Brain and Behavior
pharyngula | August 22, 2012A recent meeting of neuroscientists tried to define a set of criteria for that murky phenomenon called "consciousness". I don't know how successful they were; they've come out with a declaration on consciousness that isn't exactly crystal clear. It seems to involve the existence of neural circuitry that exhibits specific states that modulate behavior.
The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals.…
oracknows | August 17, 2012A couple of days ago, I did one of my usual bits of pontification about alternative medicine, this time around pointing out how religion facilitates the magical thinking that undergirds so much pseudoscientific medicine and how the belief systems that underlie so so much of alternative medicine resembel the belief systems that underlie religion. However, in retrospect, I suspect that I might have gone a little too far. Although the two share many aspects, alternative medicine is not in general a religion (with the possible exception of reiki, which, for all intents and purposes, is faith…
gregladen | August 4, 2012It seems like everybody in the Old Testament is either married, about to get married, or was recently married but something went terribly wrong. This may be becasue the bible is about marriage. The Old Testament is a history, it is a set of laws, and it is an enthnography, and the themes themes that hold the whole thing together are warfare, resorces, marriage, and a heavy dose of odd cultish rule-making about food and blood. Marriage is a central theme of cultural life, so of course it plays an important role in a culture's own history and ethnography. But is the bible, as one example of…
gregladen | August 2, 2012One in three or four women in the United States will have been raped or seriously assaulted sexually by the time they reach a few decades in age. That will have been done by one or more men. Most people who are killed by another person are killed by a man. This is true whether the killing is legal or illegal. Very few people in Western society get through their entire lives without being affected either directly or nearly directly by some sort of violent crime of some kind or another, and that crime was almost always committed by a man. Wars are mostly fought by men, and are typically…
pharyngula | July 23, 2012The NY Times is touting a computer simulation of Mycoplasma genitalium, the proud possesor of the simplest known genome. It's a rather weird article because of the combination of hype, peculiar emphases, and cluelessness about what a simulation entails, and it bugged me.
It is not a complete simulation — I don't even know what that means. What it is is a sufficiently complex model of a real cell that it can uncover unexpected interactions between components of the genome, and that is a fine and useful thing. But as always, the first thing you should discuss in a model is the caveats and…
pharyngula | July 12, 2012I'm always telling people you need to understand development to understand the evolution of form, because development is what evolution modifies to create change. For example, there are two processes most people have heard of. One is paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood — a small face and large cranium are features of young apes, for instance, and the adult human skull can be seen as a child-like feature. A complementary process is peramorphosis, where adult characters appear earlier in development, and then development continues along the morphogenetic trajectory…
pharyngula | June 30, 2012We do not have a rational drug policy. There are potent and dangerous drugs that are socially accepted because hey, we've always drunk alcohol and smoked cigarettes, while there are milder, far less dangerous drugs that are damned because they're new and unfamiliar. And so we throw people in prison for long jail terms if they are caught with some marijuana, while people can go out every weekend and drink themselves into an abusive, obnoxious state, and we just tell them they're cool.
It is possible to take an objective look at the effects of various drugs on individuals and society, and ask "…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
tsmith | June 15, 2012This is the third of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Mary Egan.
Murine typhus has been in the news recently in Austin, TX, where in May of this year, two people were found to be positive and one died. This rings a number of alarm bells for me, since I live in Texas, and specifically in Austin. I know of another Austin veterinarian who got sick with murine typhus in 2008, when it was first noticed in Austin and investigated by the CDC. I was also working as a relief vet at the Town Lake Animal Center, the municipal shelter, and at the Austin Humane Society, the main nonprofit adoption…
jhalper | June 11, 2012Geneticist Dr. Maya Schuldiner has a lab full of the latest, shiniest robotic equipment. So why is she showing us pictures of socks? What she and her lab group mean to illustrate is that they have trained their research robots to find pairs – not of socks, alas, but of proteins.
The team and their robots entered an area of research in which protein matches had previously been painstakingly identified one at time – and discovered hundreds of new pairs in one fell swoop. Scientists are interested in these pairs because they are necessary for transporting signaling molecules – a group that…
oracknows | May 29, 2012When I saw the latest screed from that very living embodiment of crank magnetism, Mike Adams, I chuckled. I sent it around to some fellow skeptics, including, for instance, the crew at The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, as well as acquaintances and friends of mine because I couldn't believe it. Adams, as loony as he is, had topped himself. In the meantime, I couldn't decide whether or not to write about it, particularly after Steve Novella took a swipe at it. After all, there are things that are so loony, so out there, that one seriously has to worry about whether they are the result of…
drorzel | May 4, 2012Enough slagging of beloved popularizers-- how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards, but happily, it's freely available on the arxiv, and all comments and figures are based on that version.
You're just obsessed with Zeilinger, aren't you? All right, what have they done this time? The title is "Experimental delayed-choice…
drorzel | May 2, 2012
Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching | Science Edventures
McCrickerd points out it is only through dissatisfaction that we change our behavior. An instructor with an overly-enhanced self sees no reason to change when something bad happens in class. "Not my fault they didn't learn..." And who else does a lot of teaching? Teaching assistants, that's who. Graduate students with a raging case of imposter syndrome. When something goes wrong in their classes, "It's my fault. I shouldn't even be here in the first place..." Yeah, that's a real motivator.…
gregladen | April 27, 2012The attention of the Two Little Cousins and Huxley the Baby was easily diverted to the back of the house while Cousin Randy slipped out the front door into the cold dark night wearing the red suit and fake beard, carrying a bag of toys and a strap of sleigh bells. Suddenly, Cousin Chris exclaimed that she heard ringing sounds, and this made everyone stop talking and listen, theatrically. Sure enough, there was the sound of bells from somewhere outside! The two little cousins had a good idea what this meant; Huxley the Baby did not. Then, Grandpa exclaimed that he thought an animal had…
oracknows | April 16, 2012Periodically, I like to make fun of homeopathy and homeopaths. I realize that to some that might seem like the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel, but it is amusing and educational. However, it's not always amusing. For instance, I am not amused when I see The One Quackery To Rule Them All (my favored term for homeopathy these days) being used either in areas where a lack of treatment can result in great harm (and, given that homeopathy is nothing more than water shaken up a bit with a magic spell, that's what homeopathy is, a lack of treatment) or when I see homeopaths promising what…
oracknows | March 30, 2012If there's one thing that I've learned that I can always--and I do mean always--rely on from the antivaccine movement, it's that its members will always be all over any new study regarding vaccines and/or autism in an effort to preemptively put their pseudoscientific spin on the results. It's much the same way that they frequently storm into discussion threads after stories and posts about vaccines and autism like the proverbial flying monkeys, dropping their antivaccine poo hither and yon all over science-based discussions. At the risk of sounding like a hopeless suck-up to my readers, I've…
oracknows | March 16, 2012The Autism File bills itself as a magazine dealing with all aspects of autism. In reality, it's basically a crank magazine dedicated to autism biomedical quackery plus a generous helping of antivaccine fear mongering. In fact, this passage should tell you all you need to know about the publication:
Autism File is a lifestyle guide to achieving better health. It is written with your needs in mind but is not a substitute for consulting with your physician or other health care providers. The publisher and authors are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use…
jtoney | March 9, 2012
Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson put forth the controversial idea of using LSD, yes, LSD to reduce alcohol abuse. Is there any scientific evidence for this?
Published today in the Journal of Psycholpharmacology, researchers took a careful look at a wide range of studies ("meta-analysis") and concluded:
...repeated doses of LSD - for example, weekly or monthly - might elicit more sustained effects on alcohol misuse than a single dose of LSD.
And:
Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who…
lborkowski | February 27, 2012There's a growing body of research linking childhood trauma (abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, etc.) to impaired brain development and functioning. Maia Szalavitz at TIME's Healthland blog describes the findings of new study by Harvard researchers (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences):
Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood. These changes may leave victims…
oracknows | February 24, 2012Back in September, I merrily applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to the service of deconstructing the overwhelmingly silly fear mongering by a group known as SANE Vax over the alleged discovery of HPV DNA in the HPV vaccine. SANE Vax, as you may recall, is a group founded by a woman named Norma Erickson dedicated to spreading misinformation about the HPV vaccine. If you peruse the SANE Vax website, you'll see that the common antivaccine tropes are all there; they're just directed mainly at the HPV vaccine. The hysterial fear mongering over the alleged discovery of DNA fragments of…