purepedantry | March 9, 2007We all know that inhaled anesthesia is over the short-term impairs neurological function; that is sort of the point using it for surgery.
However, a debate exists about whether inhaled anesthetics have long-term neurological consequences as well. In light of that debate Bianchi et al, publishing in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, have shown that in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease some anesthetics increase histological measures of severity. Before you get excited though, let me tell you that the results are mixed.
Background
An important point to understand in this paper is that…
purepedantry | March 9, 2007First a German man sues three teenagers for making his ostrich impotent, now another is quite literally dividing the possessions in his divorce:
A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck.
Police in the eastern town of Sonneberg said on Friday the trained mason measured the single-storey summer house -- which was some 8 meters (26 feet) long and 6 meters wide -- before chainsawing through the wooden roof and walls.
"The man said he was just taking his due," said a police spokesman. "But I don…
purepedantry | March 7, 2007Steven Levitt from the Freakonomics blog has started a discussion about whether the tenure system is worth it. His argument is that the tenure system supports the mediocre and should be scrapped:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as…
purepedantry | March 6, 2007Stuart Taylor has an interesting article on Supreme Court predictions in the National Journal. He doesn't see a dramatic shift rightward happening:
Abortion. The Roberts Court has already voted in a big abortion case, on the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. But we probably won't know who won until June.
Pro-choicers noisily fear, and pro-lifers hope, that the Court will uphold this congressional ban on a late-term abortion procedure likened by critics to infanticide because the fetus is destroyed when mostly outside the womb. In the process, many…
purepedantry | March 6, 2007I posted a couple months ago about neuron to glia (in this case oligodendrocyte) synapses in the hippocampus, and how researchers had shown that these synapses were capable of LTP. This was an example of two themes 1) the brain is a tricky business -- particularly with respect to information processing and 2) glia are much more important than we thought they would be.
Here is another set of articles in that vein. Publishing independently in Nature Neuroscience, Kukley et al. and Ziskin et al. has shown that there are neuron to glia synapses in the corpus callosum AND that these synapses…
purepedantry | March 5, 2007Not the kind of story you read everyday:
Three teenagers may be on the hook for a hefty fine if a court decides that their festive firecrackers outside an eastern German farm scared the libido right out of an ostrich named Gustav.
Rico Gabel, a farmer in Lohsa, northeast of Dresden, is claiming $6,450 in damages for the alleged antics of the three youths, ages 17-18, between Dec. 27 and 29, 2005.
According to his lawsuit, the farmer claims that fireworks set off by the boys made the previously lustful Gustav both apathetic and depressed, and thus unable to perform for a half-a-year with his…
purepedantry | March 5, 2007The NYTimes magazine has an excellent article on the controversy within science as to the meaning of God. This is different from the cultural controversy as to the validity of Revelation because it is concerned with why religion may have evolved as opposed to whether it evolved.
Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is…
purepedantry | March 4, 2007When Ecstasy is Inconvenient
by Lorine Niedecker
Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows --
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?
Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.
Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.
purepedantry | March 2, 2007I don't know if you have ever seen this show on Animal Planet -- Meerkat Manor. It is disgustingly cute. It is about a family of meerkats that were followed over several years.
Anyway, I love that show, so lately I have had meerkats on the brain.
Some other researchers are also apparently interested in meerkats. Publishing in the journal Science, they have recently shown that meerkats teach their young how to hunt.
Thorton and McAuliffe examined hunting in meerkats. Meerkats eat basically anything they are bigger than -- as you will note if you watch the show above. This would…
kcontreary | February 28, 2007Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah has a blog referring to a WSJ article impugning economic jurisdiction in questions outside the traditional bounds of economics. Specifically, the article cites a paper recently publicized by Cornell University claiming to establish a causal link between early childhood television viewing and autism. The thrust of the article is that the statistical tools used by economists are ill-equipped to address such questions and should be treated as suspect by the natural sciences.
The answer, as with all things, is a bit of yes and a bit of no.
I would like to begin…
purepedantry | February 27, 2007A damn-building mammal...get your mind out of the gutter:
Beavers grace New York City's official seal. But the industrious rodents haven't been spotted here for as many as 200 years -- until this week.
Biologists videotaped a beaver swimming up the Bronx River on Wednesday. Its twig-and-mud lodge had been spotted earlier on the river bank, but the tape confirmed the presence of the animal.
"It had to happen because beaver populations are expanding, and their habitats are shrinking," said Dietland Muller-Schwarze, a beaver expert at the State University of New York College of Environmental…
purepedantry | February 27, 2007Bill Gates, writing in the Washington Post, makes two concrete appeals to help maintain American competitiveness:
Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies.
Education has always been the gateway to a better life in this country, and our primary and secondary schools were long considered the world's best. But on an international math test in…
purepedantry | February 26, 2007Arrgh. Avast ye dogs. This Encephalon will have a pirate theme -- largely because I am coming off a wicked three day flu extravaganza, and I am still slightly delirious. Be like when the plague took me whole crew. Arrgh.
So enjoy your piracy and brains, say aye.
Ouroboros discusses the validity of a mutant mouse with oxygen radical repair defects as a model for Parkinson's. Once me an' me mates were discussing how to stop the Parkinson's. We decided that none of us would get it if we all walked the plank and were consigned to the Briny Deep. Ain't no oxygen down there. Only Davy…
purepedantry | February 21, 2007In June, we talked about a new human papiloma virus (HPV) vaccine that was being opposed by a Christian group in Colorado on the grounds that it might promote premarital sex. HPV is a virus that commonly infects the female reproductive tract. It has many strains, and some of those strains confer a risk for cervical cancer.
Merck produced a vaccine to the high risk strains called Gardasil. It had been shown that for the vaccine to be effective in preventing infection in those strains it was important to administer the vaccine before the girls begin sexual activity -- HPV is transmitted…
purepedantry | February 21, 2007Nicholas Genes -- the host of Grand Rounds and an illustrious ER resident at Mount Sinai -- interviews me on Medscape about this blog. Enjoy my shameless self-promotion.
purepedantry | February 21, 2007I am hosting Encephalon on Monday February, 26th. You can submit to Encephalon by emailing me at jamesjyoung [at] gmail {dot} com, by no later than 7 pm on Sunday night.
Thanks.
purepedantry | February 20, 2007Hi everyone, and welcome to Grand Rounds, vol. 3 no. 22.
The Oscars are this Sunday, and -- since I know we all look forward to this yearly 4-hour marathon of farcical self-absorption -- this edition of Grand Rounds will be themed according to movies nominated for awards this year.
However, I have been informed that a fair number of GR's readers are not from the US and are unfamiliar with our peculiar brand of navel gazing. Thus, let me summarize what happens during the Academy Awards:
-- The American public (and a fair number of other people) will participate in the World Cup of…
purepedantry | February 19, 2007A squirrel running around the innards of the plane grounded a Dallas-Tokyo flight:
An American Airlines flight made an unscheduled landing after pilots heard something skittering about in the wire-laden space over the cockpit.
The airline blamed the emergency landing of the Tokyo-Dallas flight with 202 passengers on a stowaway squirrel.
"You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane. You don't want anything up there," said John Hotard, spokesman for the Fort Worth, Texas-based airline.
He said pilots feared the animal would chew through wiring or cause…
purepedantry | February 19, 2007I saw Ghost Rider last night, and I have a brief review:
In this movie, there are many farcical things: demons, irrational property damage from physics-flouting motorcycles, Nicholas Cage's acting, etc. However, the most flagrant absurdity -- the most laughably impossible event -- is when Nicholas Cage's character turns down a sexually willing Eva Mendes and unceremoniously shows her the door.
In the physical universe that we presently inhabit there is no conceivable way that a heterosexual male would behave in that manner. It is practically a law of nature.
Frankly, it put a pall over…
purepedantry | February 19, 2007The Man He Killed
by Thomas Hardy
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because --
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like -- just as I --
Was out of work -- had sold his traps --
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-…