, via wolfpix…
clock | December 15, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the second one, so…
pharyngula | December 14, 2007
On the one hand, this is a strange tale of mutant, bisexual, necrophiliac flies, and you've got to love it for the titillating nature of the experiments. But on the other, much more interesting hand, it's a story about drilling down deeply into the causes of a complex behavior, and tracing it to a single gene product — and it also reveals much about the way the chemicals sloshing about in the brain can modulate responses to stimuli. Work by Grosjean and others on a simple Drosophila mutant, genderblind, which causes flies to be indiscriminate about gender in their courtship, opens up a…
developingintelligence | December 13, 2007If you encounter a difficult situation, you may be extra careful afterwards, even in a different or unrelated situation. This intuitive statement has recently been confirmed in a laboratory task, and extended to show that such carry-over "conflict adaptation" effects may affect the speed with which you approach subsequent tasks very differently from how it affects the probability of making a mistake.
A task often used to look at conflict is the flanker task: when subjects must respond to an arrow symbol that is surrounded by other arrow symbols, responses will be faster when the surrounding…
clock | December 12, 2007Massive Dinosaur Discovered In Antarctica Sheds Light On Life, Distribution Of Sauropodomorphs:
A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago.
Aging In Salmon Depends On Choosy Bears:
According to George Bernard Shaw: "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." But how fast does that aging occur once started? In the case of populations of salmon in Alaska studied by Stephanie Carlson and…