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Link-O-Rama

Finally got back from my meeting minus a piece of luggage or two. Unfortunately the trip came with a shocking reality of anthropogenic effects on marine systems. Before I headed to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, I asked around and searched online to find some localities to snorkel while I was there. Myself and two close friends loaded up in a rental car and went off to visit the sites on my list. These sites were 4 years ago the best in snorkeling the island had to offer. Unfortunately today, they are degraded coastal systems dominated by sewer runoff, resorts, industry, and trash…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Victor Henning

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Victor Henning from Mendeley to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I was born in Hamburg/Germany in 1980, moved to London in January 2008, and as a direct consequence, have…

Birds of Chernobyl

There is a new piece of information regarding the mammal vs. bird controversy in Chernobyl: Brightly Colored Birds Most Affected By Chernobyl Radiation: Brightly coloured birds are among the species most adversely affected by the high levels of radiation around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, ecologists have discovered. The findings -- published online in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology -- help explain why some species are harder hit by ionising radiation than others. Dr Anders Møller of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Professor Timothy Mousseau of the…

Fornvännen's Autumn Issue On-Line

Fornvännen 2013:3 is now on-line on Open Access. Morten Axboe and Magnus Källström on a classic find of runic gold bracteates from Trollhättan, recently expanded by a metal detectorist who would have been better informed about how to go about things if Swedish law had encouraged responsible metal detector clubs. Lennart Bondeson et al. on a recently found and previously unknown type of penny from the time of King Canute, probably struck for his rebellious Danish viceroy Ulf jarl – who was also his brother-in-law. Lennart is an extremely well-informed and responsible detectorist. Kenth Hansen…

Divorced - for having an affair in Second Life

And other miscellania. That one is from the Indy: "she had once awoken from an afternoon nap to discover him sitting at his computer watching his online character - whom he had named Dave Barmy - having sex with an on-screen call girl." Weird or what. Somewhat more spicily (not to say utterly made up) is this from the DailyMash. Which also confirms that running is stupid and that we're all buying the change bulshytt. But I promised to be less cynical, so I'll point to you what Sarah pointed me to. On another plane, Halliburton seeks patent on patent trolling amused. While we're on amusements…

Freepers Go Apeshit Over Autopsy

If you're looking for the folks for whom the Worldnutdaily exists, look no further than Free Republic. It's basically a central online gathering place for every deluded and ignorant pedestrian right winger in the country. And you just gotta see the total meltdown they're having over the autopsy of Terri Schiavo. Some of these people actually believe that Terri had broken legs and even a broken back when she was admitted to the hospital 15 years ago. Never mind that the medical reports from the hospital staff don't say anything like that, and they checked for any signs of abuse or…

Chimps Sharpen, Use Spears to Hunt

In February of this year Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist with Iowa State University, witnessed Kenyan chimpanzees break off branches from trees, sharpen them using their teeth, and then use these spears to hunt lesser bush babies, a kind of small primate. The bush babies sleep in the hollows of trees, and the chimps were repeatedly seen jabbing their spears into the hollows and pulling them back out with fresh bush baby babies impaled on the end.A chimpanzee, seen here, finishing up his degree in Information Technology from the University of Phoenix Online. Pruetz recorded a video of the…

Pounding a rhythm to the brain

An article about Oliver Sacks, from the current issue of Seed magazine, has just just been made available online. Author Jonah Lehrer, who met with Sacks to research the article, provides interesting biographical details about the neurologist, including how he started out as a science writer. In the late 1960s, Sacks carried out a clinical study in which a new drug called L-dopa was used to treat patients with encephalitis-induced Parkinsonian symptoms. The study drew heavy criticism, because the treatment had severe side effects, and the symptoms eventually returned in all of the patients.…

Chimps Sharpen, Use Spears to Hunt

In February of this year Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist with Iowa State University, witnessed Kenyan chimpanzees break off branches from trees, sharpen them using their teeth, and then use these spears to hunt lesser bush babies, a kind of small primate. The bush babies sleep in the hollows of trees, and the chimps were repeatedly seen jabbing their spears into the hollows and pulling them back out with fresh bush baby babies impaled on the end.A chimpanzee, seen here, finishing up his degree in Information Technology from the University of Phoenix Online. Pruetz recorded a video of the…

Second 2014 worker fatality at Suncor Alberta oil sands facility highlights alarming industry death rate

Today is Workers Memorial Day. This post discusses one of the thousands of occupational fatalities that occur every year around the world. On Sunday, April 20th,  Shayne Daye, a 27-year old electrician and technician, died as a result of an injury sustained while working at Suncor’s Oil Sands site about 15 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta in western Canada. Suncor is one of Canada’s largest energy companies and credits itself as the first company to develop Canada’s oil sands. Company spokesperson Sneh Seetal said Daye – who’d worked for Suncor for seven years – was working on an…

Learning from my Introductory Physics Class

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -Thomas Jefferson It's the end of the semester at my college as well as at many schools across the world, and I've spent the last week or so grading final exams. And while I was doing it, I noticed something astonishing. But let me start at the beginning. Introductory physics -- without calculus -- is one of the most notoriously challenging and rigorous classes that students pursuing a career in health, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, veterinarians, and physical therapists, face in their college career…

Does online match-making really work?

The NYTimes has an article today about the "science" of online match-making. I put that in quotes because there really isn't any clear evidence about whether it works either way. You have no doubt seen the ads on TV for the two most popular match-making sites: eHarmony and Chemistry.com. These two differ in approach from the other popular dating site match.com because eHarmony and Chemistry pick matches for you according to a secret algorithm while match.com lets you pick for yourself. (The people at match.com own Chemistry.com, and I assume created it as a competitor for eHarmony.)…

Where Did This Cheese Come From?

"Daddy, do you know where this cheese came from?" I absolutely love this video demonstrating that learning science can be - and should be - fun. Enjoy! This series is a result of a collaboration between broadcast media (NBC) and scientists (National Science Foundation.) From Eureka Alert: National Science Foundation and NBC Learn launch 'Chemistry Now' video series Videos celebrate International Year of Chemistry; available cost-free to students, teachers and fans of chemistry. In celebration of the International Year of Chemistry, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NBC Learn, the…

Never Say Goodbye: California Condor

tags: California Condor, Gymnogyps californianus, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) 336 (156 wild, 180 captive). Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes; They survived the Ice Age, but condors barely held out against Homo sapiens. Many of these scavengers were shot or poisoned by fragments of lead left behind by hunters. In 1985 just nine wild birds remained. Captive breeding and reduced use of lead ammunition have brought the species back. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this…

Cooling the Planet with Geoengineering

At World Science - listen to the podcast and join the online discussion: Our guest in this Science Forum is economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University's Earth Institute. Chat with Barrett about the science and politics of geoengineering, the emerging field of science aimed at cooling the planet. Barrett is an expert on international environmental agreements. He is currently studying the politics and economics of geoengineering. He says countries are more likely to geoengineer climate than reduce their carbon emissions. Read his paper on The Incredible Economics of Geoengineering. Barrett…

Links for 2010-06-03

Precautions and Paralysis « Easily Distracted "The cautionary example that I think is most pertinent for academics is newspaper and magazine journalism. Fifteen years ago, some of the developments that have cast the future of print journalism as we have known it into doubt were already quite visible. But few people in the industry took those developments seriously as a threat, even if they were otherwise interested in online media and digital culture. Would it have made any difference if print journalists in 1995 had sat down for an industry-wide summit, accurately forecast what online…

Scratch and HyperHomeschool

Two things. First, my wife started blogging. The best thing about this is that she can no longer complain about my blogging. Her blog is over at HyperHomeschool.com. Basically, she is keeping up with her homeschooling stuff online. I see great potential here. I guess this gets to the second thing. I made a little screen cast tutorial on Scratch. I figured this would be good material for her blog. In case you are not familiar with Scratch, it is a graphical programming language developed at MIT. It is very similar to the Lego Mindstorms programming language. You can do tons of stuff…

Reality strikes even the godless at Christmastime

Previously, I enviously mentioned this fabulous godless variety show going on in England this year. It's Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, organized by Robin Ince, and featuring a host of secular personages of note. They had a similar show last year, with many requests for recordings. The great godless minds cogitated, and realizing that Deep Thoughts alone do not pay the utility bills or generate pints of beer, they have come up with an idea: you can now buy a DVD of the 2008 Nine Lessons show, proceeds of which will go to the Rationalist Association. You should get it. It'll help…

Links 7/6/11

Links for you. Science: Fisheries: How Much Damage Can One Hook Do? Spiders Fleeing Pakistan's Floodwater Take to the Trees Assassin Bugs, the Insect World's Most Cunning Killers Trusting your instincts: Conservatives may actually be natural liberals at heart (the key part has to do with the role of fear) Other: Buy Lohan, Sell High: Why is Lindsay Lohan tweeting about the Federal Reserve's monetary policy? Ron Paul's Surprisingly Lucid Solution to the Debt Ceiling Impasse The Corrupt Corporate Incarceration Complex New York's AG Takes on the Banks Boston.com: Now free of pop-unders (it was…

Denialists' Deck of Cards: The 10 of Spades, "Self-Regulation"

At this point, the denialist must propose "self regulation" to deal with the problem that doesn't exist. Self-regulation is a set of rules that an industry generates to govern itself. The cool thing about self regulation is that it cannot be enforced, and once the non-existent problem blows over, the denialist can simply scrap the rules! For instance, in the runup to passage of bank privacy legislation in the late 1990s, data brokers created an organization called the "Individual Reference Services Group" that proposed rules for selling personal information. After the legislation passed…

Speaking of philosophy…

As you should know, John Wilkins has left the enveloping (and sometimes stifling) womb of Scienceblogs to strike out on his own, and is also laboring as an underpaid postdoc. He has entered that realm familiar to philosophers everywhere: poverty. It's good for the soul, John! Calorie restriction is also good for longevity! Unfortunately, spiritual and intellectual rewards do not pay web hosting bills, so Wilkins would appreciate any donations towards the continued solvency of Evolving Thoughts. Help him out if you can. Oh, and when his book becomes available, buy it. I know I will, even if…

perspective

In 2005, Jon Stewart, who, may I say, is a comic genius and one of the top two or three deliverers of media news to the US populace, was paid $1.5 million for his work. In 2006, Mather and Smoot shared the physics Nobel Prize: 10 million SEK At the current exchange rate that is almost exactly $1.5 million. Mather is NASA's Chief Scientist and Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also a civil servant, in 2005 G-15 paygrade topped out around $120,000 per year. With adjustments Senior Executive Service can reach $168,000 I believe - which also requires more…

American Goldfinch

tags: birds, American Goldfinch, Carduelis tristis, ornithology, Image of the Day A long-time reader, Jerry, sent some images for me to feature as the "image of the day". This is the last image in a series of five. American Goldfinch, Carduelis tristis. Image: Jerry Kram. [larger size]. The photographer, Jerry Kram, writes; I know I've sent you a goldfinch before. But they are one of my favorite birds. My father loved goldfinches. He called them wild canaries. He told me that as a child during the Great Depression he and his friends would try to catch them (uniformly unsuccessfully)…

Tom DeLay's Parody Problem

Now this is really funny. There's a new documentary out, The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress, by Robert Greenwald. It apparently is an expose on DeLay's corruption, and the DeLay folks are busy trying to spin the claims in it. They sent out a mass email about it that included a one-page fact sheet that declared: Hollywood Pulls Michael Moore Antics on Tom DeLay Colbert Cracks the Story on Real Motivations Behind the Movie That's right, they're using a Stephen Colbert interview, where he asked such questions as, "Who hates American more, you or Michael Moore?", as evidence to disprove the…

Rising Oceans vs You and Your Family

Most of you will have heard by now of Mitt Romney's convention chuckle at the expense of the global biosphere, of which you and your family are of a part: "President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family." (Full text is here) Bill McKibben's tweet in response is pretty perfect: "On some other planet, apparently".  Planet3.0 has a lengthier and very good exposition on what underlies the success of such a mockery. My only thought on what Dan has written is that all us concerned individuals in the greater blogosphere…

It's Organic Pixie Dust, from Fair-Trade Pixies

SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates? Me:: In principle, sure. But it's a cartoon. We can't go there, it's not a real place. SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there. Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we can use to make us fly, we can try to fly to Never Land. Let me know if you find any. SteelyKid: No, Daddy, we don't need to find pixie dust. We just need to go to the store and buy some pixie dust. Me: I'm pretty sure they don't have pixie dust at the stores around here. Though, there are persistent rumors that they'…

You're Not Some Kind of Squirrel-Lover Are You?

Despite my best efforts to sleep late and miss my flight, I made it to the airport with plenty of time to get on my flight to DC. Which means that I will, i fact, be giving a talk TODAY at 3:30 pm at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help." If you're in the DC area, and not stuck in a long line to buy bread and milk in advance of the coming Snowpocalypse, come to my talk, which will feature at least…

Sex, Science, and Stem Cells: has anyone read it?

I was surfing around the DNC site last night and came upon this nice addendum to yesterday's post: a series of videos about the Denver area narrated by a proud native and six-term Congresswoman Diana Degette (D-CO, 1st). I was reminded while going through 5280 magazine that Rep. Degette had written a book about the war on science by the Republicans called, "Sex, Science, and Stem Cells: Inside the Right-Wing Assault on Reason." (Actually the book was "co-written" with Daniel Paisner, the amazingly prolific and self-effacing "author, ghost-writer, reasonably nice buy."). I'm a little short…

Did classic artists paint the brain into their art?

Some scientists seem to think so. Check out this comparison between a sagittal section of a brain and this piece of art: Pretty striking similarity isn't there? Partly as a joke to entertain sceptical colleagues, he and the team went on a brain trawl, and found many other examples. The team is convinced the artists were fascinated by the scientific discoveries being made by anatomists, but their theories had to be concealed in the imagery of their paintings, particularly when their clients were so often senior clergy who might see their scientific interests as blasphemous or even heretical…

Don't wait for the LHC - get your Higgs boson now

Yesterday the large hadron collider started up successfully, and the world did not end. But it will still be months before we have exciting collision data, so don't hold your breath waiting for that Higgs boson - unless you want to buy a stuffed one at Particle Zoo: Wait - a Higgs boson costs just $9.75?! Someone should have told CERN before they spent all those billions of Euros! If the Higgs boson is too trendy for you, Julie at Particle Zoo also offers a Z boson, which looks kinda like a Pac-Man ghost, or one of the three neutrinos, which resemble the disembodied heads of Ninja turtles…

The Counter-Creationism Handbook comes to the masses!

Here's some happy news for all you warriors against creationism: Mark Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that wonderfully indispensable and entirely portable version of the Index to Creationist Claims, can now be purchased in paperback for less than $15. It was previously only available in a rather pricey but but extremely well bound edition. Next time you attend a talk by Ken Ham or Duane Gish or any of the common-as-dirt wandering creationists (or Kent Hovind, once they let him out of jail*), you'll want a copy of this with you—teach them to fear the power of well-…

MnCSE!

Good news for Minnesota! Minnesota Citizens for Science Education has been officially launched. This is a new advocacy group with the goal of promoting good science education in our state. Specifically— A scientifically literate population is essential to Minnesota's future. To that end, Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE) will bring together the combined resources of teachers, scientists, and citizens to assure, defend, and promote the teaching and learning of evolutionary biology and other sciences in K-12 public school science classrooms, consistent with current scientific…

Ready, Set, Submit! Open Lab 2011

Production on Open Lab 2010 is proceeding apace, thanks to the valiant assistance of Blake Stacey. While we put the finishing touches on it, though, it is time to announce the sixth anthology.* The submission form for the 2011 edition of Open Lab is now open. Any blog post written since December 1, 2010 is eligible for submission. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. The instructions for submitting are here. Here are the submission badges, designed again this year by Doctor Zen. You are encouraged to display them…

Donors Choose: I'm in awe

You guys (and my next blogging check) have managed to fully fund several programs already (six by my count), and we're not even at the half-way mark in the drive (well, we're almost there). We've reached over 550 kids. I have a great project for you: there's a classroom in Michigan that wants to buy a netbook. One. That's it. It would allow the students to research questions without leaving the safety of their classroom. They need another $365 to get it. Can you imagine what kind of world could open up to these kids with web access? It won't take very many readers making modest…

Good-bye to the P-I

Updated 3/17 and 3/19 (see below) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's newsroom heard the announcement this morning: The Heart Corporation, which owns the paper, will cease printing after tomorrow's edition. The official word is that the P-I won't be going away, but transitioning to an online-only format with the goal of being "the leading news and information portal of the region." That's a quote from Hearst CEO Frank Bennack Jr. in an article that must have been wrenching for P-I reporters Dan Richman and Andrea James to write. The portal "will feature breaking news, columns from prominent…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants 10

The interest in the conference was overwhelming this year. When we opened the registration back in September we did not expect that we would have to close it in less than three weeks, already over our maximal number of 200. As a result, our waitlist got bigger and bigger and, occasionally, as someone would cancel, we could invite someone from the waitlist to register. About a dozen people held off until the end, hoping they would still be able to make it, but had to cancel over the last week or two. In their place, we invited several people from the waitlist (and yes, we are still over…

Student Pugwash's Science Policy Guide for Young Voters

Student Pugwash has launched a very interesting science, environment, and technology guide for young voters. Press release below. Student Pugwash USA Launches Science Policy Election Guide for Young Voters Washington, DC (March 5, 2008): Addressing questions about climate change, energy security, and other concerns expressed by young voters in a recent survey, Student Pugwash USA launched From Electrons to Elections, a science and technology policy guide to the 2008 elections. From Electrons to Elections is a non-partisan resource designed to educate young voters on science, technology, and…

Reality catches up with the Australian

John Quiggin writes about the culture warmongers: Third, and most importantly, the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way, long after the average person has seen through it. This has been most obvious in relation to climate change and Iraq, but there are a whole string of issues where the culture warriors have imprisoned themselves in an orthodoxy every bit as constricting as the largely imaginary monolithic leftism they…

Open Lab Reviews #1: USC and DSN

The first two reviews (that I'm aware of) of this year's edition of Open Lab have surfaced! First, USC ran a fantastic story on Open Lab and on my experiences with science blogging more generally. It was placed prominently (to my surprise) at the front page of the USC website for a week, and included in the weekly email of the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences! Thanks to Ariel Carpenter for such a great article. Do Japanese people have a special sushi-digestion gene? What are 10 things everyone must know about comets? Can giraffes swim? Inquiring minds from the Internet's vibrant…

Can it be real? An FTC sweep goes after cancer quacks

As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I've been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if they hadn't decided upon woo rather than good old-fashioned surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I've become aware of enough such cases and seen the dishonest marketing of quackery enough to drive me to maintain this blog and undertake other activities to promote…

US sponsored Afghan hospital a hell hole

Rabia Balkhi Hospital (RBH) is an obstetrical hospital in Afghanistan that is one of the jewels in the crown of the US aid effort after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002. Here's the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website boast: HHS activities have had an enormous impact on the quality of care at RBH, have saved the lives of hundreds of women and newborns, and have improved significantly the skills and knowledge of the doctors, nurses and midwives at the hospital. We are continually adding new improvements that dramatically expand the hospital's life-saving capacity, such as…

What This Panel Needs Is an Editor: "Book Inflation" at Readercon

This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the "Oh, please," phase of their oscillation, so I ended up skipping a lot of it in favor of working on edits for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. I did go to a couple of panels, though, one of them on "Book Inflation:" Tom Easton, Leigh Grossman (leader), Walter H. Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, Howard Waldrop.…

Ummmâ¦

Washington Post, 12/22/2009 â Obama rejects criticism on health-care reform legislation: "Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said in an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post about his legislative record this year. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill." ⦠He said the Senate legislation accomplishes "95 percent" of what he called for during his 2008 presidential campaign and in his September speech to a joint session of Congress on the need for health…

The Evolution of Facebook

I've been on Facebook since the beginning, in 2005. I explored it and studied it. I always spent minimal amount of time on it, though. I get e-mail notifications and perhaps once a day go there to click on all the "Ignore" buttons for all the invitations. So, I do not see is as a big time drain. But every now and then I get useful piece of information there, or an invitation to something I want to attend. I also use it to monitor what my kids are doing there. It is also nice to reconnect to some people I have not heard of in 20-30 years and see what they are doing. I am on my third set of…

Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?

An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join. The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business models and even their raisons d'etre are being disrupted. In years past, the answer was easy because being a member came with tangible benefits, such as inexpensive journals and the ability to submit abstracts to annual meetings. Nowadays, these perks don't seem very important. Most society…

Public Housing, Public Health and the Public Interest

by Kim Gilhuly The quality of public housing is a key determinant of health among low-income populations. Substandard housing – where mold, pest infestations, fire hazards, or other health risks are present – is associated with a wide range of health problems, including respiratory infections, asthma, lead poisoning and mental health issues. Nor is illness the only concern: Each year millions of Americans are injured, and tens of thousands killed, by accidents in and around their homes that may be linked to housing conditions. Access to safe and affordable housing is not just an economic…

The ethics of snail eradication.

In the comments of one of my snail eradication posts, Emily asks some important questions: I'm curious about how exactly you reason the snail-killing out ethically alongside the vegetarianism. Does the fact that there's simply no other workable way to deal with the pests mean the benefits of killing them outweigh the ethical problems? Does the fact that they're molluscs make a big difference? Would you kill mice if they were pests in your house? If you wanted to eat snails, would you? Or maybe the not-wanting-to-kill-animals thing is a relatively small factor in your vegetarianism? Killing…

Framing and the problem of choice: Infinite information, limited motivation

Why is it so important to provide the wider American public with readily available and scientifically accurate "frames" that re-package complex issues in ways that make them personally meaningful and interesting? A recent Pew study comparing survey findings across decades emphasizes one major reason: Since the late 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable news as a dominant news source and the explosive growth of the internet have led to major changes in the American public's news habits. But a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Cockroaches Keep Their Predators 'Guessing': When cockroaches flee their predators, they choose, seemingly at random, amongst one of a handful of preferred escape routes, according to a report published on November 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Sleep Helps People Learn Complicated Tasks: Sleep helps the mind learn complicated tasks and helps people recover learning they otherwise thought they had forgotten over the course of a day, research at the University of Chicago shows. What Makes An Axon An Axon?: Inside every axon is a dendrite waiting to get out. Hedstrom et…

Achiever Without A Cause

A gifted friend of mine suffers from a continuous psychological dilemma. He wants to be more productive and become somewhat famous, but he's pretty lazy and there isn't anything in particular he really wants to do. So, despite being hugely talented, he often feels inadequate. His problem is that he wants to have done things, but he doesn't want to do them. We share many characteristics. I'm also driven by an internal imperative to be productive, and I also crave the appreciation of my peers. (I mean, look at me here, blogging.) The main difference is that I am, without having done anything to…