Search Content

Displaying results 74351 - 74400 of 87950

The Popular Science Writing Process

Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors: YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY. I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right. Read it. It's good, and very true. "Yeah, but that's…

Links for 2010-01-22

Creation | Film | Review | The A.V. Club "Creation contains some vivid illustrations of evolutionary theory, and some intriguing consideration of what Darwin had to overcome to achieve greatness--in particular, his fear of disappointing his family. But for the most part, Creation is Biopic 101, earnest and over-explained. It's the kind of movie in which characters have to tell each other over and over just how important its subject is, in case we've never heard of The Origin Of The Species. It's also the kind of movie that reduces the life and work of a major historical figure to something…

How to Email Your Instructor for Help

Back in the stone ages, when I was a student and walked uphill through the snow to class, if you wanted assistance on a homework assignment, you needed to track the instructor of the class down in person, either by going to their posted office hours, or calling them on the phone to set up an appointment. With the introduction of modern communications technology, it is now possible to interact with your instructor electronically, and get help on your homework at times when you couldn't hope to meet them in person. While this is a tremendous improvement over the old way of doing things, here…

The Process Is as Important as the Answer

Over at the First Excited State, the quasi-anonymous proprietor laments the tendency of basketball replays to focus on the shot rather than the play that set up the shot, and compares this to a maddening student habit: Students in introductory physics classes inevitably place too much focus on the final numerical answer of the problem, which in reality is the least important part. I graded a quiz last week where I spent way too much time trying to decipher the numbers the students wrote down, because they placed the numbers in their equations rather than writing them clearly with the symbols…

Bloggers and Journalists and Editors, Oh My!

The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice. Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring this Bloggingheads episode featuring George Johnson and John Horgan. Johnson, you might recall, riled everybody up a couple of weeks ago with a bit of a dyspeptic rant about science bloggers compared to science journalists. They spend a good fifteen or twenty minutes on the topic again this week, and…

Vagus Nerve Stimulation in the News

There is a lot of information about href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagus_nerve_stimulation" rel="tag">vagus nerve stimulation as a treatment for depression, that you can get from the latest New York Times article ( href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/business/yourmoney/10cyber.html?ex=1315540800&en=7877734ab451d64f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">Battle Lines in Treating Depression, permanent link) on the subject.  Unfortunately, most of the good information is found by following links.  The article itself is pretty bad. The author launched into a…

Tancredo Protest at UNC; Denver Schooling on Scriptures

Serendipity. Me and Tancredo, of all people. Start here: The press has been buzzing today about former Colorado congressman and US presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, having to cut a speech short yesterday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill due to protesters on his stance toward illegal/unauthorized immigration to the US. With regard to state universities, Tancredo is opposed to granting in-state college tuition to children whose parents came to the US outside of legal immigration procedures. I am not a fan of Tancredo or his policies. The time has come in this country…

Refining thoughts on Sanjay Gupta - gravitas

Just another quick note reflecting further on my 8-minute gut reaction yesterday to word that Sanjay Gupta might be nominated as Surgeon General in the Obama administration. I still contend he's a great communicator but realize that the "both sides of the story" aspect of journalism has made some uneasy about where he'd actually stand on issues as a government leader of public health. In my post yesterday, I also neglected to consider some of the more controversial moments in Gupta's past stories as elegantly and comprehensively pointed out by my colleague and surgeon, Orac. I was also…

Warm hands, warm heart - how physical and emotional warmth are linked

We will readily describe a person's demeanour as "warm" or "cold" but this link between temperature and personality is more than just a metaphorical one. A new study shows that warming a person's fingertips can also bring out the warmth in their social relationships, pushing them to judge others more positively and promoting their charitable side. Lawrence Williams at the University of Colorado and John Bargh from Yale University managed to influence the behaviour of a group of 41 volunteers without them knowing it by giving them something warm to hold. When the recruits arrived at the…

9/11 memories reveal how flashbulb memories are made in the brain

I have only ever seen one car crash and I remember it with crystal clarity. I was driving home along a motorway and a car heading the opposite way simply veered into the central reservation. Its hood crumpled like so much paper, its back end lifted clear off the tarmac and it spun 180 degrees before crashing back down in a cloud of dust. All of this happened within the space of a second, so the details may be different to what I remember. But the emotions I felt at the time are still vivid - the shock of the sight, the fear for the passengers, the confusion over what had happened. Many…

Magnifection - mass-producing drugs in record time

Imagine reading the paper to find that a new wonder drug has been created that could save your life, if only you could afford it. Alternatively, put yourself in the shoes of the authorities that must decide not to offer powerful new drugs on the NHS because they simply aren't cost-effective enough. These situations are all too common-place and are often due to the extremely high costs of drug development. But a couple of years ago, scientists at Icon Genetics and Bayer Bioscience made an exciting step toward lowering these costs for some of the most promising new treatments. The…

Bacterial smells have potential for trapping pregnant mosquitoes

New parents are often extremely picky about where they live, seeking the right combination of spacious housing, local schools, and safe neighbourhoods for their tiny sprogs. A mother mosquito is no less choosy but unlike the white-picket-fence ideal of middle-class humans, she prefers areas of stagnant water, including artificial ones like rain-filled buckets or clogged drains. But she's not looking for just any old bucket of sluggish water. A new study reveals that a pregnant Aedes aegypti mosquito seeks out just the right patch by tasting for chemicals given off by bacteria in the water.…

Parasitic wasp turns caterpillars into head-banging bodyguards

Bodyguards have a tough and risky job but they usually get paid for their trouble. But not the caterpillar of the geometer moth. Against its will, it is recruited to defend the developing young of a parasitic wasp, and the only 'reward' it gets for its trouble is to be eaten inside out by the larvae of its attacker. The vast majority of wasps are "parasitoids", animals that practice the grisly art of body-snatching. They lay their eggs in the bodies of other living animals to provide their newly hatched grubs with a fresh supply of meat. Like HR Giger's alien, the full-grown larvae then…

Congratulations to Chris Mooney on his Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science & Religion

Great news came across my RSS reader the other day that author and journalist, Chris Mooney, was among twelve journalists selected by the John Templeton Foundation for an intensive two-month fellowship on the relationship between science and religion. The Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion provide financial support for scholars to study at their home institution and engage with US and European scholars at the University of Cambridge UK to "promote a deeper understanding and more informed public discussion of this complex and rapidly evolving area of inquiry…

The Expelled! fiasco: What's wrong with telling it like it is?

I generally don't bother to draw attention to intra-ScienceBlog warfare, but all hell is breaking loose as our little corner of blogosphere tries to come to grips with the wisdom of telling it like it is. I think it goes to the heart of what may be the fundamental question plaguing American progressives: How does one go about changing the mind of someone who has rejected reason? It all began when PZ "Pharyngula" Myers was expelled from a screening of the anti-evolution documentary Expelled! PZ responded to his expulsion with his usual witty rejoinders, noting the irony that his companion for…

Should we be eating tuna?

Plenty of fuss has been made in the past few weeks over a New York Times investigation into the health risks of eating sushi, with tuna, and more specifically, bluefin tuna, painted as the biggest villan. The problem is the level of mercury in the fish, and mercury is a nasty neurotoxin. The fuss is over whether the risks of poisoning your brain outweighs the benefits to your heart from all those healthy omega-3 fats tuna offers. But there's another way to resolve the dilemma that seems to have been overlooked. The New York Times public editor summarizes the tuna battle in a look at the…

Cobra Commander & Blowing Up the Moon!

This wonderful headline showed up in my Facebook feed: U.S. 'planned to blow up Moon' with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might. This was a bit eyebrow-raising. Dr. Strangelove was a slightly unfair caricature, but the Cold War really did have a better-than-average share of nuttiness. Still - blowing up the moon? Surely not. And it was in fact surely not. The article itself says there was a never-pursued idea to detonate a nuke on the lunar surface. To an earthbound observer, it would have meant a bright, brief pinprick of light on the face of our celestial neighbor and not much…

Killing Time

As you've probably heard, ScienceBlogs is going to be silent for a day or two starting... 1pm today I think? I'm not sure, I don't pay attention very well at our board meetings. And by board meetings I mean whatever happens to get posted on the internal message board. But apparently we're upgrading the posting system (finally!) and that will help things run a lot more smoothly for us writers. I hear there's even an equation editor, which I hope is true. Right now I have to typeset in LaTeX, render to png, save, upload, and write the img tag. Some automation will be nice. Eventually I…

GPS Tracking

MarkCC on Good Math, Bad Math has been posting lately on encryption and privacy. As usual, technology has increased the number of ways the government can read your mail, but it has also increased the ways you can hide your communications as well. Modern open-source encryption is very secure and all other things being equal it's much harder for the government to read encrypted email than it is for the government to open an envelope old-style. To read encrypted email, realistically the government is going to have to surreptitiously bug your computer and get your password, which (for the…

Three desert lizards evolve white skins through different mutations to the same gene

In the White Sands National Park of New Mexico, there are three species of small lizard that all share white complexions. In the dark soil of the surrounding landscapes, all three lizards wear coloured coats with an array of hues, stripes and spots. Colours would make them stand out like a beacon among the white sands  so natural selection has bleached their skins. Within the last few thousand years, the lesser earless lizard, the eastern fence lizard and the little striped whiptail have all evolved white forms that camouflage beautifully among the white dunes. Erica Bree Rosenblum from…

Balancing amino acids for a longer life

If I say the phrases 'anti-ageing' and 'nutritional balance' to you, you'd probably think of the pages of quack websites selling untested supplements than the pages of Nature. And yet this week's issue has a study that actually looks at these issues with scientific rigour. It shows that, at least for fruit flies, eating a diet with just the right balance of nutrients can lengthen life without the pesky drawback of producing fewer offspring. Despite the claims of the cosmetic and nutritional industries, chemicals or techniques that slow the ageing process are few and far between. We're a long…

Elephants and humans evolved similar solutions to problems of gas-guzzling brains

At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly). But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…

"Food Miles" Under Review

Herein, discussion of another recent piece on agriculture and science - the third one, as foreshadowed in my last post - this one an editorial in the Times that touches on Food Miles. (Thanks to Laura for sending it along.) Food Miles are the distance food travels to get to your plate. The author of the commentary, James McWilliams, notes that it has become part of the conversation on organic and local agriculture, referring to the same Barbara Kingsolver book--Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--we just made note of in the Science and the Farm Bill post. The Food Mile measurement is helpful in…

EPA Releases Endocrine Disrupter Screening List: But Where's Bisphenol-A?

This post was written by Jody Roberts.* After more than a decade of anticipation, the EPA released a draft list of possible endocrine disrupting chemicals that will be subject to a new screening protocol - this according to a new brief in Environmental Science and Technology. So, those of you who've been following this topic from its media peak back in the days of Our Stolen Future might assume that we'd find chemicals like bisphenol-A or classes of chemicals like phthalates - both of which have been the subject of tremendous amounts of research recently. But, well, that's not the case.…

This is all about the truth: a web experiment.

<a href="http://scq.ubc.ca/?p=677">truth</a> Use this code as often as you can. A while back, I wrote a post asking ScienceBloggers what they thought were successful tactics in the game of initiating forms of viral marketing. The question was primarily posed to ask whether such tricks to be used to promote things of, perhaps more importance (i.e. in the social responsibility context). You know, not Snakes on a Plane, or cool music videos with treadmills. Anyway, this is what I've decided to try. Basically, it's a chance to create a version of a Truth that can propogate. That…

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh gooooood... (not peeing - just back from a chaotic week and a half, plus stuff about Wade Davis)

(Image from herbalgram.org) This past week and a bit have been chaos central with a number of things going on round my neck of the woods. Some of which are your usual academic doledrums, but some of which were pretty inspiring overall. I guess the thing that has been most on my mind was my role as a "producer" of sorts for a high-profile speaker series at UBC. Two days ago we had a visit by National Geographic Explorer in Resident, Wade Davis, so only now, are my wedding planner type instincts starting to die down. For those of you, who have never heard of Wade Davis, he is quite an…

History - the sequel (a few words about Ronald Wright, an author worth checking out)

Yesterday I had an opportunity to listen to and to say hello to Ronald Wright. This is a fellow who has crossed a number of disciplinary boundaries in terms of his writing prowess, and winning lots of literary awards along the way. He's trained in Archeology and Anthropology, and as far as last night was concerned, focused on two of his books: "The Scientific Romance", and "A Short History of Progress." Both are examplary and worth picking up. His language is just the sort that is lovely to read. In fact, I made previous comments to his bok "A Short History" in a previous post, but I'll…

Three groups of fish are actually the males, females and larvae of one family

Whalefishes, bignoses and tapetails - these three groups of deep-sea fishes couldn't look more different. The whalefishes (Cetomimidae) have whale-shaped bodies with disproportionately large mouths, tiny eyes, no scales and furrowed lateral lines - narrow organs on a fish's flanks that allow it to sense water pressure. The tapetails (Mirapinnidae) are very different - they also lack scales but they have no lateral lines. They have sharply angled mouths that give them a comical overbite and long tail streamers that extend to nine times the length of their bodies. The bignoses (…

Has the speed of light changed?

A reader writes in with a question about the speed of light. Since the meter and second are defined in terms of that speed, how would we be able to tell if the speed of light is changing or has changed throughout history? It's a good question. According to the official standard, a meter is defined to be "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1â299 792 458 of a second". If the speed of light gets faster, by definition the meter gets longer. It's additionally complicated by the fact that the second is also defined in terms of the speed of light. The…

The Physics of the Death Star

Standing on the edge of Niagra Falls you can watch the water pour over. Falling down the gravity of the earth, it exchanges its potential energy for kinetic energy by picking up speed. Some of that energy is extracted by turbines and lights the homes and businesses of Yankees and Canucks alike. Some of that energy is used to pump water up into water towers to maintain the water pressure which those same people use to cook and clean. Move with a gravitational field, get energy. Move against it, lose energy. Now let's say you wanted to take apart the earth. Yes, the whole thing. You want…

Communicating climate change uncertainty

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program finally managed to release its Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment a couple of weeks back. There's not a lot of new material in the first four of five volumes which deal with the state of the science, mostly because the report was supposed to be released a while back. Must have been some delay at the top of the food change. But the fifth volume came with an intriguing title: "Best practice approaches for characterizing, communicating, and incorporating scientific uncertainty in decision-making" The 156-page report tries to give scientists a few…

Whose side are they on?

The US Climate Action Partnership includes several notable and powerful environmental organizations, specifically the Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and World Resources Institute. So one might expect that any plan endorsed by the partnership would be relatively strong and science-based, even if the group is dominated by industry members, like Duke Energy, Ford and Alcoa. But that isn't the way the USCAP's recently released strategy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions is being received. Indeed, by supporting the plan, more than a few enviros…

Book Review: Stoczkowski “Explaining Human Origins”

(This review appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2005) As human beings, we like to tell stories--we are story-telling apes. As scientists, however, we tend not to see ourselves as telling stories for, we are led to believe, stories are mere fiction. Yet when faced with answering the question of why or how we became story-telling apes, we are often presented with a series of hypotheses with little empirical evidence to distinguish between them. In many ways, Wiktor Stoczkowski claims that it is because we are storytelling apes, and that because stories often represent…

Thoughts on Lazowska's Seattle Comments

Over at TechFlash there is an article about some words Ed Lazowska, professor extraordinaire here in the computer science & engineering department at UW, had for the Seattle tech scene (see also xconomy): "It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone's college program is above average. And everyone's company is above average. And everyone's venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It is a state of…

Happenings in the Quantum World: April 1, 2008

Postdoc in Italy, AQIS 2008 Call for Papers, the Register reports on QUEST, and the New Scientist morphs into the No Scientist. There is a postdoc position available in Italy: A Post Doctoral fellowship in Quantum Information Theory is available at the University of Camerino, Department of Physics, associated with the EU project "Correlated Noise Errors in Quantum Information Processing" (CORNER FP7-ICT-2007). The research work consists in the development of optimal encoding and decoding procedures for quantum memory channels. This should be done in connection with the channels…

Cryptococcus gattii: Outbreak due to climate change?

National Geographic href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100421-new-fungus-cryptococcus-gattii-deadly-health-science/">reports: A new strain of hypervirulent, deadly Cryptococcus gattii fungus has been discovered in the United States, a new study says. The outbreak has already killed six people in Oregon, and it will likely creep into northern California and possibly farther, experts say... Cryptococcus infections in humans are hardly new.  And so far, the public health impact of the outbreak has been very low (understanding, of course, that the personal impact has…

Consciousness and the culture wars, part 2

After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the objection of her family. Then on Tuesday, Governor Jeb Bush ordered that her tube be reattached, using powers given to him by the Florida legislature the day before. If ever there was an argument for a living will, the Schiavo case is one. She supposedly told her husband she wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially, but never wrote anything down. If she had, the…

Gallup: Belief in Climate Change Exaggeration at Record High

A Gallup survey report released yesterday finds that a record 41% of Americans--and 66% of Republicans--now say that news reports of climate change are exaggerated. I first spotted this troubling trend in a 2007 paper analyzing twenty years of public opinion about climate change. This latest survey reinforces my fear that climate advocates have fallen into a dangerous communication trap. At the root of this growing perception is something I blogged about earlier this week: As long as science is communicated as the principal reason compelling policy action--and this "compelling" science…

Heat Capacity 101: Detecting and Measuring Heat Capacity Changes in Biological Reactions

Okay, after a long, long gap (on the blogosphere timescale) and/or almost zero elapsed time (by scientific literature standards), we're going to attempt to wrap up this mini-series on heat capacity effects in biology. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here, respectively. So: How do you know if your reaction has a heat capacity change? Actually, it's easy: collect data as a function of temperature and make a van't Hoff plot (ln 1/Keq versus ln 1/temperture) or a Gibbs-Helmholtz plot (ÎG versus temperature) - if either plot is not-linear your reaction has a ÎCp. This figure shows Gibbs-Helmholtz…

Allergies, Environmental Justice, Theory, and Audience: Part II with Author Gregg Mitman

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - - Part 2 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: Given the class issues you deal with, the book is also a contribution to the history of environmental justice. How would you characterize environmental justice and issues of health? GM: I think it is difficult to separate out issues of environmental and social injustice. When you combine inadequate access to health care, for example, with increased exposure to air pollution caused by the siting of bus depots in…

Again with the Lazy Environmentalists

"Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment." Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science and political science at Alleghany College, contributed a compelling op-ed to the Washington Post recently, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do it." Maniates basic point is captured both in the title of his essay and the quote I excerpted above. As related to the old industry-sponsored ad campaign, he's saying that Iron Eyes Cody isn't asking much of us. He writes, ostensibly, to call attention to some recent books appealing to maintaining the status quo by suggesting we…

Loss Aversion as applied Tax Ethics

Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or a gain: In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling used to put some questions to his students at Harvard when he wanted to show how people's ethical preferences on public policy can be turned around. Suppose, he said, that you were designing a tax code and wanted to provide a credit -- a rebate, in effect -- for couples with children. (I'm…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (3/26/08)

Megan McArdle posts about the psychology that causes parents to associate their child illnesses with vaccines, but she also reminds us what we can look forward to if parents fail to vaccinate their children: * Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952) * Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s) * Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy. * Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US…

Medicine in Rural China is still expensive, hard to come by

From the Economist, medicine is not going well in rural China: Since 2004 the government, for the first time, has been giving direct subsidies to grain farmers in an effort to keep them growing grain and to curb grain-price rises. This year the subsidies are due to rise 63%, to 42.7 billion yuan ($5.7 billion). Grain output has risen for three consecutive years, the best stint of growth since 1985. But high grain prices may have encouraged this more than the subsidies, which have been largely offset by the rising cost of fuel, fertiliser and other materials. The changes are a temporary salve…

NYTimes on Global Warming and Hurricanes

The NYTimes has an excellent article about the controversy concerning hurricanes and global warming: Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate. He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute…

Neurological "Personhood"

Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument. Money quote: Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was…

Flap those gills and fly!

I am going mildly nuts right now—somehow, I managed to arrange things so multiple deadlines hit me on one day: tomorrow. I've got a new lecture to polish up for our introductory biology course, a small grant proposal due, and of course, tomorrow evening is our second Café Scientifique. Let's not forget that I also have a neurobiology lecture to give this afternoon, and I owe them a stack of grading which is not finished yet. I'm really looking forward to Wednesday. Anyway, so my new lecture for our introductory biology course is on…creationism, yuck. What I'm planning to do is to describe…

Implied motion in Hokusai Manga

Click to enlarge images ARTISTS employ a number of different techniques to represent implied motion in two-dimensional works. One of these, commonly used in posters, comics and animation, is the affine shear effect, whereby a moving object is depicted as leaning into the direction of movement. Cartoonists also use action lines to depict movement and speed, with straight lines conveying fast movements and wavy lines conveying slower ones. Motion can also be conveyed by superimposing several images showing the successive positions of a movement, or by a blurred image showing the different…

Selective aphasia in a brain damaged bilingual patient

IN the 1860s, the French physician Paul Broca treated two patients who had lost the ability to speak after suffering strokes. When they died, he examined their brains, and noticed that both had damage to the same region of the left frontal lobe. About a decade later, neuropsychiatrist Carl Wernicke described a stroke patient who was unable to understand written words or what was said to him, and later found in this patient's brain a lesion towards the back of the left temporal lobe.  Thus was established the classical neurological model, in which language is localized to two specific areas…

Facial sensations modulate speech perception

What sensory cues do we rely on during the perception of speech? Primarily, of course, speech perception involves auditory cues - we pay close attention to the sounds generated by the speaker. Less obviously, the brain also picks up subtle visual cues, such as the movements of the speakers mouth and lips; the importance of these can be demonstrated by the McGurk effect, an auditory illusion in which the visual cues accompanying spoken words can alter one's perception of what is being said.  Integration of these auditory and visual cues is essential for speech perception. But according to a…