January 15, 2008
A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature a story about climate change and Atlantic cod, an old love of mine from my time on the Gulf of…
January 10, 2008
There were a mess of interesting items in the New York Times Magazine annual "Ideas" issue last December 9, but I keep thinking of this one every time a) I wait to make a left-hand turn or b) see a UPS truck. Short v: Avoid left turns and save ...
Here's the whole thing:
Left-Hand-Turn…
January 6, 2008
You're supposed to bring Adirondack chairs in for the winter, to make them last longer. But I like to leave them in the garden, sitting in their comfortable circle. They look tough, as mountain chairs should. And they remind me the garden, and spring and summer, await.
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January 4, 2008
Spatial cognition research is a major interest of mine. This one's a doozy. From ScienceDaily, Jan 3, 2008:
Gay Men Navigate In A Similar Way To Women, Virtual Reality Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2008)
Gay men navigate in a similar way to women, according to a new study from…
January 4, 2008
A New York Times piece by Atul Gawande gives some good news and bad news about a life-saving checklist developed to prevent fatal infections in intensive care units.
The good news:
A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly…
January 1, 2008
A 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…
December 29, 2007
Last month, when all the "Best Books of 2007" lists came out, several regulars on a science writers list-serve I'm on expressed chagrin that most of the most prominent lists held few science books. Even defining "science book" broadly, the New York Times Review Notable Books list contained just one…
December 28, 2007
At Mind Matters, the expert-written blog I manage for Scientific American, I've posted a review of the material and papers we covered in that blog's first year. It was interesting to see how the blog echoed the interests of the larger neuroscientific world. The opener:
Mind Matters - The First…
December 27, 2007
The best things I read this year, in no particular order:
"Falling Man: A Novel" (Don DeLillo)
"Tree of Smoke: A Novel" (Denis Johnson) This is almost cheating, as I'm still in the midst of reading it. But it'd have to dive a long way in the last few pages to not stay on the list. I'll be brave…
December 25, 2007
Each December the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury has a gingerbread-house exhibit and competition. This year's was better than ever, with some amusing political entries.
I'm not sure which I liked better - "Mission Accomplished," which tests the idea of whether a gingerbread house can be grim…
December 7, 2007
If you've a taste for scholarly review papers (and who doesn't?!) and an interest in fear and learning (ditto), a rigorous but substantial treat awaits you, free, in the January issue of Nature Neuropsychopharmacology. Gregory Quirk, a former post-doc in the lab of fear-research pioneer Joe…
October 27, 2007
Music is alive and well
I long ago grew weary of complaints about the demise of classical music -- a demise based on dropping sales and and market share. Similar complaints had been voiced about tennis, another thing I love. In both cases the hand-wringing about falling ticket or record sales or…
October 10, 2007
This week's post at Mind Matters, the Scientific American blog I edit, looks at an intriguing study of gene-environment interactions in abused children. Charles Glatt, who wrote the review, outlines the rather encouraging results of this study, which suggest -- with all the usual caveats about…
September 19, 2007
McClure Strait, long the bottleneck in the Northwest Passage, has been opened by warming seas.
A warming globe has created what a lot of very cold explorers could not find: Arctic melt has opened the Northwest passage, as described in good stories at ABC.com, ScienceMode, and in Nature:
The most…
August 29, 2007
We've long accepted that hormones can make you amorous, aggressive, or erratic. But lately neuroscience has been abuzz with evidence that the hormone oxytocin -- which also acts as a neuromodulator -- can enhance at least one cognitive power: the ability to understand what others are thinking. In…
August 24, 2007
Grace Paley passed away, at 84, after a long battle with breast cancer. I heard her read once at a tribute to Howard Norman here in Montpelier, and her presence was as lively, funny, and riveting as her stories are. The Times story on her passing sums it up well:
Grace Paley, the celebrated writer…
August 23, 2007
Here's a juicy one from the Aug 24 Science.
Labs in Switzerland and the UK have independently used visual tricks to induce "out-of-body" experiences in healthy lab volunteers. At the UK lab -- the ever-productive Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London -- they seem to have combined some…
August 17, 2007
A recent study in the American Geophysical Union'sJournal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres confirms that it really is getting hotter. The study found heat waves in Europe have doubled in length and that extremely hot days are three times as common as a century ago.
From the AGU press release:…
August 16, 2007
A splendid -- and to parents and young'n's, painfully relevant -- bit of research news from Science :
Every parent can use a little help now and then, and birds are no exception. Some species even use nannies to feed and care for chicks. These 'daycare' babies don't seem to do any better than…
July 7, 2007
My article on Williams syndrome and human sociability is now on the New York Times Magazine web site, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html
This was one of the more enthrallling stories I've worked on. Williams syndrome rises from a genetic deletion of about 20-25 of…
June 1, 2007
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the…
May 4, 2007
As the folks at Pure Pedantry point out, the discovery that stress precedes volume reductions in the hippocampus in PTSD is a significant insight and settles a long-running debate: Do stress and depression shrink the hippocampus (a brain area vital to learning, memory, and navigation), or does a…
May 3, 2007
This makes me think of the old line about fading actors or writers when death brings them renewed attention: "Good career move." My post about leaving Seed's Scienceblogs and the conflict between blogging and more serious work got picked up and pondered by Andrew Sullivan at his Atlantic blogging…
May 1, 2007
A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore.
With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home…
April 17, 2007
From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.
As the PLOS Biology review notes,
Anyone who has…
April 16, 2007
Here's a pretty picture worth a look: a spinning 3-D view of populations of new neurons in a rat hippocampus. Check it out at
The Scientist : Brain Cell Video
Needs a fast connection, so take a pass if you're using dial-up.
February 21, 2007
I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race."
The study in question seems to contradict many…
February 19, 2007
Maybe it sounded good at the editorial meeting: Have Christopher Hitchens, supposedly funny, clearly chauvinistic, write about Why Women Aren't Funny. And so we gots, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens -- who seems ever more a boorish drunk rather than a quick-witted friend of the vine; an…
February 13, 2007
At this week's Mind Matters (the expert-written blog seminar I edit for sciam.com), Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania ponder how stimulating environments (read: better digs) and (of all things) fatherhood can build brains and…
February 12, 2007
Kuroda Seiki, "A Nap," 1894. from Kuroda Memorial Hall online
I love midday naps, and before I had kids and all time evaporated, I used to take 2 or 3 a week: Kick back the recliner, shut 'em for 20-30 minutes, and wake up a new man. Worked for Churchill during the war, so why not for me? Like a…
