omnibrain | January 30, 2007 GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a diet drug derived from Marijuana which suppresses the appetite. This is especially surprising for obvious reasons - perhaps a little ironic?!
Clearly the marijuana plant contains many many different compounds - but who would have thought that one of them suppressed the urge to gorge yourself on cheeze doodles and icy pops. The drug will soon be entering into human trials to combat obesity.
Don't get too exited about getting high on the drug though since that doesn't happen to be one of the side effects. Well...that is unless you want to find the secret…
omnibrain | January 30, 2007Here's the main gist of his argument - I really wish this was a conversation in the cartoon though.
I suppose some of you will argue that the Big Bang started a natural series of events that led to a chance development of intelligent life. And then the life did all of the intelligent stuff. But what is the logic behind arbitrarily picking a tiny slice of time and acting as if it's the only important part of a process that requires many steps?
Consider the simple act of picking up a pencil. It requires your brain and your muscles, but it also requires you to exist in the first place. And that…
omnibrain | January 29, 2007
Ahh.... anti-war protests in D.C. and the creative signage that goes along with it. Check out the rest of my friend Audrey's pictures :)
omnibrain | January 29, 2007Lincoln seemed to have all sorts of problems - bipolar depression, unipolar depression, thyroid problems, bad gas, gargantuanism - you name it and someone has claimed he had it! But now it looks like, according to a study of worms, his nerves shattered?
Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a genetic disorder that literally shattered his nerves, a new study on worms suggests.
Many of the president's descendants have a gene mutation that affects the part of the brain controlling movement and coordination, researchers discovered last year. The mutation prevents nerve cells from "communicating…
omnibrain | January 28, 2007 Check out the brains of mice on drugs. This site is a very strange one to say the least- it starts with a bunch of high mice in a club of sorts just struggling to stand up. Then the interactive flash demo starts in which you have to drag a mouse into a comfy chair which transports it into a weird device that shows what's happening to the mouse's brain depending on what it snorted, smoked, or injected earlier.
Freakin' weird - a wee bit trippy ;). Especially from an academic institution.
Check out the Mouse Party.
omnibrain | January 27, 2007From Thom Parks:
The American Chemical Society is rich ground for blogging.
Scientific American has a piece about the American Chemical Society
spending close to half a million of membership dollars hiring two
lobbyists to defeat open access.
PBS just aired a documentary about a journalist at the American
Chemical Society who was fired for reporting that the White House was
suppressing federal scientists for speaking about the link between
hurricanes and global warming.
http://www.thirteen.org/air/111/latest.html
You can watch the episode, which is titled "Science Fiction."
http://www.…
omnibrain | January 27, 2007Ok.. so perhaps it's not a total museum dedicated to homosexual animals - but it looks like a pretty good sized exhibit. Unless you're in Norway you might be missing the exhibit though. Anyone want to sneak some photos for us?
From male killer whales that ride the dorsal fin of another male to female bonobos that rub their genitals together, the animal kingdom tolerates all kinds of lifestyles.
A first-ever museum display, "Against Nature?," which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.
Here'…
omnibrain | January 26, 2007Here's a little Monty Python action about a brain surgeon.
D. P. Gumby - My Brain Hurts!
and a little P-Funk below the fold...
Parliament Funkadelic "Maggot Brain" 1978
omnibrain | January 26, 2007Here's the truth so far...
- A WEB EXPERIMENT -
(In no particular order)
1. Cigarettes are bad for you.
2. Men and Women are equal.
3. Global Warming is real.
4. It's not all relative.
5. Intelligent Design is wrong.
6. Over consumption is a serious problem.
7. The Millenium Development Goals are worthy*.
8. Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential.
9. Shit happens.
10. Creationism is silly. (also, see 5)
11. Science, for better or for worse, is all around.
------------------------------------------------------------------
What the hell is this? See here
omnibrain | January 26, 2007
SMOKERS who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habit easily - a discovery that might open new avenues of addiction research.
A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage of various kinds after a stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were in many cases able to quit smoking quickly and easily - saying they had lost the urge to smoke altogether.
The insula receives information from the body and translates it into subjective feelings such as hunger, pain and craving, including craving for drugs…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007It seems that alcoholics just can't seem to get a joke. In this study from Germany, participants underwent a series of tests including, mood, intelligence, memory, psychomotor skills, and their ability to enjoy a joke.
For example, one of the jokes tested on the subjects began as follows: It was Mother's Day. Anna and her brother had told their mother to stay in bed that morning. She read her book and looked forward to breakfast. After a long wait she finally went downstairs. Anna and her brother were both eating at the table.
The subjects were given a choice of five punchlines:
a) Anna said…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007These companies/groups are all on everyones shit list.
Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.
This group includes Elsevier and Wiley among others.
This groups consultant:
also recommended joining forces with groups…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007From the Improbable Research blog and Reuters:
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China -- and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported on Wednesday.
The bizarre sequence events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu in the summer with his father who was delivering bottles of gas, the Nanjing Morning Post reported.
A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007Answer... They both have tasteless protests when someone dies from something they attribute to the wrong thing.
A Scientology group targeting "toxic" medications plans to protest in Sudbury today for a public airing of any drugs given to the teen accused of murdering another boy at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School last week.
The group's gripe hits as the Sudbury community struggles to cope with Friday's stabbing death of straight-A student James Alenson, 15.
Scientologists are demanding at the demonstration that:
the types of drugs given to accused killer John Odgren, 16, and the…
omnibrain | January 24, 2007I posted this story a week or so ago about Nobel prize winners living longer. Some people didn't seem to believe the study and now it seems that even some Nobel Prize winners are questioning the results.
Winning the Nobel Prize can add almost a year and a half to a laureate's life, two British economists say. But though he's 81, Harvard physicist Roy J. Glauber, a 2005 Nobelist, isn't buying it.
So why doesn't Roy buy it?
But Glauber said the study might have been biased by the fact that many laureates aren't selected until they're quite old.
Glauber won his Nobel 40 years after publishing…
omnibrain | January 24, 2007Old fun: Music on an iPod | Newer fun: Watching porn on the iPod | Newest fun: Listening to lectures!
Apple Inc is letting NJIT Professors post their lectures, and other audio and video class information on its iTunes U website - where students can go and then download whatever material they want onto their computers, i-pods, mp3 players and even their cell phones.
NJIT Instructional Design Professor Blake Haggerty says if you know you'll be able to download a lecture, "you have the opportunity of really paying attention in class, and then reviewing afterwards what was said."
Ohh.. and don't…
omnibrain | January 23, 2007I used to love these books! Check out this funny post about Mr. Bump over at Mind Hacks.
I've been notified of a rare case of focal retrograde amnesia that doesn't seem to have been reported in the medical literature.
Focal retrograde amnesia is where memory for past events and personal information is lost, while the ability to remember new events is spared.
The case is described in Mr Bump Loses His Memory by Roger Hargreaves (ISBN 1844229866).
omnibrain | January 23, 2007There is an interesting article from todays New York Times about magical thinking in children well worth checking out.
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking -- the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick -- are far…