purepedantry | August 1, 2006I have been falling down on the job on my carnivals updating.
Encephalon #3 is up at Thinking Meat.Grand Rounds is up at Inside Surgery.
purepedantry | August 1, 2006You've taken a Myers-Briggs personality inventory before right? They are usually strings of yes-or-no questions that give you a result like INTJ or ENTP.
These kinds of tests populate the internet, and for what they are worth they are fun time-wasters and moderately gratifying. This one is just funny. It reframes the descriptions of the resulting personality types.
For example, I usually get classified as a INTJ -- under most classifications it is called a Mastermind. Under this classification here is my description:
INTJ: The outside contractor
INTJs are solid, competent personalities…
purepedantry | July 31, 2006This is huge. Jackson et al. have identified that the adult stem cell in the human brain for both neurons and oligodendrocytes are the PDGFR-alpha expressing cells and that PDGF-AA causes proliferation of these cells and a shift towards the oligodendrocyte lineage.
A little background. There is this place in the brain called the subventricular zone (SVZ) which is shockingly enough just below the lateral ventricles. This area contains rapidly dividing cells that during development grow outward to populate the cortices. These cells first form radial glia, then most of the glutamatergic…
purepedantry | July 31, 2006Are we dividing drugs into illegal and legal based on a rational classification system based on risk?A British government committee says no:
The committee's report recommends that drugs be ordered on "a more scientific scale, to give the public a better sense of the relative harms involved". But Michael Gossop of King's College London, UK, who studies drug use, is not sure that drugs can be easily ranked by the harm they cause. "There are lots of different aspects to 'harm'," he says. "It's not clear that when you add them together you get a simple rating."
In seeking to compile a league…
purepedantry | July 31, 2006Gov. Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair are endeavoring to create a California and Great Britain global warming pact, to pool their efforts in lowering CO2 emissions:
Britain and California are preparing to sidestep the Bush administration and fight global warming together by creating a joint market for greenhouse gases.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plan to lay the groundwork for a new trans-Atlantic market in carbon dioxide emissions, The Associated Press has learned.
Such a move could help California cut carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping…
purepedantry | July 30, 2006This review in Nature Neuroscience is excellent. I have never seen the issue of gene-environment interactions laid out so eloquently. Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, so those of you not affiliated with a University may have to just live with this excerpt:
The recent history of psychiatric research that has measured genetic differences at the DNA sequence level can be divided into three approaches, each with its own logic and assumptions. The first approach assumes direct linear relations between genes and behaviour (Fig. 1a). The goal of this approach has been to correlate…
purepedantry | July 30, 2006Them's, as they say, fighting words.
The National Journal has a cover story on the Politicization of Science by Paul Starobin, and there is simply no way in the concievable Universe that this is not going to cause a ruckus.
In part, this is because in his desire to equally indite indict the Right and the Left in the politics of science, he utters some things that are outright incorrect. He repeats the "girls bad at math" meme that if I have to spend the rest of my life trying to debunk I will. (There is evidence that men and women have on average different cognitive strategies, not…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006Floyd Landis, most recent winner of the Tour de France, has tested positive for testosterone use:
Landis denied cheating and said he has no idea what may have caused his positive test for high testosterone following the Tour's 17th stage, where he made his comeback charge last week. But he aims to find out.
"All I'm asking for," he said Thursday via teleconference, "is that I be given a chance to prove I'm innocent. Cycling has a traditional way of trying people in the court of public opinion before they get a chance to do anything else."
Now the cycling world will wait for results from a…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006A study reveals that an increasingly large number of Americans are too fat to fit in MRIs and have X-rays that lack resolution:
More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, radiologists reported Tuesday.
With 64 percent of the U.S. population either overweight or obese, the problem is worsening, but it represents a business opportunity for equipment makers and hospitals, said Dr. Raul Uppot, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"We noticed over…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006Apparently I will be spending today documenting differing opinions on the Ben Barres Nature editorial. Here is the man himself doing Q&A for the NYTimes:
Q. What about the idea that men and women differ in ways that give men an advantage in science?
A. People are still arguing over whether there are cognitive differences between men and women. If they exist, it's not clear they are innate, and if they are innate, it's not clear they are relevant. They are subtle, and they may even benefit women.
But when you tell people about the studies documenting bias, if they are prejudiced, they…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006The WHO reports that the Sun kills as many as 60,000:
As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun, mostly from malignant skin cancer, the World Health Organization has reported.
It found that 48,000 deaths every year are caused by malignant melanomas, and 12,000 by other kinds of skin cancer. About 90 percent of such cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun.
Radiation from the sun also causes often serious sunburn, skin aging, eye cataracts, pterygium -- a fleshy growth on the surface of the eye, cold sores and other ills, according to the report, the first to detail…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006Eugene Volokh from The Volokh Conspiracy has weighed in on the recent Nature editorial by Ben Barres that I commented about before. The editorial is about whether it was right for Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, to discuss the possibility of innate gender differences in the gender disparity in science. He agrees with Dr. Barres's evidence but is concerned about the standard we set when we prohibit discussion of scientific topics. Money quote:
Now I understand part of people's concern about discussion of innate gender differences: If certain students get alienated or dispirited…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006...depression.
This is related to something they make medical students memorize. When someone comes in with hypertension, it is always good to check whether the person has renal artery stenosis because this is one of the few causes of hypertension we can actually fix. Renal artery stenosis results in hypertension because your kidneys secrete hormones that are involved in maintaining your blood pressure. How much hormones they decide to secrete is determined largely by the blood pressure that is felt by your kidneys; thus, when you block blood flow to the kidneys, they become convinced…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006When I first read this it summoned immediate images of the robot from Lost in Space. Fortunately, these X-ray wielding robots seem decidedly less sinister. Instead, it is a better way to deliver X-rays to lung tumors, accounting for motion of the lungs during breathing:
Super-intense radiation delivered by a robotic arm eradicated lung tumors in some human patients just 3-4 months after treatment, medical physicist Cihat Ozhasoglu, Ph.D. of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (ozhasogluc@upmc.edu) will report in early August at the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Association of…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006That's quite clever:
Instead of using expensive photovoltaic cells to convert solar radiation to electricity directly, Matteran's solution uses far-cheaper thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point (around 58°F), creating enough steam to drive a specially designed turbine. And although a fluid-circuit system converting heat into electricity is nothing new, Matteran's innovative solution increases the system's efficiency to a point where small-scale applications make economic sense...
So far, Matteran has created only small amounts of refrigeration…
purepedantry | July 25, 2006The entry that I posted on research challenging the idea that Hummers are worse for the environment than hybrids has sparked a great deal of contreversy and criticism. I cannot say that I find this entirely surprising.
There have been several very reasonable criticisms related their failure to publish their methods and their assumption that hybrids will have a significantly shorter operating life than Hummers. (They assert that the average operating life of a Hummer is 300,000 miles while the average operating life of a Prius is 100,000 miles.) Specifically with respect to the operating…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a symposium on the benefits of academic blogging. This symposium addresses ostensibly the failure of Juan Cole, a prominent Middle East scholar and proprietor of the blog Informed Comment, to recieve tenure at Yale University. Many have attributed that failure to his publishing his views on the Internet, though Yale has thus far refused to comment.
Many of the contributors to the symposium also talk in depth about the benefits of academic blogging. Here are some choice morsels:
Brad De Long:
The hope of all of us who blog is that we will…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006Fellow Scienceblogger Jonah Lehrer has this nice little vignette in Seed arguing that practice is more important than ability. Two examples that could be forwarded for the idea of innate genius are Mozart and Tiger Woods, two child prodigies that practiced a lot harder than most people give them credit for:
Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week-- his father was known as a stern taskmaster--he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson's golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart's early symphonies are not nearly as…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit:
...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In places (such as its headline call for a "paradigm shift" in economics) the book may irk Mr Krugman and other gatekeepers of the profession. But it is good enough, and scholarly enough, to warrant their attention rather than their scorn.
Indeed, Mr Beinhocker is himself critical of "loose analogising" between biology and…