purepedantry | April 11, 2007TCS published an interview with Freeman Dyson about his iconoclasm and his optimism about the future of science and humanity:
Benny Peiser: One of your most influential lectures is re-published in your new book. I am talking about your Bernal Lecture which you delivered in London in 1972, one year after Desmond Bernal's death. As you point out, the lecture provided the foundation for much of your writing in later years. What strikes me about your remarkably optimistic lecture is its almost religious tone. It was delivered at a time, similar to the period after World War I, when a new age of…
purepedantry | April 10, 2007Many of you will be shocked -- shocked -- to discover that ejaculation turns off men's brains. Well only briefly...
Janniko et al., after publishing an earlier paper on the subject in 2003, have chosen again to examine the activation in the male brain during ejaculation. They use PET scanning -- a technique that measures the metabolic activity of different parts of the brain.
Why a further paper on the subject, you ask? Did they not answer all the important questions in the prior paper?
Well unfortunately the early study had what we scientists like to refer to as a methodological…
purepedantry | April 10, 2007If you don't want to overeat, make sure they don't bus your table:
People watching the Super Bowl who saw how much they had already eaten -- in this case, leftover chicken-wing bones -- ate 27 percent less than people who had no such environmental cues, finds a new Cornell study.
The difference between the two groups -- those eating at a table where leftover bones accumulated compared with those whose leftovers were removed -- was greater for men than for women.
"The results suggest that people restrict their consumption when evidence of food consumed is available to signal how much food they…
purepedantry | April 9, 2007I just thought this paper was kind of cool. It reviews the evidence from twin studies that shows that certain regions of the brain show very high levels of genetic heritability. Heritability, as I discussed in an earlier post, is a gross measure of the genetic as opposed to the environmental contribution to a particular trait. It is calculated by what are called the concordance rates between monozygotic and dizygotic twins for a particular trait -- the concordance is the percentage of twins that share the trait. (I would hasten to point out that this is not a perfect measure by any…
purepedantry | April 5, 2007Not to be outdone in ridiculousness by the younger generation, Keith Richards has admitted to inhaling his father's ashes:
Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.
In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.
"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.
"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't…
purepedantry | April 5, 2007There was a debate in the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for some time about whether the shrinkage observed in the hippocampus -- a structure involved in learning and memory -- was the result of the stress or was a vulnerability factor for the disease.
We know that high levels of cortisol -- a stress hormone -- can kill neurons. So you could argue that the stress and stress hormones that cause PTSD could also result in the reduction in hippocampal volume. This is the so-called neurotoxicity hypothesis.
On the other hand, individuals who get PTSD could have some underlying genetic or…
purepedantry | April 5, 2007You know, waiting might have been just as effective:
It took a Coast Guard helicopter to rescue a man and his pet cockatoo from the heights of a pine tree after he got stuck trying retrieve the $2,000 bird.
William Hart, 35, had climbed about 60 feet up the tree to get the bird after it escaped from its cage and flew out a bedroom window. Television video showed him standing on a branch Tuesday evening awaiting rescue, the exotic white bird apparently tucked under his shirt.
The bird, Geronimo, got out after Hart's daughter apparently forgot to latch his cage after feeding him, Hart told the…
purepedantry | April 2, 2007From AFP:
-- Discover Magazine announced in 1995 that a highly respected biologist, Aprile Pazzo (Italian for April Fool), had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. The creatures were described as having bony plates on their heads that became burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speed -- a technique they used to hunt penguins.
-- Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment…
purepedantry | April 2, 2007I was just in London, and a friend of mine clued me into this British comic named Bill Bailey. Priceless.
Anyway, this is not even vaguely science-related, but there is a clip below the fold that is too funny.
He was also in this BBC show that I am in love with -- or at least in lust with -- at the moment called Black Books. Here is a clip from that:
purepedantry | April 2, 2007This article struck my eye because all of the literature I was familiar with said the opposite. The authors looked a weight gain in the mother during pregnancy and found that the children of the mothers who gained too much or even normal amounts of weight -- by the existing standards -- were more likely to be overweight at 3 years old:
Pregnant women who gain excessive or even appropriate weight, according to current guidelines, are four times more likely than women who gain inadequate weight to have a baby who becomes overweight in early childhood. These findings are from a new study at the…
purepedantry | March 29, 2007This is interesting. Researchers at Columbia have established that restricting neurogenesis in the hippocampus improves working memory:
New research from Columbia University Medical Center may explain why people who are able to easily and accurately recall historical dates or long-ago events, may have a harder time with word recall or remembering the day's current events. They may have too much memory -- making it harder to filter out information and increasing the time it takes for new short-term memories to be processed and stored.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…
purepedantry | March 28, 2007This is not just videos of hairy, fat people having sex. This is actual panda porn we are talking about:
Chuang Chuang the panda has been spending his days in front of a big-screen television watching panda porn.
Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand hope the images will encourage him to mate with his partner, Lin Hui, and serve as an instructional lesson in how to do it right.
So far, it's been a tough sell, the zoo's chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, said Tuesday.
"Chuang Chuang seems indifferent to the videos; he has no reaction to what he's seeing on TV," Kanika said…
purepedantry | March 27, 2007If you are like me, you spend a lot of time not thinking about anything in particular. You read a couple papers, get a little work done, and then you stare off into space for a period of pleasant mindlessness.
From a neuroscientist's perspective, we spend a lot of time determining how we react to particular stimuli or how we accomplish certain cognitive tasks. We tend to view the brain as a little black box that coordinates responses to particular stimuli -- admittedly elaborate responses, but responses nonetheless.
What we don't spend much time doing is figuring out what we are doing…
purepedantry | March 26, 2007This is absolutely ingenious:
Patients rely on their physicians to recognize signs of trouble, yet for common heart murmurs, that ability is only fair at best. Fortunately, the solution is simple: listening repeatedly. In fact, intensive repetition -- listening at least 400 times to each heart sound -- significantly improved the stethoscope abilities of doctors, according to a study presented today at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting.
After demonstrating last year that medical students greatly improved their stethoscope skills by listening repeatedly to heart sounds on…
purepedantry | March 15, 2007We're on vacation, so no posts until the 25th of March. Check back then.
purepedantry | March 13, 2007I love the comedian Eddie Izzard. This is primarily because he is one of the few I have ever seen that even tries to make relatively intellectual jokes about history and science. Anyway, enjoy this video about physics and Pavlov's other animals.
purepedantry | March 12, 2007David Ignatius has a great column about the underestimated power of American education. American-style education is being rapidly exported all over the world, and foreign students are lining up to attend American universities at both a graduate and undergraduate level. In some cases, these students stay. In some cases, they return, bringing the values they learned here to their home countries:
America's great universities are in fact becoming global. They are the brand names for excellence -- drawing in the brightest students and faculty and giving them unparalleled opportunities. This is…
purepedantry | March 12, 2007David Wallis, writing in SFGate, has a very interesting article about politics and political cartoons. I like all the historical background, although I don't entirely buy the one-sidedness of the censorship he seems to suggest:
Adolf Hitler understood the power of cartoons. They made him crazy ... crazier. Long before World War II, David Low of Britain's Evening Standard routinely depicted Hitler as a dolt, which infuriated the thin-skinned fuhrer so much that the Gestapo put the British cartoonist on a hit list.
The CIA also appreciated the huge influence of little drawings. Declassified…
purepedantry | March 12, 2007Jeffrey Rosen has an excellent piece in the NYTimes magazine about the increasing use of neurological arguments in the courts:
One important question raised by the Roper case was the question of where to draw the line in considering neuroscience evidence as a legal mitigation or excuse. Should courts be in the business of deciding when to mitigate someone's criminal responsibility because his brain functions improperly, whether because of age, in-born defects or trauma? As we learn more about criminals' brains, will we have to redefine our most basic ideas of justice?
Two of the most ardent…
purepedantry | March 11, 2007The Bistro Styx
by Rita Dove
She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her. What's this,
I thought, lifting a hand until
she nodded and started across the parquet;
that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray,
from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl
down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though
she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape
tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse
my blighted child, this…