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Moses was high as a kite

And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. (Exodus 3:2) Moses was high when he saw that bush. Or so speculates Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week. Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny…

Dimethoxytrityl/DMT (Orange you glad you protected that alcohol?)

The dimethoxytrityl, or DMT, ligand, is one of my favorite protecting groups in organic chemistry. Oftentimes, you need to "mask" part of a molecule to keep it from reacting during a step in a synthesis. DMT does this without breaking a sweat and gives you pretty colors to look at to boot. Those phenyl rings form a pinwheel type arrangement (in 3-D, that is, they're twisted out of the plane of your screen). When bound to a molecule, DMT doesn't have much of a color. When it's removed with acid, though, you actually get a (rare, usually unstable and only transient) solution of dimethoxytrityl…

Entheogen and hallucinogen, N,N'-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), identified as endogenous ligand for sigma-1 receptors

Welcome 4 March readers of The Daily Grail - please be sure to also click on the original post about the DMT article by my colleague, Laura Mariani. Thanks to Dave Munger & Co's ResearchBlogging.org, I just found a fabulous neuroscience grad student blogger from Emory University: Laura E Mariani at Neurotypical? Doctor-to-be Mariani blogged last Monday about a paper in Science where the endogenous ligand of the orphan sigma-1 receptor was identified as the hallucinogen, N,N'-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The work originated with the group of Arnold Ruoho and colleagues at the University…

Fmoc (Amino acid condoms)

Automated solid-phase synthesis of biomolecules defines 20th century biology. I previously covered a protecting group that is ubiquitous in DNA synthesis, but the Nobel was actually awarded for peptide chemistry. Fmoc is sort of to amino acids what DMT is to DNA. In amino acid synthesis, you take off stepwise protecting groups (fmoc) with base and release your peptide with acid, but in DNA, you take off stepwise groups (DMT) with acid and release your DNA with base. Fmoc, like DMT, is useful because you can watch it come off because it's colored (well, Fmoc absorbs UV, DMT cation is kool-aid…

Coleman, under investigation, wants to use campaign funds for criminal case

Attorneys for Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) have asked the Federal Election Commission for permission to use campaign funds to pay his legal bills stemming from allegations that a Coleman confidante funneled improper payments to the lawmaker via his wife. Coleman and his wife have denied any wrongdoing, but the former CEO of Deep Marine Technology, a Houston, Texas, company, filed a lawsuit claiming that Nassar Kazeminy, a DMT investor, "coerced DMT to make improper payments of $75,000 to Laurie Coleman through her employer, for the ultimate benefit of her husband." A similar lawsuit was also…

Hoasca, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and the US Supreme Court

As we approach 100,000 visitors since joining ScienceBlogs I am amazed to still be getting 500-700 visits per month at the old home of Terra Sigillata, all without any promotion or new posts. The most-visited of the old posts is the following which appeared originally on 21 February 2006. Much of humankind's experience with pharmacologically-active natural products has been through the mind-altering effects of plants used in religious ceremonies. Today [21 Feb 2006], the US Supreme Court upheld a decision to permit a New Mexico sect of a Brazilian religious order to continue using an…

Dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (An even smellier way to make proteins than bacteria)

Making biomolecules is tricky - getting a reasonable quantity of whatever DNA or protein you're after can take what seems like heroic efforts. You're made acutely aware of the fact that the humblest bacterium does this without breaking a sweat. Protecting and activating groups are needed, like DMT and phosphoramidites for DNA. Dicyclohexylcarbodiimide is an activator used in making peptides.

Phosphoramidite chloride (Making DNA the hard way)

The automated chemistry for making DNA uses special monomers called phosphoramidites. To make this, you have a nucleoside (a DNA base + a DMT-protected sugar - everything but the phosphate) - and couple it to a phosphoramidite chloride. Once you've made (and purified) this, it's ready to go into a DNA synthesizer. The final product of coupling the nucleoside to the phosphoramidite chloride is what we usually call a "phosphoramidite" - sometimes just an "amidite." The reaction produces HCl as it moves along, so it's usually done in the presence of a little Hünig's base (N,N-…

Be nice to me or I might not talk to you. Or worse, maybe I will talk to you...

Recently published research shows that individual humans will be nicer (more altruistic) when there is the possibility that the recipient of an act can respond verbally. The paper, "Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior" is published in Evolution and Human Behavior for March. These results are not particularly surprising, but it is important to confirm these things through experimental work. From the abstract: [Humans may be...] motivated by concerns for praise and blame. ... we experimentally investigate the impact of anticipated verbal feedback on altruistic behavior…

White House is the reason children are still working in US tobacco fields

  “I got a headache before. It was horrible. It felt like there was something in my head trying to eat it.”  Those are the words of a 12 year-old boy who works in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. His words are just one of many from other young seasonal workers who work on U.S. tobacco farms in KY, NC, TN, and VA. Their experiences are catalogued in Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) "Tobacco’s Hidden Children: Hazardous Child Labor in US Tobacco Farming.” The report was released last week. Credit: Human Rights Watch The 139-page report was also the subject of editorials appearing on…

Open Lab 2007 - soon in a bookstore near you!

The day before yesterday, my copy of The Open Laboratory 2007, the second annual science blogging anthology, arrived in the mail. So yesterday, Reed and I met at a coffee shop and looked it over. It looks great! Reed knows what he's doing and is a perfectionist, so of course the book looks perfect. So, I went back online to Lulu.com and approved the book to be sold in various online and offline bookstores. The book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload the title to their distribution network. This process is generally completed…

Open Lab 2008!

So, Open Lab 2008 is now available, and you must buy a copy. Open Lab collects the best writing from the blogosphere and (ironically) captures them in print. It's a nice chance to read some great stuff that you knew you'd love, and some great stuff you've never even seen. The cover art by Dave Ng and The Flying Trilobite is awesome. The proceeds go toward ScienceOnline10, next year's online science writing conference, which totally rocks. Lot's of the attendees are graduate students, academics, high school students, and other types of hungry people who could really use a subsidy to come…

Scientists: why your access to the literature is about to get worse, and what you can do about it

Making headlines in libraryland is EBSCO's announcement of exclusive access to several popular periodicals in electronic form. (See also this reaction, which includes a partial list of the publications that will be exclusive to EBSCO.) Essentially, libraries who want their patrons to be able to access Time, New Scientist, and other such publications will have two choices: buy an EBSCO database subscription, or buy the publications in print. If print is undesirable, EBSCO is the only choice. It doesn't take a Nobel-level economist to guess what this monopoly on popular content will do to…

In today's papers....

When I woke up this morning and went online while kids were getting up and ready for school, the first this I saw was this tweet by abelpharmboy: Two articles on @BoraZ in today's Durham Herald-Sun. Will post links later. Herald-Sun has pain in the ass registration to access site. So, I went out and got a hardcopy of the paper, and also looked at it online (feel free to use login: coturnixfan and password: boraborabora to see the articles, thanks Bill). The first article starts on the front page of Chapel Hill Herald (I think that if you buy the paper in Durham, Chapel Hill Herald is inside,…

Around the Web: An academic ghostwriter comes clean, Mechanical MOOCs and more

An Academic Ghostwriter, the 'Shadow Scholar,' Comes Clean The Mechanical MOOC Rewriting the Journal (what will online do to journal publishing) The Siege of Academe The Self-Centered Library: A Paradox (why do we do what we do) Tweeting By Faith (calculating social media ROI for universities) Streaming content: Why buy when you can borrow so much more? Carleton U reveals new donor deal in controversial political management program >MOOCs will mean the death of universities? Not likely The Problems with Peer Grading in Coursera Building a Stellar Team (building an academic executive…

Dynamic Pricing on Amazon

Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing: Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you'll come back to buy them. When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he's raised the prices. "I knew you were hot to buy them," the clerk says, "so I figured I could make a few extra bucks." That's what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been…

Grocery Shopping

In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping: That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online grocery shopping. The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon -- how does that happen? -- but that didn't make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You…

Around the Web: Library school mergers, Makers in the library, Quiet makes a comeback and more

Horses, motorcars and mergers on the LIS horizon Mergers, boundaries, and image St. Kate’s MLIS program is going under the business school Maker Faire KC 2012 and what it means for libraries At Libraries, Quiet Makes a Comeback Blogs as Serialized Scholarship Why Millennials Don't Want To Buy Stuff Concrete options for a society journal to go OA I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail. Online Higher Education Opening Ceremonies (changes in schol comm starting to seem inevitable) Is online learning really cracking open the public post-…

Psychedelic Pharmacology

Clarence Darrow famously said: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." It's likely that Dr. John Halpern experienced a similar kind of schadenfreude on hearing of Timothy Leary's death in 1996. For those of you too young to remember him as anything other than Uma Thurman's godfather, Leary was a renowned academic who launched the now infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project. The research project, which Leary developed in partnership with Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), used psychedelics to facilitate "life-altering spiritual insights" in…

Sasquatch is ill-served

Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November. It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn't get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We're all heartbroken, I know. But now she has overcome all the obstacles, and it's finally in print! You can read the abstract. One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and…

Science and Stimulus: Action still needed

The following is the latest missive from Shawn Otto: Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U.S. Science, but it was just the warm-up act. Now we all need to come together as a community for the real show. Even after the $3.1 billion restoration, the final approved Senate version of the stimulus bill falls far short of the House version when it comes to science and technology. You can look at the differences…

THE OPEN LABORATORY!

You kept submitting your posts all year long and watching, every Monday, to see which other posts were also entered. Then we closed the submission form. Then we made you wait a month of "electoral silence" while the judges went through three rounds of judging, until we announced which 50 essays, plus poems and cartoons, made it into print. Then, at Science Online, we announced the gorgeous new cover art. But now - what you have been waiting for so long: The Open Laboratory 2010, the collection of best writing on science blog for the year, is finally up for sale! Buy one for yourself, buy…

The fifteen years that shook the world . . . and you were there

Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone through a revolution in that period that will seem as profound as the 50 years from 1450 to 1500, the half century after Gutenberg and the invention of moveable type. It's hard to remember what the cyberworld was like a short 15 years ago, but thanks to the internet we can retrieve -- instantly --…

Not Exactly Rocket Science - the BOOK!!!!

Folks, I have big news... I've just published a book based on this little blog. Some of you may remember me doing a quick poll about this a while back. Well since then, I've collected about 80 or so of my favourite posts from the last year and converted them from pixels to paper. The book is now available through online publisher Lulu and you can order one for the tiny sum of £9.99 by clicking on these magic blue words. It covers a wide range of biological areas - Mexican-waving bees, snow-making bacteria, viruses of viruses, the psychology of voting, the neuroscience of jazz, binge-…

Buy where you shop: Bookstores, libraries and intellectual locavores

Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story. A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death and decline for bricks and mortar bookstores. But while some of the competition is retrenching or worse, BakkaPhoenix, which recorded a double-digit increase in sales last year, is expanding. In stark contrast to the recently shuttered This Ain't the Rosedale Library, BakkaPhoenix is readying a fall…

A quick question for my readers

On Saturday afternoon, after a morning of rounding on the service's patients and doing some odds and ends in the office and the lab, on the way home I stopped at the local Best Buy because I needed some blank DVDs. To my puzzlement, there were people lined up outside as though they were camping out for tickets for the most popular rock band in the world. There were sleeping bags, chairs, tents, and coolers. I had no clue what was going on. Then I saw this, and realized that it was the afternoon before the midnight launch of the Nintendo Wii. Can someone explain to me why people would line up…

File this away.

Because everyone is doing it, here's the card catalog entry for this here blog: I miss physical card catalogs. I would totally buy one for Casa Free-Ride if I could get my hands on one. (Although, would buying them up amount to contributing to their demise in libraries?) The sprogs have only ever dealt with online library catalogs, which I think is a shame. And they don't know from 8-tracks! *Sigh* Anyway, you are invited to make your own and report back on it.

The Paradox of Choice (Internet Version)

So the Times is reporting that online sales are starting to stall/ (Jack Shafer disagrees.) This trend certainly jives with my own shopping experiences. While I still buy most of my things online - the only thing I will never buy online are pants - I've grown disenchanted with the vast majority of online retail sites. Simply put, they offer me way too many options. Take flip-flops. A few weeks ago, I decided to get a new pair of flip flops. I dutifully went to Zappos (free shipping!) and looked in the "casual sandals" section. There were 1590 options. Just for men. In my size. So then I…

NYTimes Editorializes on High Textbook Prices

The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them: College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-…

Mitchell & Webb: Nutritionists comedy sketch

When all else fails, go online and buy another doctorate: Hat tip to le Canard Noir.

English Language: The Best Kept Secret

"The Elements of Style". Prescriptive. Precise. Buy it for the elegant introduction by E B White. Read the original text online.

Click-Throughs, Advertising, and Branding Versus Point-of-Sale

For anyone trying to make a living at blogging, including our Seed Media Overlords, one of the major hurdles is the poor pay of internet advertising compared to magazine and newspaper advertising. This is an accurate assessment of the problem (italics mine): I think the evidence for this dynamic is weaker than a lot of people suspect. As far as I can tell, it's all based on Google. GOOG showed up and provided contextualized ads to consumers and a model that allowed advertisers to only pay for purchases that were "working". This is pretty much the only way they make money, and they make a lot…

We'll give you a deal on textbooks if you don't mind some ads.

In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them. So, I'll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed. Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee. Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television…

Aleppo: UN vs private traders

In a success for the "invisible hand" over "big government", we have People gather to buy fresh produce that was brought into rebel held areas of Aleppo by private traders from a newly opened corridor that linked besieged opposition held eastern Aleppo with western Syria that was captured recently by rebels, in Aleppo versus U.N. Seeks 48-Hour Aleppo Ceasefire to Deliver Aid to Syrians. I heard the second link on R4 a day or so ago and thought to myself "how typical of a giant lumbering bureaucracy". The first, contrasting, link was a throwaway line in the FT, that I then found online.

The First Step in Increasing the NIH Budget

The Specter-Harkin Amendment passed the Senate, but this does not guarantee an increase to the NIH budged. The House must still vote on it and it must be reflected in House and Senate Appropriations Committees' allocation for the Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee. (Don't worry, I don't understand the jargon either; I'm reproducing it from an email I received from the Genetics Society of America.) That said, an important step has been taken towards ensuring important biomedical research gets funded. The amendment passed by a vote of 73 to 27. I have reproduced a list…

Sustainable Energy â without the hot air?

David J.C. MacKay has a draft book out online, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ , which is worth a browse. He is due to give a talk here in a bit, which should prove interesting. The book is an attempt to look at renewable energy from a broad-brush numbers point of view (in which I suspect it does a rather better jobs than "Heat" by Monbiot). But the bit I want to look at is the "offsetting" section, p143 onwards, the Story of Joan and Thambo. Joan flies in a plane, and offsets her emissions by helping Thambo keep warm by not burning his pile of coal. This seems fair enough: she…

No way to run a bookstore

I love bookstores — I like the ones that have huge stacks of strange used books where you can find surprises, and I also like the big online stores where I can order anything I want. My kids are all the same way; when we make trips into the big city, the whole mess of us usually end up spending hours in places like Cummings or Uncle Hugo's. But I finally found a bookstore with no redeeming values at all, one I will never patronize. It's called Abunga, and their motto is "Empowering Decency as your Family Friendly Bookstore". What that means is that they allow bookstore members to vote against…

Last Minute Presents for Physicists

Books, of course, but which books...? One of these "be careful what you wish for" things, is that I now get a lot of requests to review books (and DVDs and online games etc), just as I reach the stage of my life where I spend most of my time doing reading reformatting paperwork instead of reading fun new things... which is a shame, because the books I get sent are pretty much generally exactly those I spent most of my very limited disposable income on when I was younger... One day soon I'll catch up on the backlog. In the meantime, here are three good looking physics books that any good…

Sun in 3D

Poor man's VR. Bought a few pairs of Red-Blue 3D Glasses (you can buy them online, I paid five pounds for five glasses) to view the 3D images of Sun produced by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites. This image is nifty.

Please purchase Unscientific America at your local, independent bookstore

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have released a new book entitled, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Mr Mooney and Ms Kirshenbaum also co-author the blog, The Intersection, a Discover Magazine online. I was fortunate to receive a review copy from the publisher but must admit, sheepishly, that the book has sat unread beside my home office desk because of other responsibilities. The advance paperwork says it is to be released officially on 20 July. So, my plan is to get to it this weekend and get some magnitude of a review written. During my relative…

There Will Be Books: Raven Used Books Opens in Boston

One of the things Newbury Street has lacked is a used book store. Now it has one: Raven Used Books. This could be really bad as it's about four minutes away. Unlike most Boston area used book stores, Raven Used Books' business model isn't to sell really expensive rare books and then stock the rest of the shelves with crap. They actually have lots of books you want to read at very low prices, along with books that you either can't order online or would be really expensive to do so (it seems they focus on buying leftovers from college and independent bookstores, not buying by the pound…

Stephen Fenech and The Daily Telegraph promote Q-link quackery

The Q-link is a device that purports to protect you from radiation from mobile phones using "A coil connected to nothing". Ben Goldacre and Orac have comprehensively debunked Q-link's claims. Yesterday Sydney's Daily Telegraph published a story promoting Q-link (the on-line version has now vanished) by Stephen Fenech, their technology writer. Fenech's story read like an advertisement for Q-link, with their claims for the benefits of the product presented as factual and including the url of their website where you could buy one. That's bad enough, but it also turns out that he's done this…

Danish Journal of Archaeology

Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further ones will see rolling electronic publication from then on, with an annual physical print volume appearing in ~May. Subscribers get access to the full back-catalogue of the old JDA, as well as new papers. You can also buy PDFs of single papers without subscribing, but this is jævle expensive. Whether…

Shaming in the Marketplace: who polices online sellers scammers?

Update: welcome Consumerist readers! While I use my own experience to illustrate concerns about third-party online merchants, this post is mainly about the bigger long-term informational problems I see with reputation, reliability, and online communities. Please feel free to weigh in! A few weeks ago, I caught a familiar story on the local news. A local citizen had written in to the news team with a request for help after a local furniture company sold them a defective living room set, and wouldn't give them a refund. The news team went to the business, who - wary of the potential public…

"The" Feynman Lectures

Roughly a week or so ago the ScienceBlogs front page was discussing the new online videos of the Feynman lectures. Somehow they found one of my old posts on the subject. What I haven't really seen pointed out that the new online video isn't actually "the" Feynman Lectures. "The" lectures were given as an actual class for Caltech physics undergrads, and the point was to teach them physics. There's not a lot of point reiterating the detail in my old post, but the main thrust is that the lectures are not far removed from what you'd hear if you wandered into your local university intro physics…

"Keep 'em coming"?

Longtime readers know that I'm a bit of a World War II buff. In fact, that's how I ended up developing such a profound interest in Holocaust denial, to the point where I used to write about it rather frequently. I don't write about it as often these days, not so much because I'm not still interested in countering it but rather because I don't routinely come across it in the news as often as I used to. Be that as it may, I happen to love WWII propaganda posters. American, British, Russian, German, I collect digital images of them all, and although my collection is only a couple of hundred…

Microsoft: So evil it can make smart people stupid

CNN is supposed to be a professional news outlet. But even the editors and writers at CNN's Fortune desk are no match for Microsoft's' Stupid-Ray Gun. This piece is virtually giddy about the fact that the next version of Microsoft Office will be just like Google Office. Free and on line . Now, think about that for five seconds and imagine yourself to be a writer for CNN. Do you actually believe that Microsoft Office is going to be available for free? Like, me, Greg Laden, can just decide "Oh, I've had enough of Google Docs ... I'm going to switch to the online version of Microsoft…

links for 2009-01-04

TheStar.com | Entertainment | Cultural resolutions: bigger, better, closer, stronger "No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don't want to live in a world without bookstores." (tags: economics society culture books) Iron Man, physics and g-tolerances | Dot Physics "My attack will center on the scene where Tony Stark (Iron Man) escapes from captivity with his home made iron man suit. He uses some type of rocket boots to…

Ayurvedics Are Secretly Using Pb®

Friends, many of you know the miraculous benefits of Hoofnagle Brand All-Natural Pb®. Well, I am writing to tell you that today I am filing a suit against a wide range of ayurvedic herbal supplements providers for using the active ingredient of Pb® and its sister product, As33® without licensing it from me. The New York Times reported yesterday on this widespread deception of consumers. You see, in order to make ayurvedic medicine appear efficacious, a large number of supplement providers are secretly including Pb® and As33® in their scammy supplement products: A report in the Aug. 27 issue…

Class lectures on iTunes

Old fun: Music on an iPod | Newer fun: Watching porn on the iPod | Newest fun: Listening to lectures! Apple Inc is letting NJIT Professors post their lectures, and other audio and video class information on its iTunes U website - where students can go and then download whatever material they want onto their computers, i-pods, mp3 players and even their cell phones. NJIT Instructional Design Professor Blake Haggerty says if you know you'll be able to download a lecture, "you have the opportunity of really paying attention in class, and then reviewing afterwards what was said." Ohh.. and don't…