purepedantry | March 12, 2008Things I did not visualize reading this morning. 1) David Mamet wrote a piece in the Village Voice -- of all places -- disavowing his faith in government.
Money quote:
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years…
purepedantry | March 12, 2008A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not.
A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that.
Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in…
purepedantry | March 11, 2008Well, that's good:
Medical scientists just starting at universities have been, more and more often, left empty-handed when the federal government awards grants. So on Monday the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to medical research, announced a little help: a new program that will award $300-million to as many as 70 young scientists.
The Early Career Scientist Program will pay salaries and provide research money for people who have held tenure-track positions for only two to six years, with the goal of supporting them through the early period before they are…
purepedantry | March 11, 2008The association between sleep and memory performance has been relatively well-documented. Studies in animals and humans have shown memory deficits in both declarative and procedural memory associated with sleep deprivation. (The subject is slightly complicated because whether sleep deprivation affects a task can depend on particular task demands and may vary from study to study. See this review for more details.)
What has received much less examination is the role of daytime sleep in aiding memory performance. Only a few studies have examined whether the "power nap" aids retention, and…
purepedantry | March 10, 2008I am hosting Encephalon next week on Monday (March 17th). If you would like to submit a neuroscience-related post to this carnival, email it to encephalon [dot] host {at} gmail [dot] com.
I will be writing it on Sunday night, so try and get your posts in by 7 pm if you want them to be included.
purepedantry | March 10, 2008MarkH, SciBling at denialism blog and fellow MD-PhD student, takes issue with my post about a move to ban "poaching" of doctors from African countries. I can't say I am entirely surprised, since I knew that post would be controversial. I want to respond to his -- in my opinion very substantive -- criticisms.
(You might notice that people on ScienceBlogs don't always agree. No worries. I have no expectation that a group of smart and diverse people will agree on everything, particularly in science. I respect the opinion of everyone who blogs here including Mark, so I don't lose sleep in…
purepedantry | March 7, 2008Unbelievable.
Unbelievable is simply the only word that can describe this article in the Lancet. Citing problems with retention of doctors in under-treated populations in Africa, Mills et al. argue that direct recruitment of doctors by groups in the West should be criminalized and the individuals perpetrating it prosecuted in the International Criminal Court.
The authors present clear and compelling data to support the assertion that there is a brain drain of health care workers from Africa. Further, they show that this brain drain is exacerbating an already severe doctor shortage in…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has launched a broadside at NYTimes Science Blogger John Tierney (also here) over what he (Quiggin) considers politicization of science:
One of the big problems with talking about what Chris Mooney has called The Republican War on Science is that, on the Republican side, the case against science is rarely laid out explicitly. On a whole range of issues (evolution, passive smoking, climate change, the breast-cancer abortion link, CFCs and the ozone layer and so on) Republicans attack scientists, reject the conclusions of mainstream science and promote…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. (Exodus 3:2)
Moses was high when he saw that bush. Or so speculates Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:
High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008I got this flier from the American Academy of Neurology in the mail, and it cracked me up.
Check out under the title:
It actually says: "Now Featuring More Basic Science than Ever!"
Does that sound like a cereal commercial to anyone else?
American Academy of Neurology: Now with more cornflakes and fruity nut-clusters than ever!
Having never been to the AAN meeting, I have to ask: what was the major activity at these meetings before? Dancing and carousing? I guess it must have been medical practice lectures because that is the only thing I can think of them going away from...
High-five…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008How do you track the relative contributions of a plant species in an ecosystem? When you are talking about thousands of square miles of land area this can be an incredibly daunting task, but it is very important because it provides important information related to invasive species that may be displacing their native counterparts in an ecosystem.
I remember in a biology course a Stanford we were shown how you perform experiments like this using trees in a nearby nature reserve. In order to a get a sense of the geographic distribution of different types of tree, we would walk around the park…
purepedantry | March 4, 2008Don't believe in evolution? Just look to the weeds in the sidewalk:
Like other members of its family, Crepis sancta produces two types of seeds. Heavy seeds fall into the grass below the plant, whereas lighter seeds with feathery tails drift in the wind to new habitats. Ecologists have long known that plants in patchy habitats, such as islands, for example, produce more heavy seeds than light seeds, presumably because wind-swept seeds tend to get lost in the ocean. But controlling for environmental changes has been difficult.
A good study system turned up in Pierre-Olivier Cheptou's backyard…
purepedantry | March 4, 2008The NYTimes has a slide show of "migraine" art provided by Oliver Sacks from his book Migraine. They attempt to illustrate what a migraine aura looks like.
Neat. I would put one up on my wall if I didn't feel so horrible that it was the pictorial prelude to someone's intense pain.
purepedantry | March 3, 2008I nearly aerosolized Diet Pepsi all over my computer screen when I read this:
It a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there's strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.
McCain was responding to a question from the mother of a boy with autism, who asked about a recent story that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the National Vaccine Injury…
purepedantry | March 3, 20081) Two of my favorite bloggers -- Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle and Steve Higgins of OmniBrain -- have teamed up to form at group blog called Of Two Minds. Adjust your links accordingly.
2) Encephalon 40 is up at Mind Hacks. Thanks Vaughan!
purepedantry | March 3, 2008Conventional wisdom + bigger microphone = excellent journalism!
High fives all-around for Charlotte Allen who repackages conventional wisdom about sex differences to a degree rarely attained by print journalists.
My favorite part:
Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men…
purepedantry | March 3, 2008I don't know if you have seen these, but Florida Orange Juice started a new ad campaign featuring commercials with the voice of Tom Selleck. (Magnum PI does like his orange juice.)
Anyway, the commercials show a beaker into which is being poured OJ. Tom Selleck then proceeds to say:
"Food scientists have spent years with their beakers and flasks and chemistry sets, trying to come up with something as good for you as Florida orange juice," says Selleck's deep baritone. "But they've never come close. Start your day with almost 25 percent of your daily recommended fruit and vegetable servings…
purepedantry | February 29, 2008That is amazing:
The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It's inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.
On both the top and bottom…
purepedantry | February 29, 2008Jay Cost at RCP uses a prisoner's dilemma game to show why the absense of institutional structures is likely to yield a socially inefficient result in the Democratic primaries. He looks at the super delegates' behavior in terms of what is good for them vs. what is good for the party:
The core problem is that the Democrats have empowered the super delegates to break a tie, but they have not empowered anybody to manage the super delegates. There are no rules that demand the super delegates convene and discuss with one another. There is nobody in charge of regulating the debate. There is…
purepedantry | February 28, 2008...literally:
Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.
The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.
"I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it's very economical," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
In the event that shooting the moon fails, we can always nuke it. You can sign…