purepedantry | August 9, 2006Apparently the sexual drive is insufficient at motivating many people to leave their apartments:
Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And with millions of gamers hooked on mega-popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), she believes the problem is growing rapidly. In fact, Orzack says as much as 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game. TwitchGuru talks with Orzack to find out more about the issue of game addiction, and…
purepedantry | August 9, 2006Why do we lose all the good ones?
Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91.
The University of Iowa, where he taught for years, announced the death in a statement on its Web site.
In a career that stretched over more than a half-century, Van Allen designed scientific instruments for dozens of research flights, first with small rockets and balloons, and eventually with space probes that traveled to distant planets and beyond.
Van Allen gained global attention in the…
purepedantry | August 9, 2006Earlier this week I argued that the gender differences in cognition, while real, are not substantial enough to explain gender disparities in science. We talked about the work of Janet Hyde; it shows that -- contrary to the popular conception of women and men as psychologically disparate -- men and women are actually quite psychologically similar in most respects.
Some of the commenters brought up the issue of the upper tail, and I want to talk about that specifically. It has been suggested that even if the size of the effect -- the differences in averages between a trait like mathematical…
purepedantry | August 8, 2006That's a lot of Panda:
A giant panda in China has given birth to the heaviest cub born in captivity after the longest period in labor and elsewhere twin pandas each gave birth to twins, Xinhua news agency reported.
Six-year-old Zhang Ka delivered the baby on Monday at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in the mountainous southwest, Xinhua said.
The cub weighed just 218 grams (half a pound), but was still the heaviest panda ever born in captivity, where most cubs are born at between 83 and 190 grams, Xinhua said.
Chinese keep busting out Panda at this rate, they are going to be hawking…
purepedantry | August 8, 2006It's all the lying that really gets me:
The universe could be 2 billion years older than thought, according to a new report by an international team of astronomers. The scientists have found that a nearby galaxy is 15% farther away than previous results suggested. That could mean the age of the universe is off by the same amount. But other experts think it's too early to draw such far-reaching conclusions.
Astronomers have been able to determine relative distances of remote galaxies using observations of a particular type of star that periodically changes its brightness. But in order to know…
purepedantry | August 8, 2006Look, an Israeli inventor has patented the McDonald's playland as a way to escape fires:
A specialised emergency truck would carry an extendible boom that could be raised to a window in a burning building. Jaws at the top of the boom would then expand to clamp a small platform inside the window frame, while a spiralling tube would be dropped from the frame down to the ground.
OK, so maybe it isn't McDonald's playland, but it sure as hell looks like it.
purepedantry | August 8, 2006There is a manatee in the Hudson; which is interesting because I had always associated the Hudson with industrial waste, bad smells, the periodic dead person, and kayakers who seem to have no problem floating amongst those things:
Over the past week, boaters and bloggers have been energetically tracking a manatee in its lumbering expedition along the Atlantic Coast and up the Hudson River.
John H. Vargo, the publisher of Boating on the Hudson magazine, put out an alert last week, much to the incredulity of some boaters.
"Some were laughing about it, because it couldn't possibly be true," Mr.…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006Yikes. You just can't win with embryos:
Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally.
Rakic discussed his preliminary results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2004...But he says he wanted more results to be convinced -- now, 335 mice later, he is.
Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006The traditional Darwinian view of evolution holds that evolution occurs through the selection of the most successful members of a group. Each member of the group is stable over its lifetime. This view was later modified to include the idea that DNA is the stable carrier of this information throughout the lifetime of an organism. But cells do hold other forms of genetic information or so-called epigenetic modifications -- that generally take the form of modifications to DNA such as methylation which influence their transcription. There is some evidence that these modifications are…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006Bedbugs say "I'm back baby!":
After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton could not sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of insecticide with him in bed.
"We were afraid to even tell people about it at first," Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. "It feels like maybe some way your living is encouraging this, that you're living in a bad neighborhood or have a dirty apartment."
Absent from the United States for so long that some thought they were a myth, bedbugs are back. Entomologists and pest control professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006Wasn't here to mention it yesterday, but the Synapse #4 is available at Neurotopia.
The next Synapse is on August 20th at Retrospectacle. Submission guidelines here.
purepedantry | August 7, 2006I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition?
OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this with people you don't know well, but I do.
Anyway, it got me thinking that I should post a summary of what is known. Much has been argued about the relevance of differences in cognition. Larry Summers lost his job over it. Ben Barres wrote a lovely editorial about it -- that we all talked about at length (my stuff is here, here, and here). The Economist has an…
purepedantry | August 3, 2006Sorry folks.
Heading to a wedding for the weekend. Blogging light to nonexistent til Monday morning.
Have a good weekend!
purepedantry | August 3, 2006Neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, were for many years regarded as exclusively diseases of molecular crud. You would look at brains of patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and notice that there were all these aggregates of protein crud forming in specific locations. This led scientists to conclude that the crud must be causing the neurons to do die through a mechanism that was not at the time clear.
The reality we are learning is far more complicated.
There is a form of inherited Parkinson's disease that is caused by loss-of-function mutations in the gene…
purepedantry | August 3, 2006The Synapse #4 is being hosted by Neurotopia on Sunday. He asks that you get your submissions in by midnight on Saturday. Information for submitters is available here.
purepedantry | August 3, 2006It is like sweat and balls hot out, so I have a little personal story -- or rather my Dad's personal story -- to tell about heat waves. My Dad is an Emergency Room doctor, and he has been working in CA this summer for reasons that are not relevant. Anyway, one day about a week ago he had two patients come in from one nursing home with heat stroke, one with a temperature of about 104 and one with like 112. At this point I was asking, "Can that even happen?" To which he responded, "Not if you plan to survive it." Unfortunately, that patient did not survive.
My father, being suspicious that…
purepedantry | August 2, 2006Some students at UCSD have too much time on their hands:
A group of grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are in the process of creating what one of the students calls the "most over-designed soda machine in the world."
Right now, the machine has attached to it a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. Want a Coke? Stick your thumb on the reader so the machine recognizes you as having an account, take out the drink, then walk way, never having had to reach into your pocket for change.
The project, called SodaVision (sodavision.com…
purepedantry | August 1, 2006The biggest object in the Universe is glimpsed, and everyone is surprised:
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang.
The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.
The galaxies within the newly found structure are packed…
purepedantry | August 1, 2006Muahaha. It has now been proven that men should not sleep over:
If you have ever thought you were stupid to sleep with someone, consider this. Sharing your bed could actually make you stupid if you are a man - at least temporarily.
Even without having sex, bed sharing disturbs sleep quality, say Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues from the University of Vienna, Austria. The team recruited eight unmarried, childless couples, and used questionnaires and a wrist activity monitor, an "actigraph", to assess sleep patterns after 10 nights together and 10 apart.
Men and women fared differently. While…
purepedantry | August 1, 2006As some of you may have noticed, I have been keeping up with the science of Floyd Landis's failed drug test in a rather long post here.
In the post, I mentioned that there is another test besides the Testosterone to Epitestosterone ratio (the test he already failed) that they can use to check whether the testosterone is synthetic or not. This test exploits the difference in the carbon isotopes in synthetic as opposed to natural testosterone (there is an explanation of that in the earlier post).
Anyway, it turns out my man Floyd is busted -- he failed the isotope test:
Tests performed on…