clock | May 1, 2007Press-release just in - Deep Sleep: Researchers Discovery How To Simulate Slow Wave Activity:
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During slow wave activity, which occupies about 80 percent of sleeping hours, waves of electrical activity wash across the brain, roughly once a second, 1,000 times a night. In a new paper being published in the scientific journal PNAS, Tononi and colleagues, including Marcello Massimini, also of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, described the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to initiate slow waves in sleeping volunteers. The researchers…
clock | May 1, 2007One chronobiological pioneer is leaving and another one is coming in. Gene Block is going to UCLA and Joe Takahashi is leaving Northwestern (What are Fred Turek and others going to do there without him? What happens to the Howard Hughes institute?) and coming in to head the new Center for Circadian and Systems Biology. A very interesting game of musical chairs. Stay tuned.
clock | May 1, 2007Famous Galapagos Tortoise, Lonesome George, May Not Be Alone:
"Lonesome George," a giant Galapagos tortoise and conservation icon long thought to be the sole survivor of his species, may not be alone for much longer, according to a multinational team of researchers headed by investigators at Yale University. New research led by biologists Adalgisa Caccone and Jeffrey Powell in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, with the strong support and cooperation of the Galápagos National Park and Charles Darwin Research Station, has identified a tortoise that is clearly a first…
clock | May 1, 2007Jake, Chad, Rob, Janet, Chad again and Chad again. have already written everything important about today's Buzz topic - the undergraduate research. What I will do is add a few examples and you draw conclusions why this worked (or not) for each one of them.
A Self-Starter
Kevin Messenger loved snakes all his life. He did his own research in high school, a standard survey of herps in the Sandhills area of North Carolina. He presented that at a meeting of the Herps society while a high-school senior. He went to college to NCSU because he wanted to work with Hal Heathwole. He got his own…
clock | May 1, 2007...because weird sex does not only happen on Fridays....
Remember this? Many have asked themselves (I did) where does it go, i.e., what kind of female genital tract can accomodate such a large penis. But one person actually did not stop at wondering but set out to find out. You can find out who and how and why in Carl Zimmer's today's NYTimes article about today's PLoS-One paper.
clock | May 1, 2007Out in the real world, especially in the Red States and the Bible Belt, atheists tend to go on with their lives without actively tooting their horns every day everywhere. But online, the Internets are teeming with atheists suggesting that there may be more of us in the general population than what the various censuses show, even if one controls for such things as self-selection, i.e., repressed atheists tending to vent their atheism online if prohibited from doing so offline. The Carnival of the Godless has been going on for some time now and it has grown really big, to the point of…
clock | May 1, 2007A guy 'jebo jeza', ahem, literally fucked a hedgehog in Serbia and ended up in the ER. Do kids there these days don't even know their slang? 'Jebo jeza' means something along the lines of 'being in big trouble' or 'having everything go wrong for you'. This guy accomplished that for himself, I guess....unless this is, as is likely, an urban legend.
clock | May 1, 2007In a large proportion of the surface of our planet, people are not supposed to go to work today. Not here, though. Eh, the good old days back home when my parents would go off for a ten-day vacation on May Day and leave my brother and me to rule the house and host parties...
clock | April 30, 2007I am teaching tonight (and preparing for the lecture today) so there will be very light blogging today, naked or not (tune in tomorrow).
I am also struggling with writing the cover letter for PLoS. I have never written (or even read) a cover letter before so I asked some friends for samples of theirs and it makes me really uncomfortable how self-advertising they are supposed to be: me, me, me. I have as big ego as anyone, but writing a couple of pages about how great I am just rubs me wrong. I'll keep trying...
clock | April 29, 2007Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
- Marcel Proust
clock | April 29, 2007The word 'circadian' has a certain mystique about it for people not in the know, thus it is not surprising that there are several bands around with that word incorporate in their names. I know I blogged about it before but I am too lazy right now to search my archives for it. Anyway, here is the newest addition to the lineup, an Ohio band called the Circadian Skyline.
clock | April 29, 2007Wing Morphing Of The Swift Could Inspire New Aircraft Designs:
A swift adapts the shape of its wings to the immediate task at hand: folding them back to chase insects, or stretching them out to sleep in flight. Ten Dutch and Swedish scientists, based in Wageningen, Groningen, Delft, Leiden, and Lund, have shown how 'wing morphing' makes swifts such versatile flyers. Their study, published as cover story in Nature on April 26, proves that swifts can improve flight performance by up to three-fold, numbers that make 'wing morphing' the next big thing in aircraft engineering.
Female Ticks Have…
clock | April 28, 2007Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
clock | April 28, 2007Life of a Labrat
Open and Shut?
Open...
Open Access News
Recurring Decimals.....
T. taxus
Under the Dome
Journalology
clock | April 28, 2007Just came back from the first Durham blogging teach-in of the year. Pam, Brian and Anton were there and we introduced some new interesting people to the wonderful world of blogging (and they started their own new wordpress blogs).
If you are in the Triangle NC area, we are doing the same thing next week - same place and time: Durham public library 10am-12noon.
clock | April 27, 2007Last week's Casual Friday study on Cognitive Daily tried to look at the way various curse words are used and perceived by their blog readers.
Today, the results are in and, though not surprising, they are quite interesting. The sample is probably skewed towards well-educated folks interested in cognitive science, as well as towards the US readers (or at least English-speaking readers), but they had a large enough sample this time to get significant differences between sexes, if not races.
Do you find "bitch" less offensive if you are a dog breeder? Or if you are a regular reader of Bitch…