purepedantry | June 19, 2006
A study by researcher David Holben in the latest Preventing Chronic Disease (never heard of it) shows that so-called "food insecure" Appalachians are more likely to be obese and have obesity-related disease.
This puzzling statement can be clarified somewhat by changing the phrase "food insecure" to "poor," in which case these results are not particularly surprising.
A total of 2,580 people participated in the Ohio University project, with 72.8 percent from food secure households and 27.2 percent from food insecure households that may or may not be experiencing hunger. That's higher than the…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated:
The steady decline in suicide rates for both men and women is associated with an increasing number of fluoxetine prescriptions from 2,469,000 in 1988 to 33,320,000 in 2002. A cross-correlation analysis of fluoxetine use and suicide rates in the period 1988-2002 shows a significant negative correlation: rs = â0.92, p
Granted (as many of you will likely point out)…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...
We can answer this with a multiple choice question...
Jake manages to find time to blog because
A) he writes while waiting for gels to run, reactions to run their course, cells to grow, etc.
B) he has little or no other personal life.
C) he has been heavily sleep deprived since some time in the late Clinton administration.
The answer is D, all of the above.
In fact, I do often blog while I am waiting for stuff to…
purepedantry | June 18, 2006The Scientific Activist has a post on chemistry to create little people looking chemicals. I don't remember chemistry being nearly this cool.
purepedantry | June 18, 2006There are Nerd Gods in the movie Word Play. I am not talking about rock gods or leaders of men or even Adonises of the human form. I am talking about Nerd Gods. Nerds of such startling nerditry that when they go up on stage women in thick glasses throw their underwired bras at them.
Would you like to be a Nerd God? Well, then you have to see the movie Word Play.
I am not kidding when I tell you that this is perhaps the funniest movie that I have seen in several years.
Partially, it is the variety of characters. For example, we learn that Daniel Okrent, former New York Times Ombudsman,…
purepedantry | June 18, 2006As promised I have a response to this article in the New York Times (I had to spend a couple days marshalling my evidence). I thought I would summarize some evidence about what we know from behavioral genetics so you could understand why I think this article was so wrong. I have tried to classify what we know below by the kind of study that we use to know it. Hopefully this will make things a little bit more clear.
(WARNING: This post is what economists would call a Schumpeterian tome.)
People studying behavioral genetics in humans use three types of studies:
Twin studies: Twin studies…
purepedantry | June 15, 2006The Synapse now has a permanent page with some kickass clip art for icons. Click on The Synapse at the top of this page. Check back often for the newest issue and submission guidelines. The current submission date is the 25th of June.
UPDATE: By the way (I am so skatterbrained), we are not the only proud neuroscience carnival on the web. Neurophilosopher's Blog is organizing the first Encephalon starting on July 3rd. Interested parties should submit to encephalon_submit {AT} yahoo {DOT} com. Neuroscience is a big world people, so I am certain there is more than enough of it to go…
purepedantry | June 15, 2006I was totally incensed by this article in the New York Times, largely because the science quoted -- what little there was in between the anecdotes -- was truly attrocious, ignorant of alternative views, and completely missing the point.
When I get a free moment I will provide some clear examples of why genetics is a factor in determining behavior but only in an environmental context. Until then Cognitive Daily and The Frontal Cortex seem to be confronting the issue quite ably.
purepedantry | June 15, 2006I love science. New Scientist reports a study looking at brain activation during the female orgasm. The results are let us say interesting.
His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner's fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm.
The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain,…
purepedantry | June 15, 2006SciAm's Invention is reporting the filing of a patent for a vomit ejector -- a ultrasonic pulse that irritates the wall of the trachea triggering the patient too cough:
Patients who overdose on drugs or alcohol can easily drown on their own vomit because they are too intoxicated to cough. Doctors must dread the thought of giving mouth-to-mouth to such a patient in an emergency.
So inventor John Perrier from Queensland, Australia, has come up with an ultrasonic device that promises to make anyone cough, no matter how ill or sedated they are.
The handheld device, which resembles a rechargeable…
purepedantry | June 14, 2006This article points out that trans-fats not only clutter up your arteries but also make you fatter over the long run. That is unfortunate.
What is more unfortunate however is the picture in this article. How sad is it to be "fat person clip art"?
purepedantry | June 14, 2006I think that the Miller Amendment is well intentioned, but I have some concerns. If you don't know what the Miller Amendment is Nick is all over that.
Here is my concern. How is such an amendment to be enforced? If the means of enforcement is either by Senate hearings or by judicial prosecution, can members of the political establishment be trusted to distinguish accurate from inaccurate scientific information in an impartial manner? Also, can this amendment be abused?
Consider the following scenario. Congressman A has a problem with a set of scientific results done by a scientific…
purepedantry | June 14, 2006Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species all over again.
This is really important stuff because it goes against a common argument vs. evolution -- that it cannot be witnessed in action. Experiments like these show that it is plausible and that it occurs on human-relevant time scales.
purepedantry | June 14, 2006A new International Labor Organization (which I don't think is part of the Communist Party but sure as hell sounds like it is) study shows that at-work violence is increasing in basically every country surveyed except England and the US:
A 2000 survey of the then-15 Member States of the European Union showed that bullying, harassment and intimidation were widespread in the region. In Germany, a 2002 study estimated that more than 800,000 workers were victims of mobbing, i.e a group of workers targeting an individual for psychological harassment. In Spain, an estimated 22 per cent of officials…
purepedantry | June 14, 2006Baboons show handedness in communicative gestures, tending to be right-handed. This paper analyzed the handedness of baboons to see if they were more likely to use their right or their left hands for communication.
Here is a key figure.
We know that there is a connection between handedness and the lateralization of language in humans. Humans are primarily right-handed, and the vast majority of right-handed people have their language functions lateralized to their left hemisphere. Left-handed people -- though the distinction is not as clear cut -- also usually show language function in…
purepedantry | June 14, 2006GrrlScientist displays one of her favorite animals -- the Okapi.
Personally I think it looks suspiciously similar to the result of a profane, drunken hookup between a zebra and a giraffe. I wonder who rolled over only to be shocked that morning -- my guess is the zebra...
How would that even work? I would think zebra girl, giraffe boy, but I am willing to hear alternative views on the subject. Like all drunken hookups, the issue of mechanics is usually secondary.
purepedantry | June 13, 2006This paper shows that leptin injections into the hippocampus improves memory in a T-maze footshock avoidance and step down inhibitory avoidance tasks. It caught my eye because I just finished a course in behavioral neuroscience, but I have never for the life of me thought the two were related.
Leptin is a hormone that is released by fat cells that tells your brain that you're good on food and that you should stop eating. Leptin insufficiency causes obesity. Before you get excited though you should know that leptin is not a diet drug because if you have too much of it your brain stops…
purepedantry | June 13, 2006Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason.
The report from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, California, was based on a look at data from 125,580 people.
"These data support the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis," concluded the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
You will be fine if you are an alcoholic; just…
purepedantry | June 12, 2006Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.
The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.
Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth.
Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance…