neurophilosophy | October 30, 2007European reseasrchers, led by David Penny of the University of Manchester, have used a medical imaging technique called Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography to digitally dissect and reconstruct a 1mm-long 53 million-year-old spider that is preserved in a piece of amber.
The pictures, and some links, are below.
Read more at ScienceDaily and the BBC, and see this post for more about the amazing arachnids.
neurophilosophy | October 29, 2007
Bertalan has found the Virtual Labs Series, a fantastic educational resource produced for science teachers and students by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The series includes the Transgenic Fly Virtual Lab, the Bacterial Identification Lab, the Cardiology Lab, the Immunology Lab and - my favourite - the virtual Neurophysiology Lab.
Each of the virtual labs has an interactive set of the appropriate apparatus, which comes complete with background information about the experimental setup to be used and the underlying biological concepts.
At the virtual neurophysiology…
neurophilosophy | October 29, 2007I'm very flattered to have been given two Intellectual Blogger Awards (first by Eric and then by Kate; thank you both). Now, after hard deliberation, I can name five other intellectuals upon which the same honour should be bestowed.
All of the bloggers named below have given me inspiration in one way or another, and, I'm sure, will continue to do so.
So, in alphabetical order by surname...
Vaughan Bell is a neuropsychologist who is undergoing clinical training at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He writes about the kind of things that first got me interested in neuroscience, in posts…
neurophilosophy | October 28, 2007
A new paper about the reproductive behaviour of the spiny anteater, to be published in the December issue of American Naturalist, makes for fascinating - if slightly disturbing - reading.
The spiny anteater (Tachyglossuss aculeatus) is a primitive mammal with an unusual four-headed penis. The animal is difficult to observe in the wild, and does not readily copulate when in captivity, so exactly how the male uses its penis was a mystery.
Stephen Johnston of the University of Queensland and his colleagues obtained a male spiny anteater which regularly produced erections when handled during…
neurophilosophy | October 28, 2007The New York Times Magazine contains a long article about the close ties between evangelical Christians and the Republican party.
neurophilosophy | October 27, 2007The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence has just started a major study into traumatic brain injury (TBI) in British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an accompanying article, the behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms of this "silent injury" are described by the father of an American soldier who sustained TBI during a 24-month tour of duty in Iraq.
The official figures on TBI in American troops are based only on cases involving a penetrative head wound, and evidence published earlier this year in the Journal of Neurosurgery suggests that the high…
neurophilosophy | October 27, 2007
(Image: Ben Osborne)
This photograph of an elephant at a watering hole, by Ben Osborne, has just been announced as the best overall photo in the 2007 Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
"I staked out this waterhole in Botswana's Chobe National Park for three weeks," Osborne says, "taking pictures from my vehicle of thirsty elephants and other animals coming to drink. Sometimes the waterhole overflowed, and this huge bull was the first to indulge in a head-to-toe spa. I focused on the centre of the action, an explosion of texture and colour."
This, and the winning images…
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007Physicist Chad Orzel, who knows a lot more than I do about the mysterious world of quantum mechanics, criticizes the new model of quantum consciousness proposed by Efstratios Manousakis, which I described recently.
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007The new issue of Current Biology has a freely available primer on the amygdala by Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
The amgdala is a small, almond shaped structure found on the medial surface of the temporal lobe, just anterior to the hippocampus. Functionally, it can be thought of as junction between the neural circuits involved in memory and emotion. These two phenomena are intimately linked, and the amygdala is now known to be crucial for that link.
LeDoux is the ideal person to write a primer on this brain structure, as he is one of the world's…
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007
Some 365 million years ago, during the early Devonian period, the Sarcopterygian (or lobe-finned) fish emerged from the sea and gave rise to the first terrestrial tetrapods.
During the course of their evolution, the tetrapods became adapted to life on land. One big challenge faced by the earliest tetrapods was how to interpret the rich tapestry of visual information to which their aquatic ancestors were all but oblivious.
One would think that, having evolved from fish, the visual systems of the early tetrapods would have been poorly adapted to life on land. But new research, just…
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007In a new poll conducted for Halloween by the Associated Press and market research company IPSOS, one third of respondents said that they believe in ghosts and UFOs, and nearly one half said they believe in extrasensory perception.
A Yahoo! News story summarizes the main findings of the AP/ IPSOS poll.
neurophilosophy | October 25, 2007
This film from the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) website features a 24-minute talk called A Journey to the Center of the Mind, by neuroscientist and neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, who heads the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego.
In his talk, "Rama" discusses synaesthesia, phantom limb syndrome (including the case of a woman who experienced phantom menstrual cramps after having her uterus surgically removed), and Capgras Syndrome, a bizarre condition in which patients with damage to the fusiform gyrus believe…
neurophilosophy | October 25, 2007David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and director of the Center for Consciousness, has just announced the launch of MindPapers, an online database of papers about the philosophy of mind.
The database is very comprehensive indeed - it includes about 18,000 published and online papers, subdivided into sections such as the philosophy of neuroscience, perception, synaesthesia, language and thought and vegetative states, coma and the minimally conscious state (which are disorders of consciousness).
neurophilosophy | October 24, 2007
(Image credit: Alex Klochkov)
Here is a rather macabre set of photographs by Alex Klochkov, apparently taken in an abandoned Russian brain research laboratory.
neurophilosophy | October 23, 2007According to Efstratios Manousakis, a professor of condensed matter physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, the key to consciousness could be lie in the quantum effects that occur in the brain when one is viewing ambiguous figures like the spinning silhouette (or Rubin's vase or the Necker Cube).
These optical illusions are ambiguous because at any one instant they can be perceived either in one way, or in the other, but not in both. The image is said to "flip" when our perception changes from one interpretation of the image to the other. In the case of the spinning silhouette…
neurophilosophy | October 23, 2007The New York Times science section has a special issue devoted to sleep.
The feature contains about 10 articles about recent findings in sleep research, including one by Carl Zimmer on how studies carried out on birds are informing us about the functions of sleep.
The title of the post is from a quote that is often attributed to Edgar Allan Poe: "Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them."
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2007
Here's the first 10 minutes of a documentary called Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes. It's about Ben Underwood, a blind teenager from Sacramento who uses echolocation.
At the age of 2, Underwood was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that that affects about one in 5 million children. One year later, his eyes were surgically removed, to prevent the tumour from spreading throught the optic nerve and into the brain.
Soon after his surgery, Underwood realized that he could use echoes to determine the positions of objects, and began to develop this "six…
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2007BioMed Central has just launched an online collection of biological images, film clips and animations.
The Biology Image Library is intended for educational and research purposes, and contains more than 11,000 images covering subjects which include neuroscience, developmental biology, and microbiology.
Although BioMed Central is an open access publisher, the Biology Image Library is only free from within academic institutions which are subscribed. A personal subscription costs $293 a year, and the publishers are offering a free trial which provides access to the whole site for 7 days.
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2007The 34th edition of the neuroscience and psychology blogging carnival Encephalon is now online at Distributed Neuron.