purepedantry | August 30, 2006The Synapse #6 is being hosted on The Mouse Trap on Sunday, September 3rd. Submission guidelines here.
purepedantry | August 30, 2006Those of you who read an earlier post here noted that I was somewhat skeptical of the technical aspects of the so-called ethical stem cells. I felt that there were several technical hurdles that had to be surmounted before this technology could be used reasonably.
It turns things were even worse than I thought.
New Scientist reports that Nature has issued a clarification to the article because many had complained that the scientists had been disingenuous in suggesting that no embryos had been destroyed in that set of experiments. In fact, 16 embryos had been destroyed.
Early press reports…
purepedantry | August 29, 2006The Neurophilosopher has a fabulous long post on the discovery of the neuron as the fundamental unit of the nervous system.
I would note when you get to the part about Ramon y Cajal that his picture of the neurons in a chick cerebellum formed the red banner for this site, and a picture of him is part of the green banner. He is my favorite neuroscientist. (For those of you who haven't noticed if you keep reloading the site you get a random banner. There are six.)
purepedantry | August 29, 2006There is an excellent discussion on Prometheus about whether it is OK to distort the means of science to justify certain ends. Money quote:
This is of course an issue much broader than climate change, and at its core is about how science is to operate in a democracy. The practice of science, insofar as it is related to action, is all about questions of means. That is, science can tell us something about the consequences of different possible courses of action. Science however cannot tell us how to value those consequences, which is the territory of ethics, values, religion, ideology, etc..…
purepedantry | August 28, 2006Wouldn't we all like to know how to control hairiness? Women complain that they have too much, and spend half their lives eradicating the little bastards. Men have too little on the tops of their heads, and, let us say, carpets in other places. Well the molecular pathway that regulates hair density has been established. (Is there anything science can't do? I will answer. No.)
Setting aside for a moment the issue of putting this information to medical use, the issue of how hairs are created can also be generalized into one of the great problems of molecular biology: how to take a…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006You be the judge?
Meanwhile, Cruise has been busier pushing Scientology than anyone knew. According to a just-declassified State Department schedule, Cruise visited then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on June 13, 2003, just an hour after Armitage had met with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. (It's speculated that Armitage outed Valerie Plame as a CIA spy at that meeting.)
Cruise was accompanied by Tom Davis, head of the L.A. Celebrity Center for Scientology, and Kurt Weiland, Scientology's veep of communications.
What was discussed? "Only Armitage can answer that question,…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006So Pluto is no longer a planet (totally destroying everything I learned in elementary school), and I get the feeling the little guy is bummed out about it. I have a list of suggestions of things Pluto can do to raise it's self esteem:
1) Become a free agent and join another solar system
2) Crash into (invade) another planet to show it who's boss, then fail to adequately prepare for that planet's reconstruction
3) Attract attention of NASA...then lose all the probes they send
4) Circle the wagons with the other "Dwarfs" at the dork table at lunch, mock other planets with your superior…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006First, I would note that I think Jared Diamond is a fabulous scientist, and a brilliant man. His work in Guns, Germs and Steel was genius, and well qualifies him in my book as someone we should all listen to.
However, Terry Hunt, writing in the American Scientist, questions one of the arguments he forwarded in his more recent book Collapse.
One of the core arguments in the book is the example of the people of Easter Island or Rapa Nui. Diamond attempts to document how the people who settled the island exhausted all their resources, and he uses this as a parable for the environmental…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006This is completely unacceptable:
The constant calls, the people frightening his children, and the demonstrations in front of his home apparently became a little too much.
Dario Ringach, an associate neurobiology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, decided this month to give up his research on primates because of pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project, which seeks to stop research that harms animals.
Anti-animal research groups are trumpeting Ringach's move as a victory, while some researchers are worried that it could…
purepedantry | August 27, 2006I have talked before about evidence that there is no new neurogenesis in the adult cortex, but that paper used stereological techniques.
A new paper in PNAS shows a more direct method to demonstrate that there are no newly created neurons in the adult cortex -- and their technique for this is so clever that I have to talk about it. They use a spike in the atmospheric levels of Carbon 14 isotopes after nuclear testing -- before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 -- to carbon date the creation of new cells in the human brain.
First some background: If you want to start a fight among…
purepedantry | August 23, 2006The press is all in a tizzy about so-called ethical stem cells, but this still indicates a really limited understanding of how embryonic stem (ES) cells work. (Frankly, if I had a dollar for every time I read bad reporting on ES cells, you and I would not be talking. I would be Tahiti...with Natalie Portman.)
Anyway, in an article published in advance online in Nature, Klimanskaya et al. show that single cells derived from preimplanation genetic diagnosis (PGD) can be used to grow new stem cell lines.
Some background:
People go to in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics for a variety of…
purepedantry | August 23, 2006I don't really know why, but for some reason this Flickr page makes me want to buy an "I [Brain] Cognitive Science" T-shirt. Brainy women are hot.
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks.
purepedantry | August 23, 2006Did you know that ants snap their mandibles together so fast that they can throw themselves in the air? Check out this (click on the video link to watch it):
When trap-jaw ants need to get out quick, they use their heads, not their legs to escape. This large species of Costa Rican ant smashes its jaw into the ground, causing the ant to catapult up and away from danger.
Videos of Odontomachus bauri show that this ant can propel itself 8 centimetres up into the air using jaws that snap shut at a speed of nearly 65 metres per second -- perhaps the fastest predatory strike measured.
Brian Fisher…
purepedantry | August 22, 2006OmniBrain has a funny post on the secret of antigravity.
The Neurophilosopher has a interesting post on how neuropathic pain could be treated with menthol, which activates cold receptors.
The American Scientist Online publishes an interview with Marc Hauser on his model of an inborn moral system. Sounds suspiciously like repackaged Kant to me, but worth the read. (Hat-tip: Thinking Meat.)
purepedantry | August 22, 2006Before, I talk about a mouse model that is resistant to depression, I think I had better talk about mouse models of depression so that everyone is on the same page. If you ask a nonscientist whether they think there can be a mouse model of depression, you would probably get a raised eyebrow if the person didn't totally laugh in your face. But mouse models of depression -- ridiculous as they may sound -- are actually important learning tools for understanding the disease...that is as long as you think of them in context.
How would we define a mouse model of depression? Well, since it is…
purepedantry | August 22, 2006Right:
An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy -- a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.
It claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.
Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland's Nobel…
purepedantry | August 21, 2006Dark matter definitely exists:
New observations of a great big cosmic collision provide the best evidence yet that invisible and mysterious dark matter really does exist.
The collision, between two huge clusters of galaxies, is the "most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, that we know about," said Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The impact split normal matter and dark matter apart, rendering the dark matter's gravitational presence observable.
Dark matter is sort of like the G-spot. We knew it was there. We knew it…
purepedantry | August 21, 2006BMI or Body Mass Index is a measure of obesity that is used to approximate the health problems associated with being overweight. It is really easy to calculate. The formula for it is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. Here are some calculators for those of your reluctant to mosey into the metric system. Anyway, after you calculate it values below 20 are generally considered underweight. Values between 20 and 25 are considered normal weight. Over 25 is considered overweight. Over 30 is considered obese (with various classes of obese determined by how large the…
purepedantry | August 21, 2006OK, so I am not actually on this paper, but my boss is. It is also what I am doing my thesis on, so I thought I might mention it.
The article is entitled "Convergent evidence that oligodendrocyte lineage transcription factor 2 (OLIG2) and interacting genes influence susceptibility to schizophrenia" and was published in the August 4th issue of PNAS.
For many years all the work on schizophrenia focused on the dopamine system -- I think this is largely because dopamine-affecting drugs are used to treat it. There was also a great deal of interest in other transmitters such as glutamate, in part…