neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007
The former Larsen Air Force Base Complex 1A Titan ICBM Facility is listed on eBay.
The facility comes complete with 16 underground buildings, including three 160 ft. tall missile silos, three 4-storey terminal equipment buildings, two antenna silos and a 100 ft. diameter control dome building. That amounts to 45,000 square feet of useable space, excluding tunnels.
The facility is situated on a 57-acre site in Central Washington, between Moses Lake and Ricksville - that's just 10 minutes away from Interstate 90. It could be yours for a mere $1.5m. (A downpayment of $300,000 is required.)
(…
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007Ed Boyden, leader of the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group at MIT, has just started a blog.
I wrote about some of Boyden's work earlier this year. His is one of several groups that have used a light-sensitive bacterial protein called channelrhodopsin to develop an "optical switch" that can activate or inhibit neurons.
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007
I took this photograph about three years ago, while on holiday in the Charente region of central France.
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007Over the past few days, there have been numerous scary news stories about a "brain-eating" amoeba that has killed six boys and young men this year (three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona, the most recent case being that of 14-year-old Aaron Evans, who died on September 17th).
The amoeba in question is Naegleria folweri, a thermophilic (heat-loving) free-living organism that is commonly found in rivers, fresh water lakes and soil all over the world.
N. fowleri infects humans very rarely, but infection is usually fatal. It normally occurs during water-related activities such as…
neurophilosophy | September 28, 2007At Wired, filmmaker Ridley Scott discusses the forthcoming remastered final cut of Blade Runner. This classic 1982 film depicts a dystopian futuristic society based on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and was recently voted as the best science fiction film ever made by 60 top scientists.
The interview includes quotes about the film from various people, including this one, in which Craig Venter, the billionaire geneticist who has just had his genome published, gives his views on cognitive enhancement:
The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that…
neurophilosophy | September 28, 2007
Today's issue of Science contains the winners of the 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the journal's website has an online exhibit that features all of the winning images.
The competition is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who created it with the editors of Science five years ago. The aim of the competition is to make science comprehensible to more people, and to encourage the growth of scientific literacy, at a time in which it seems to be becoming increasingly rare.
The image above comes from a poster by aeronautical engineer David Willis and…
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007
This image from Google Earth shows the swastika-shaped barracks at the Coronado Naval base near San Diego.
Following objections from the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Navy has set aside $600,000 of its 2008 budget for landscaping and rooftop adjustments that will camouflage the shape of the building.
"We told the Navy this was an incredibly inappropriate shape for a structure on a military installation," says Morris S. Casuto, the ADL's regional director. "[But we] never ascribed evil intent to the structure's design."
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007The new issue of Monitor on Psychology, the American Psychology Association's monthly magazine, has a special feature on the mental health of military personnel.
The feature includes articles about the military's efforts to recruit and train psychologists, and the changes that are being made, following criticisms earlier this year, that the Department of Defense is neglecting the mental health of its troops.
(Via Mind Hacks)
Related:
Military over-reach & mental health
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007
(Image credit: C. Franklin/ PLoS One)
In the first study of its kind, a team of Australian researchers have used satellite telemetry to show that crocodiles can navigate hundreds of kilometres to return to their home rivers after being moved.
Mark Read, of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, and his colleagues captured three large male estuarine corocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) from the Nesbit and Wenlock Rivers in northern Queensland. The crocodiles were transported 56, 99 and 411 km by helicopter, and fitted with specially designed satellite transmitters (above) before being…
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007A handful of good blogs that I've found recently:
Neural Dump
Logical Science
Dave's Daily Dose of Science
Scientific Misconduct Blog
neurophilosophy | September 26, 2007The New York Times has an article about how Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott (director of the National Center for Science Education) were duped into appearing in Expelled, a film that puts forward the case for intelligent design and depicts science as something that limits freedom of thought.
PZ has written about the affair at length.
neurophilosophy | September 26, 2007Just posted on the Seed website is an article about the evolution of language by Juan Uriageraka, from the October issue of Seed Magazine. Most of the article concerns the role of the FoxP2 gene in the brains of songbirds. (I discussed this gene earlier in the week in my post about echolocation.)
Also on the Seed website are the winners of the second annual Seed Science Writing contest, in which the contestants were asked to write an essay about what it means to be scientifically literate in the 21st century. The winners are Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Disclosure, by Thomas M.…
neurophilosophy | September 26, 2007In the Annals of Neurology, a team of physicians, led by Tony Ro of the Department of Psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, report the unusual case of a woman who began to feel sounds following a stroke
The woman, a 36-year-old professor, suffered a rare type of cerebrovascular accident: a lacunar infarct, in which a small blood vessel deep within the brain became blocked. This led to damage in the ventrolateral thalamic nucleus (VL) on the right side of her brain.
When first examined, some 9 months after her stroke, the woman reported significant changes in her sensations and…
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007I received an email earlier today from one Nelson Abreu, who offered a criticism of the experimentally-induced out-of-body experiences that were reported recently, in the hope that I might post a reaction on my blog.
In his message, Mr. Abreu tells me that the studies "reveal interesting things about dissociated perceptions under virtual reality conditions, but [do not] say much about the OBE." He also provides several links to the International Academy of Consciousness (IAC), and suggests I follow them if I want to gain a better understanding of out-of-body experiences.
It only took me a…
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007The Learner.org website has a large collection of video teaching modules for high school, college and adult students, including modules on the brain and mind.
The Brain module has 32 film clips, ranging in length from 5-20 minutes. They include films about Phineas Gage, the visual system, sensori-motor integration, the role of synaptic plasticity in learning, the brain's language centres and neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric conditions.
The 35 videos in the Mind module include films on brain mechanisms of pleasure and addiction, the role of the frontal lobes in cognition and awareness…
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007Both EurekAlert and ScienceDaily have a story called "Sense of taste different in women with anorexia nervosa". The stories have been "adapted" from a press release issued earlier today by the University of California, San Diego.
This "adaption" is nothing more than a reproduction of the press release, spelling mistakes included:
...a new study finds that women with anorexia have distinct differences in the insulta -- the specific part of the brain that is important for recognizing taste -- according to a new study by University of Pittsburgh and University of California, San Diego…
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007To celebrate the 100th email issue of its research digest, the British Psychological Society has asked leading psychologists and bloggers to write a few paragraphs about the most important psychology experiment that's never been done.
Contributors include Susan Blackmore, Richard Gregory, Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks and ScienceBlogs' own Chris Chatham. The contributions are being published at the BPS Research Digest blog over the next few weeks.
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007Recently, I've been getting the occasional duplicated comment. I thought this had something to do with the comments being held in moderation, but, as Brian explains, it appears to be because of an error.
Thanks Brian.
neurophilosophy | September 24, 2007
Echolocation - or biological sonar - can be thought of as an auditory imaging system that is used by organisms in environments where vision is ineffective. It involves the emission of vocalizations by the animal, and the detection of the echoes of those sounds, which are used to produce three-dimensional information about the environment.
Echolocating organisms understand the world largely via the interpretation of the acoustic reflections, and possess specialized neural circuitry that performs the computations necessary for the perceptual organization of auditory information. This…
neurophilosophy | September 24, 2007Grrl Scientist has just posted the 32nd edition of Encephalon at Living the Scientific Life. As usual, the carnival includes entries from the best neuroscience and psychology blogs on the web.
The next edition of Encephalon will be hosted at GNIF Brain Blogger on October 8th. If you'd like to contribute, send permalinks to your blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.