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"Will" I be able to think of a witty title for this post?

BS has the definitive answer to the George Will nonsense. Or read John Fleck, who conveniently links to our joint paper. Until I started typing this, I had an even better answer: I ignore it, it's a pile of toss. But alas, I'm unable to resist joining in, even though I have nothing new to say. And indeed, I haven't even bothered to read what he wrote, so uninterested am I in his errors (yes yes, I know dearest septics, but life is too short). Andy Revkin (a page, incidentally, that the vaunted Chrome displays very badly) f*cks this up badly, effectively painting Gore and Will as equivalents.…

Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver Wins Key Lawsuit

Andrew Weaver is a Canadian climate scientist with numerous publications. The National Post is a Canadian newspaper generally recognized as having a conservative and Libertarian leaning. Between 2009 and 2010, the Post published four articles that seemed defamatory of Dr. Weaver’s reputation as a scientist. Weaver sued the post over this, and yesterday, the B.C. Supreme Court agreed that the articles were in fact defamatory. The defendants in the case were Terence Corcoran, Financial Post editor, Peter Foster, National Post columnist, Kevin Libin, a contributor to the Financial Post, National…

The Lazy Astronomer

Every once in awhile, I'll get an email from someone curious about getting into amateur astronomy, but with no idea where to begin. More often than not, it's from someone with a crappy telescope who's trying to salvage some utility out of a bad purchase/gift. The truth of the matter is that most telescopes either cost a lot for automated, easy-to-use features, or require a lot of time and effort to learn to use them properly. But lets say you'd like to start exploring the skies, and need some help with where to begin. If you're like most people, and not sure how seriously you're going to be…

Answering Comments, part 2

Russell Husted also left a couple of comments in response to my fisking of Mitt Romney's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece about gay marriage. Russell wrote: Ed, you say "he's right on the general point that marriage predates our constitution and our nation, but he is wrong to imply that there has been anything like a consistent conception of marriage over those millenia and across cultural lines. The definition and limitations of marriage have varied dramatically over the centuries, both within and between different cultures." That's true, of course, just as what is considered proper food to…

Arctic Sea Ice: A System In Collapse

For the last 25 years or so there has been a decrease in the amount of ice that remains on the surface of the Arctic Ocean every summer. This is a trend that can be attributed to global warming, which in turn, can be attributed to the steady release of previously fossilized Carbon to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. But over the last few years, this decrease in ice has been much more dramatic. The trend has steepened. The formation and melting of ice has to do with air and water temperatures. This in turn can be affected by how much ice there is, because ice…

Chinese Archaeology Loses Proto-Historical Innocence

Turquoise mosaic dragon and bronze bell in rich male burial at Erlitou, phase II, c. 18th century BC. A really good historical source is coeval with the events it describes, or it may even form a part of those events, such as in the case of a land deed. It is written by a knowledgeable participant in the events, one who is not strongly politically biased or whose bias is at least known. And any statement in a good historical source is ideally corroborated by other independent good historical sources. Now, in no part of the world is there any historical source older than the first proto-…

Olson on Rights and Ethics

Mark Olson of Pseudo-Polymath has a post about rights and ethics in competition that I must respond to more fully than I already have in the comments on his blog. To begin with, I must take issue with his characterization of the dispute: The two extreme positions on such laws lie between the Libertarian/Rights based stance of feeling that the law should provide complete license with regard to what is allowed between consenting adults and the Liberal/Conservative/Ethics based stance which holds that laws should support and agree with the ethical values we "should" hold (Liberals and…

Kermit Roosevelt on Roberts

Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches con law at UPenn, has an interesting article at American Prospect about the John Roberts hearings. He points out, correctly, that the arguments for why a nominee cannot be specific about a case that may come before them on the court don't withstand scrutiny: What these remarks suggest is that Roberts will not be a wrecking ball, not a conservative out to change the tenor of the Court. That would have been a safe bet anyway; even aggressive conservatives like the young William Rehnquist tend to grow more moderate after assuming the chief justice's chair. We have…

The Splendid Spice: You can have as much as you want cheap!

I like to cook, and I am good at it and know something about it. So I therefore am somewhat attracted to certain information streams including, for instance, Lynne Rossetto Kasper's "The Splendid Table" on National Public Radio. (Although this show comes out of the Twin Cities, Kasper and I have only crossed paths a couple of times, and very uneventfully. Some day I'd love to actually talk to her. I have some questions about garlic.) But I have some issues related to cooking and elitism. Gourmet cooking is an elitist activity, and a large share of the cooking enterprise in general in the…

Oppy Surveys the Work of Atheist Philosophers

Philosopher Graham Oppy, whose book Arguing About Gods is well worth reading, has written an interesting survey of work by atheist philosophers over the last sixty years. Here's a taste: The last sixty years have been a very fertile period for academic atheist philosopher critiques of theistic arguments. Among large-scale works that have attempted to establish that theistic arguments are unsuccessful—i.e. not such as ought to persuade non-believers to change their minds—we should certainly mention: The Existence of God (Wallace Matson, 1967), The Miracle of Theism (John Mackie, 1982),…

Obligatory Cosmos Commentary

It says here in the fine print that my blogging license could be revoked if I fail to offer a public opinion on the Cosmos reboot, which premiered last night. I missed the first couple of minutes-- I had The Pip for bedtime, and he didn't start snoring until 8:58-- but saw most of it in real time. I posted a bit of commentary on Twitter, but will offer something marginally less ephemeral here. The show opened and closed with tributes to Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson standing on the same cliff where Sagan opened the original series back in 1980. That was good and fitting, and Tyson's…

Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don't Agree

This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it's a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics-- Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field are really interesting. This particular paper, though, is mostly kind of depressing. The authors, including Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, gave students in three introductory physics classes a survey about their attitudes toward physics. They asked the students to indicate…

On Moderation

(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...) Over at Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long explanation of the comment moderation policy in Q&A format. As you might expect, if you're a reader of Making Light, it's very well done, and as clear a statement of what good community moderation is about as you'll find anywhere. As you might expect, if you're a reader of the Internet generally, the…

Space Invader DNA jumped across mammalian genomes

Mammals like ourselves pass our genes 'vertically' from parent to child. But bacteria aren't quite so limited; they have mastered the art of gene-swapping and regularly transfer DNA 'horizontally' from one cell to another. This "horizontal gene transfer" has been largely viewed as a trademark of single-celled organisms, with few examples among animals and plants. That is, until now. A group of American researchers have discovered a group of genetic sequences that have clearly jumped around the genomes of several mammals, one reptile and one amphibian. It's the most dramatic example yet that…

I HATE Fahrenheit ... and its link to presidential elections

The past few days have seen wild thermometer swings in my neck of the Blue Ridge woods. Overnight lows are hitting a few degrees below freezing and by the mid afternoon it's almost room temperature. Measuring all that in Fahrenheit only makes more confusing. What this country really needs, says this Canadian ex-pat, is a presidential candidate who thinks in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.... OK. Not really. I'm talking metaphorically. But for me there really is a connection between American resistance to the metric system and the absence of anything more than lip service paid during this…

Forget Hitler, the fault lies in our stars

Astrology is not usually at the top of my worry list. Sure, there are far too many gullible readers of daily horoscopes, and it did bother me a bit to learn Ronald Reagan was consulting an astrologer while sitting in the White House. The space those astrology columns waste in the newspapers could be put to better use, but most the time, it seems like harmless silliness. At best, one could argue that astrology represents a misguided, primitive form of scientific inquiry into the forces that govern the universe, and it is true that the first modern astronomers were also the last sincere…

Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot?

In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw. Now, Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham has found that there's something to Bohr's explanation. People do indeed have…

They don't all look the same - could better facial discrimination lead to less racial discrimination?

It's been a big week. With a simple words, Barack Obama became the first black President of a country whose history has been so haunted by the spectre of racial prejudice. His election and inauguration are undoubtedly proud moments but they must not breed complacency. Things may be changing outwardly, but problems remain. For a start, it goes without saying that many people, even the most liberal and left-wing among us, still harbour unconscious prejudices against members of other races. These "implicit biases" may be hidden, but their effects are often not. For example, a study published…

Humor as a Guide to Research

Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…

The Shadow Biosphere

Let's define alien. Definition number one: unfamiliar. By that description alone, a good 99% of life on this planet is alien. Breathing water, living nestled in thermal vents, stalking prey on the veldt, growing out of the Earth and eating sunlight, without eyes, without legs, with extra legs, color-blind, carapaced, marsupial, with exoskeletons, with jelly for brains, microbial, in a test tube, growing from spores. Not to mention the extremophiles, those nutty organisms that thrive in hellish environments like boiling acid, liquid asphalt, radioactive waste, and under extreme pressure. I'…

PTSD: Two new programs; two big ignored questions

After a rather intense two months of long-form work, I'm so far behind on blogging I don't know where to start. Forget the last two months and move on? Probably the best move. But beforehand, I want to note a few developments along major lines of interest. I'll start with PTSD. Amid the stagnation on combat PTSD, the summer brought news of new programs from the UK and US militaries aimed to answer the call for more effective treatment for rising rates reported in vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mind Hacks was one of several blogs to report and comment on a new Royal Marine program…

GRRR...

OK, I apologize in advance for the general venting that is about to occur. But, in my defense, people really bug me sometimes. I posted my post 'Take 30 Seconds to Save Sea Turtles' at another website and got this response: Is there evidence anywhere that any shallow internet poll has ever actually determined any government policy? I donât mean to be rude, just blunt: what possible reason would a foreign government have to respect your wishes? Itâs mostly the laz-ee-boy attitude that I think gets to me, the idea that it might be possible to stop resource waste or whatever by sitting comfy in…

Can Copyright Evolve With The Internet?

Today seems like a really good day to try and start a conversation about the complex relationship between copyright and the internet. This morning, the New York Times website posted an article about concerns that for-profit publications have when it comes to other websites excerpting their writing. Late last week, Creative Commons officially launched their CC0 license, which is designed to make it easier for content creators to officially place their work in the public domain. Brian Stelter's New York Times article notes that a number of traditional publishers are starting to worry about…

Science and spirituality

New Scienceblogger Rob Knop has written a couple of posts explaining his own religious views and raising one of those questions that usually manages to get people worked up here: are science and spirituality compatible? That's a question that I've found myself thinking about more than usual lately, and with mixed feelings. I'm still not sure exactly where I stand on the whole religion thing, and I don't think I could describe my own views even at gunpoint. But I am comfortable saying this much: for at least some definitions of "spirituality," science and spirituality are compatible. I…

First Impressions of an Amateur Naturalist

This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab science writing intern Kenrick Vezina, who joined our team this month and will be sharing Brookhaven science stories from inside and outside laboratories on site through mid December. On Saturday, September 10, I rode into Brookhaven National Laboratory for the first time. Within two hours, I was watching a handful of white-tailed deer on a strip of grass near the Princeton Avenue gate. I'm a new intern in the Lab's Media & Communications Office, fresh from MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, here to report on all of the fascinating…

New study names a Titanoboa menu item

A restoration of Titanoboa (foreground) in its natural setting. (By Jason Bourque, image from Wikipedia.) When I was growing up I used to spend hours poring over the Time/Life series of nature books in my little library, absolutely enthralled by images of strange creatures from all over the world, but one photograph was particularly arresting. A grainy black-and-white double-page spread showed an anaconda that had wrapped its crushing coils around a caiman and a tree, slowly squeezing the life out of the crocodylian. Without any frame of reference for size it was easy to envision the two…

What about creationism?

I get a lot of questions about my forthcoming book, Written in Stone, but the most popular by far is "What are you going to say about creationism?" Presently there is a glut of books that confront creationism in one way or another. There are books that counter creationist claims with scientific evidence (Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, &c.) and others that, while they present many of the same scientific arguments, are also concerned with making the idea of evolution less threatening to religious audiences (Only A…

Mommy Monday: Minnow's ideal day

Minnow woke up yesterday morning snuggled in my arms. We rolled over and nudged Fish awake as Minnow happily wiggled between her parents. After a few minutes, she decided she wanted a little something to eat, so I obliged. When she was finished, she rolled away from me and let out a sigh of pure satisfaction. I looked down at her and she had a huge smile on - I swear it was the sort of smile one has when they've just had really good sex. She just seemed blissful. Minnow's good mood got me thinking about what a perfect day would look like in her eyes. It's hard to know for sure because her…

Planet of the Hats

I know you will not believe me, but I swear it's true: I'm not of this earth. I fled here years ago because my home planet was driving me crazy. Let me explain. My home world is very much like this one. It's populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing. The hats. My people are obsessed with hats. Almost…

Facts and their interpretation.

Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of "correct" and "interesting", at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf: It is essential that one's experiments be "correct" in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid. But it is not at all important that one's interpretation of the data--from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data--turns out to be correct or not. All…

Evidence for an ancient lineage of modern humans

It almost seems like there are two separate research project under way regarding the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. One focuses on recent humans, tends to use DNA as a major source of information, and from this base projects back into the past. This approach tends to confirm the idea that humans share an African origin with a subsequent spread from Africa, with various degrees of complexity in that series of historical events. The other focuses on early human remains, sometimes including remains that would be placed by some in a separate species or sub species. This sort of…

ScienceBlogs under the microscope?

It looks like someone over at BlogCritics is undertaking the task of reviewing each of the component blogs of ScienceBlogs. So far, he's not particularly impressed with anyone except Martin and, to a lesser extent, Afarensis. Although he makes a few good points in checking out the first five blogs (he's proceeding in alphabetical order) and I have to applaud an attempt to do a critique of nearly 50 blogs, he clearly needs a gentle (for the moment) beating with a clue stick about a couple of things. For one thing, he's full of crap when he says this about Janet: My major criticism of this blog…

Welcome to Culture Dish, the Sequel

Yes, it's true, Culture Dish has found a new (and improved) home. After a long blogging hiatus while I finished writing my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (see below for details), I'm now packing up shop and moving here to ScienceBlogs (you can subscribe via RSS here, or get Culture Dish updates delivered to your email inbox by clicking here). As a welcome to readers old and new, here's a bit of a Culture Dish history as an introduction: I'm a science writer whose forthcoming book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story of the amazing HeLa cell line and the woman…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Cloning - Who Cares?

This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to? In short, my answer is yes. Although the number of species of mammals cloned has increased, slowly but surely, nobody is cloning their dead relatives yet. No surprise there. In 2006, though, cloning for cloning's sake isn't where it's at. Instead, the future of cloning lies in its applications to biomedical research. Today, that means, among other things, the prospect of using cloning to generate…

Friday Cephalopod: It's not really an alien

a, Schematic of Octopus bimaculoides anatomy, highlighting the tissues sampled for transcriptome analysis: viscera (heart, kidney and hepatopancreas), yellow; gonads (ova or testes), peach; retina, orange; optic lobe (OL), maroon; supraesophageal brain (Supra), bright pink; subesophageal brain (Sub), light pink; posterior salivary gland (PSG), purple; axial nerve cord (ANC), red; suckers, grey; skin, mottled brown; stage 15 (St15) embryo, aquamarine. Skin sampled for transcriptome analysis included the eyespot, shown in light blue. b, C2H2 and protocadherin domain-containing gene families…

There is not much hope to free Spirit on Monday

"We'll start by steering the wheels straight and driving, though we may have to steer the wheels to the right to counter any downhill slip to the left" ... OMG have I ever been there before . But not on Mars. The Martian rover Spirit got stuck in the dust on April 23rd of this year. One wheel was already broken, forcing the little martian rover to drive backwards. Then, its other wheels plunged through a crust covering the dusty infill of a 26 foot wide crater. If Spirit turns into the crater, it's curtains. So, from April 23rd to now, NASA engineers have been thinking about this,…

Hox cluster disintegration

Hox genes are metazoan pattern forming genes—genes that are universally associated with defining the identities of regions of the body. There are multiple Hox genes present, and one of their unusual properties is that they are clustered and expressed colinearly. That is, they are found in ordered groups on the chromosome, and that the gene on one end is typically turned on first and expressed at the head end of the embryo, the next gene in order is turned on slightly later and expressed further back, and so on in sequence. That the tidy sequential order on the chromosome is associated with…

Private Guns, Public Health

This is David Hemenway's response to criticism of his book Private Guns Public Health by Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority. September 27, 2004 I was asked to respond to what is claimed to be a critique of my book by Kevin Baker. I have neither the time nor inclination to have a detailed response to the many assertions and arguments he makes, many of which are wrong or misleading. It turns out that Baker isn't really discussing my book Private Guns Public Health, but a magazine article about it. Unfortunately it seems that Baker may not have read my book (or the hundreds of journal…

What is an internist and why should you care?

Yes, this is a repost, sort of. I first put this up on denialism blog in December of 2008. For various reasons, I haven't had a chance to crank out anything fresh this weekend, but this is still a good one, and I've edited it to freshen it up a bit, so don't complain until you read it. --PalMD It's July again, and that means I have a crop of new interns.  I love new interns, because every topic is fresh, every moment a teaching moment.  I'm sobered by the statistic that predicts that only about 4% of American medical grads will chose primary care, but even when I work with  the…

The ducks are gonna get you

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter — I will say, it's a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren't wrong in every particular. I've transcribed it below. I couldn't help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit. Homosexuality, including same sex marriage, is not an enlightened idea [But…

DWFTTW - The saga continues.

Wow. I wrote a post about Directly Down Wind Faster Than The Wind (DWFTTW) vehicles. At the time of this post, there are 37 comments for the original post. That is way more than I expected. This is very popular topic. Clearly, it brings a lot attention to Dot Physics. The first question - is this the kind of attention a naked person running through campus gets or is it a different kind of attention? I really don't mind either way. I am going to try to look through all the posted material and see if I can add or subtract anything for the discussion. First - the parameters of the…

Insomnia

I'm a terrible sleeper, which is perhaps why I got invited to contribute to a NY Times group blog on "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life". Here is my first contribution, which focuses on the work of Dan Wegner: My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. I've been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes -- the text is suddenly impossibly dense -- and I can feel the book getting heavier and heavier in my hands. Gravity is tugging on my eyelids. And then, just as my mind turns itself off, I twitch awake. I'm filled with disappointment. I was so close to a night of sweet…

Birth control rocks -- and should be free

This post is part of the Birth Control Blog Carnival put on by the National Women's Law Center. Yesterday I wrote about new Institute of Medicine recommendations regarding preventive health services for women that should be covered by all new health plans without requiring cost-sharing. One of the IOM's recommendations was that all FDA-approved contraceptive methods be available free of charge to women with reproductive capacity, and this was the one that attracted the most opposition. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 99% of women who've had sexual intercourse have used contraception.…

Woman in persistent vegetative state shows brain activity associated with consciousness

I talked earlier this year about a patient who recovered from a coma after 20 years. In that post, I discussed how -- with respect to the diagnostic criteria -- the difference between a persistent vegetative state and a minimally conscious state is the difference between someone who has only autonomic nervous activity and episodic conscious activity. In this way, someone who is in a minimally conscious state -- as that patient was -- still has the possibility for recovery even if recovery is very rare. Here is another case of a woman in a persistent vegetative state discussed in the…

PAPupuncture? On the rebranding of regional anesthesia as acupuncture

Acupuncture has been a frequent topic on this blog because, of all the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities out there, it's arguably the one that most people accept as potentially having some validity. The rationale behind acupuncture is, as we have explained many times before, little different than the rationale behind any "energy healing" method (like reiki, for example) in that it claims to redirect the flow of "life energy" (the ever-invoked qi). The only difference is that acupuncturists claim to bring this therapeutic qi rearrangement about by sticking thin needles…

Another swing for the fences and a miss by the anti-vaccine movement

Knowing what you are destined to blog about on a given night three days beforehand is a two-edged sword. On the plus side, I don't have to worry about writer's block or lack of suitable material to use as fodder for my Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, and that's usually a good thing. On the other hand, by the time the evening rolls around, my attention can easily stray to other things, and I might not be as enthusiastic about deconstructing the latest example of, for example, anti-vaccine idiocy as I was when I first learned of its impending arrival. Yet not blogging about it…

Innumeracy and the U. S. Supreme Court

As long time readers of this blog know, one of the things that drive me crazy - in fact, one of the things that led me to start this blog - is the rampant innumeracy of our society. The vast majority of Americans have no real knowledge or comprehension of numbers or mathematics, and what makes that even worse is that most really, truly, fundamentally don't care. A vivid example of that is demonstrated in a recent Supreme Court ruling in a case dealing with the use of sonar in submarine training by the US navy in waters inhabited by whales. The basic idea behind the case is that…

A receptor for dopamine and a mismapped mutation

Right or wrong, the word "dopamine" always conjures up images in my head of rats pushing levers over and over again, working desperately hard to send shots of dopamine into their tiny little rodent brains. Dopamine, like many other neurotransmitters (chemicals that send signals in the brain), works by binding to proteins on the surface of brain cells and sending a signal to the cell. There are five different subtypes of receptors for dopamine (D1-D5) with somewhat different activities (1) and drugs that bind to these receptors are known to have potent effects on brain activity and behavior (…

Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias

Those of us who have been on the receiving end of racial abuse know all too well that words can hurt. But they're also the tip of the iceberg. According to a study of popular US television, we're exposed to the spectre of racial bias on a regular basis, all without a single word being uttered. When scenes are muted, body language and facial expressions are enough to convey more negative attitudes towards black characters compared to white ones. This bias is so subtle that we're largely unable to consciously identify it, yet so powerful that it can sway our own predispositions. In some ways…

Neuron to Glia Synapses on Axons?

I 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…