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Honorifics Keep Rolling In for One World's Fair Writer

Not only was I once awarded a baseball signed by the entire 1983 Orioles team -- when attending the Orioles Traveling Carnival and having my number selected from a bowl -- and yes, I'm counting that as an honorific, because, I mean, Rick Dempsey was there and everything -- but now this: I have just been appointed (hold your breath, longer, keep holding...almost...almost...okay...okay, now breathe)...a biographical candidate into the Cambridge Who's Who of Executives and Professionals in Nursing and Healthcare! I know! I know! Isn't it incredible!! We World's Fair guys don't usually toot our…

Metafiction and Self-Reference in Bridget Jones' Diary

Normally you wouldn't think of chick lit as experimental literature, but the interplay between the book and film versions of Bridget Jones's Diary is so bizarre as to be practically science fiction. The novel is itself a very loose retelling of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice. That novel is of course the gold standard for pretty much all romantic fiction since then, and Bridget Jones is far from the first to try a more or less modern retelling. Pride and Prejudice itself features the now-legendary Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, who meet, instantly dislike each other, and…

Sunday Function

I first met this function sometime in the year 2001 in the manual for a graphing calculator. The manual said that the function had no "closed-form analytic antiderivative" but nonetheless the calculator could integrate it numerically. At the time I had no idea what any of that meant, but upon taking a high school calculus class I met the function again as a demonstration of the concept of a limit. In my freshman calculus class in college I met the it yet again and learned that while this function and all continuous functions have an antiderivative, the antiderivative can't always be…

Bose-Einstein Condensates, pt. 4

Well, we've explored some groundwork in three previous posts and so it's time to put it all together. Why exactly do bosons have such weird behavior at very low temperatures, with a large fraction of their number crowding into a single quantum state? Let's plow on. If you're not familiar with the mathematics or the physics, don't worry. What you've absorbed from the previous posts will be fine - you don't need to know the details to understand the big picture. The number of bosons is given by the grand partition function Q in the following way: Each term in the sum is the expected number…

Things are worse than I thought: Journalism is dead

IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri is no intellectual slouch. But I have no idea where he gets the idea that news media are doing are bang-up job covering the science and politics of climate change. He recently wrote this baffling piece: It is therefore fair to say that the media has (sic) helped turn public opinion in favor of action on climate change. And this attitude has seeped into the negotiations that began with the 2007 Bali meeting and continued in Poznan, Poland, late last year. ... There is also every reason to believe that the way the media engages with this issue over the next six…

British Columbia hangs on to its carbon tax

Canadians had a chance to introduce a national carbon tax last year during a federal election, but failed to elect the party that was pushing it. Yesterday's provincial election in British Columbia produced the opposite result: the governing party, which had introduced a carbon tax last year, survived. Interesting. No one considered the 2008 national campaign a referendum on the merits of a carbon tax, and there were certainly other issues at play in the B.C. vote. But the tax attracted an enormous amount of attention, largely because the opposition party, the New Democrats, have…

Feedback

There's a new report on Arctic temperatures that is not only worrisome, but helps make clear one of the most challenging aspects of the climate change story, specifically the role of feedback. For example, pseudoskeptics whose primary source of information on climate is Fox News, are forever pointing out, as if it had never occurred to climatologists, that carbon dioxide levels historically follow rising temperatures, instead of the other way around. To the less informed, this pokes a big hole in the whole global warming story. The thing to know is, the initial temperature rise was quite…

Why can't American scientists be like this?

The Canadian Press has this story about Canadian scientists who have written an open letter calling on the Canadian voter to consider climate change in next week's federal election. When will their American colleagues follow suit? Here's the opening to the letter: We have been disturbed by what we perceive to be a lack of attention to the environment during this election campaign. While it's clear the public accepts that global warming is a threat, it seems people have simply no idea how serious this issue is. Global warming is without a doubt the defining issue of our time, and we cannot let…

Reading for non-psychopaths

I've met Jon Ronson a few times, including this past weekend, but I can't say I really know him — we've exchanged a few words, I've heard him give a talk, I now him as the short intense guy with the very bad hair, slightly neurotic, expressive, and funny. But I read his book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) this afternoon while on the train from Cheltenham to Heathrow, and I have this idea of who he is. He's Hemingway. Yeah, you know, the macho, hard-drinking man's man who would run with the bulls or fish for the marlin or pretend to be a war…

Original McEliece Cracked

Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…

A Simple Experimental Challenge?

Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave's machine: What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process? Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments (proving that a quantum computer is quantum computing is something which many experimentalists have struggled over, for far smaller systems than D-wave's system.) But there is a much simpler experiment which I haven't seen answered in any of the press on D-wave, and which, for the life of me, I…

Frank Luntz on Bush's Failures and His Advice for Obama

Turns out that GOP message guru Frank Luntz doesn't think much of the Bush administration's communication strategy across the past eight years. In an interview with NPR's On the Media (audio above, transcript), here's part of what he had to say about the Bush lexicon: FRANK LUNTZ: I don't think all that much of George Bush's linguistic mastery will live beyond him. The problem with Bush is that he talked about privatizing Social Security before he talked about personalizing it, so that undermined that way of articulating. He talked about a bailout rather than calling it a recovery plan or a…

Strategies for Scientists Writing Effective Op-Eds

At The Yale Climate Forum, Lisa Palmer contributes a very useful feature reviewing various strategies for how scientists can write effective newspaper op-eds on climate change. Most of the first half of the feature focuses on examples that target national elite newspapers like the NY Times or WPost, either grabbing attention by using heated language, i.e. arguing against "deniers" that "infest" public discourse, or by proposing bigger picture policy initiatives such as boosting long term funding for NASA's Earth observing system. (Using too much heat, of course, often backfires.) These types…

Recap on NYAS: Science Communication at a Crossroads

About a 100 attendees turned out for Thursday night's talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. The event marked the end of a year long series on science communication that was launched by Kate Seip, Liz Oswald, and other New York-area graduate students in partnership with the Academies. As I mentioned at the outset of my talk, the series offers a unique model to be reproduced in major cities with well developed institutional science hubs such as San Francisco and Chicago. Already, a similar prototype exists in Seattle through the work of students at FOSEP and the University of Washington…

At the NYTimes and the WSJ, Just 2% of Front Page Stories Focus on Either Science or the Environment

In an analysis released last week, Pew reports that during a three month period (Dec. 13-March 13, 2008), only 2% of front page stories at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal focused either on the environment or science/technology. The finding is troubling on a number of fronts. First, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are the papers of record for the country. The stories that they run on the front page are typically the lead stories across other news organizations including public radio, weekly magazines, regional newspapers and TV and cable news. If our highest quality…

Mass Destruction: the environmental effects of mining

Tim LeCain, a professor at Montana State (in Bozeman) and a talented scholar in environmental history and the history of technology ("envirotech"), has just published Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. Although I've not read it yet, I'm familiar with LeCain's work in general (having read prior work that is now part of the book). He's a solid scholar and a notable writer; this is important work. I copy here from the Rutgers Press description of the book: The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the…

Eight Ways to Kill Someone By Using an iPod Nano...

...According to Ex-Marine Brad Collum. And Kevin Fleming, his apparent interlocutor, as originally published here. You thought we couldn't pull off three Apple product satires in a row? Not to mention the Dick Cheney one we didn't like as much so we didn't include in this reprint series. But it is timed-posts week after all, so there you are. Don't miss the iPod Zepto and iPod User's Guide, oh inconsistent reader. Then and only then check below the fold for a reprint from the iPod-as-a-deadly-weapon genre of literature. "Eight Ways to Kill Someone By Using an iPod Nano According to Ex-…

Music does not make your kid smarter

Thank you, Germany: Passively listening to Mozart -- or indeed any other music you enjoy -- does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry. The ministry commissioned the report -- surprisingly the first to systematically review the literature on the purported intelligence effect of music -- from a team of nine German neuroscientists, psychologists,…

I get email

These people do exist. I am a fellow atheist from Germany. I have to say I enjoy reading your blog Pharyngula. I study molecular biology and strongly believe in evolution. I am, however, rather conservative in my views. That's what troubles me with atheism lately, it seems that atheists are generally on the left side of the political spectrum. Esp. your last post about how atheists should have progressive views in terms of "racism", "gender equality" and "disability rights" made me thinking. I feel like I agree with Conservative Chirstians on most political and social issues. For example…

Godless goals are progressive goals

Rebecca Watson is stirring up trouble again. She points out the dire situation for women in this country. In the first quarter of this year, 49 state legislatures introduced 916 bills that restricted reproductive rights. Here are a few that have passed, like in Texas, where women must have an invasive ultrasound that they either have to look at or have described to them in detail by a doctor before getting their abortion. Or South Dakota, where there’s now a 72-hour waiting period, and women must get counseling at an anti-choice pregnancy crisis center before obtaining an abortion. No centers…

Stinky Feet & New Hiccups Cure: 2006 IgNobel Awards!

The IgNobel Awards are the humorous counterpart to the Nobel Prizes; each year the most bizarre (but real!) research is awarded the dubious honor of an 'IgNobel.' "The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," which sponsors the awards with the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students. All the research is real and has been published in often-prestigious…

The Maori, MAO Inhibitors, and the "Warrior Gene"

"New Zealand's indigenous Maori population reacted angrily on Wednesday to a researcher's findings that Maori have a high representation of a gene linked to aggression, as the nation faces a domestic violence crisis." According to a Yahoo news story, genetic epidemiologist Rod Lea recently presented research in Australia that Maori men were twice as likely to carry monoamine oxidase than European men, describing it as "the warrior gene." This gene has apparently been tied to aggression and risk-taking behaviors such as smoking and gambling. "I believe this gene has an influence on behavior of…

Friday Grey Matters: The Story of Nkisi

Professor Donald Broom, of the University of Cambridge's School of Veterinary Medicine, said: "The more we look at the cognitive abilities of animals, the more advanced they appear, and the biggest leap of all has been with parrots." Meet N'kisi, a captive bred, hand raised Congo African Gray Parrot. He is 4-1/2 years old, and has been learning "language" for 4 years. He is now one of the world's top "language-using" animals, with an apparent understanding and appropriate usage of over 700 words. His owner, Aimee, intuitively taught N'kisi as one would a child, by explaining things to him…

Katrina Aftermath: Mercy Killing or Murder?

Imagine this: You are a doctor at a hospital in New Orleans, and you've just heard that the worst hurricane to hit New Orleans in centuries is headed your way. Your hospital is completely unprepared for this event, and nurses, doctors, and staff are leaving in droves. The wind and rain whip the hospital, tree branches are breaking through the windows. The power goes out; those on life supporting machines are now supported by a generator. Then, the generator goes out. You watch patients suffocate and die, as the hospital halls are filled with panicked, frantic patients, family, and staff. As…

Experimental Drugs for the Dying

People dying of terminal illnesses now have the right to take experimental drugs that are not yet approved by the the FDA, a federal court of appeals ruled last month (as reported in June's Nature Medicine). While on the one hand, these drugs may bring some hope to those whose illness has been thus far unresponsive to therapy, on the other it may hasten their demise by exposing them to a range of untested side effects while not even conclusively treating their illness. The recent ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed against the FDA by the advocacy group Abigail Alliance, whose namesake…

Let's Defund NCCAM

Orac and PZ are popularizing a post at Change.gov to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Biomedical research funding is falling because of the nation's budget problems, but biomedical research itself has never been more promising, with rapid progress being made on a host of diseases. Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by…

Monday: Framing Science Talk at Princeton University

For readers on campus or in the area, on Monday I will be giving a lecture hosted by the Program in Science, Technology, & Environmental Policy (STEP) at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The talk is scheduled for 1145am to 1pm and will be in 300 Wallace Hall. Below is a description: Framing Science: A New Paradigm in Public Engagement? Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. School of Communication American University Over the past several years, controversies over evolution, embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, and many other topics…

Why Thompson Launches his Candidacy on Jay Leno

Say what? Fred Thompson is launching his presidential candidacy on Jay Leno? In today's fragmented media world, it's a smart move. As the political scientist Matt Baum describes in a recent study, and as I have detailed on this blog many times, with so many media choices, audiences without a preference for political information are tuning out hard news and instead spending their media time with entertainment and infotainment media. When candidates go on late night comedy, they reach the limited number of "persuadables" left in the electorate, non-news audiences who have few other sources…

The Two Americas of Global Warming: Democratic Leaders Warn of a Looming Threat While Republicans Say Don't Worry

With political leaders like Senator James Inhofe and ideological safe zones like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, is it any wonder that only 23% of college-educated Republicans accept that human activities have contributed to global warming, or that among Republicans the issue polls dead last in importance behind the estate tax, gay marriage, and flag burning? Take for example Inhofe's press release declaring that the IPCC report "is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." The Big Oil…

More poetry

Since GrrlScientist raised the stake by giving a poem by the zoologist Arthur O'Shaughnessy, here's one by marine biologist Walter Garstang (1868-1949) called "Ballad of the Veliger or how the Gastropod got its Twist" from 1928. The Veliger's a lively tar, the liveliest afloat, A whirling wheel on either side propels his little boat; But when the danger signal warns his bustling submarine, He stops the engine, shuts the port, and drops below unseen. He's witnessed several changes in pelagic motor-craft; The first he sailed was just a tub, with a tiny cabin aft. An Archi-mollusk fashioned it…

Florida State University sells its integrity for $1.5 million

That's a bargain price for throwing a reputation down the drain. FSU has turned over some hiring decisions to a billionaire ideologue. A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university. A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free…

That Old Time Complexity

My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders if I'm just discovering all the complexity stuff he and George were writing about back in the 1990s. I think it's always good for John to keep everyone aware of the dangers of hype, of the need to ask how important or new scientific research really is. He's been particularly tough on the science of complexity, if there is such a thing. In 1995 he wrote a piece in Scientific American that practically…

Kalis Ilustrisimo seminar in Maryland

A few weekends ago I attended my second kalis Ilustrisimo seminar, sponsored by Guro John Jacobo of SWACOM. Master "Topher" Ricketts and his son Bruce led the seminar and it was one hell of a good time, despite being in a sweaty gym in Baltimore on a 95 degree day. (That kinda added to the atmosphere, though.) I had not had the pleasure of meeting Bruce before, but let me say that kid is already amazing and is going to be one incredible fighter someday. Actually he is already. Kalis Ilustrisimo is a bladed art of the Philippines that was last handed down from the Ilustrisimo family by the…

Meaning from Melody: Music as Language

Khalil Gibran said that "music is the language of the spirit," but today many would claim it can convey only a general impression or mood. However, recent research has shown that the meaning of musical passages can be surprisingly specific. In their 2004 article, Koelsch et al. demonstrate that even 10-second musical excerpts can build up concrete semantic expectations, the same as short sentences. (I just learned that Cognitive Daily covered this same study yesterday, so I'll try to put a slightly different spin on it in this post.) Normally, when people hear a sentence followed by an…

Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society

The latest issue of the journal Science has an essay by Greg Miller looking at the explosion of research into epigenetics and what this work could suggest about human society. In 2004, Szyf and Meaney published a paper in Nature Neuroscience that helped launch the behavioral epigenetics revolution. It remains one of the most cited papers that journal has ever published. The paper built on more than a decade of research in Meaney's lab on rodent mothering styles. Rat moms vary naturally in their nurturing tendencies. Some lick and groom their pups extensively and arch their backs to make it…

Tidbits, 7 September 2009

Happy Labor Day, US readers. Time to clean out the "toblog" tag on del.icio.us again: Everyone else has already linked to this Wall Street Journal article on data curation, so who am I to go against the tide? My chief takeaway is the trenchant observation that judging the value of data is not straightforward. One scientist's noise is another's signal, and everything is grist for the history-of-science mill. My friend from ebook days Gene Golovchinsky is learning by experience some hard truths about migration versus emulation. Welcome to the fold, Gene! Let's all play with supercomputers!…

Random bullets, pre-weekend edition

Sometimes, when I look at Toddler Jane*, my heart aches over how beautiful she is, inside and out. Nothing in the parenting books, nor the advice and stories from other parents, can prepare you for what that feels like. Call me crazy, but I really do enjoy advising undergrads. It's a different kind of problem-solving: should I drop this class or talk to the professor? do I have time before I graduate to double-major? if I major in X, will I still be able to take classes in Y? Plus, I really like getting to know the students one-on-one, and getting a glimpse into their lives, their…

An update on my mental state

Rather than responding to all of the comments on my last post (and thanks once again---really, you all have done so much to help put me in a better mental state than I've been in in a while!), I thought I would do a brief update in a post. First and most importantly, I'm doing better. Not great, but better---and that's huge, for me, right now. A few things happened in the past week to help put me in a better place: 1. I did as little work as I could get away with. I went in almost every day with the intention of Getting Stuff Done, but mentally, I wasn't up to it. Normally this would be…

Wait, did I just see a pig fly?

Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with the struggles I've had to finish and submit journal articles. In particular, there are two such articles that I've been working on forever that I just couldn't seem to wrap up, for one reason or another. Well, ahem...check out the "Stuff I should probably be working on" in the sidebar. That's right, I finally got one of the two monkeys off my back. Relief does not even begin to describe what I feel right now. I fully expect this article to be rejected, or best case scenario require major revisions. I sent it to the top journal in my…

Happy Pi Day!

Nathan Lau's Chocolate Haupia Pie This entry for the Scienceblogs Pi Day Pie Contest was sent to us by reader Nathan Lau of the House of Annie food blog.  It is a chocolate haupia pie, which Nathan describes as a "Hawaiian-style coconut milk-based pudding".  He has the full recipe and step-by-step instructions and pictures on his website and it looks absolutely delicious!   We're hoping to take a final crack at making a pie of our own later this afternoon, and I'll update this post with some pictures if we get it done before the end of the day.  To see all of the current pie contest…

DOI! D!O!I! D-O-I! D.O.I.!

I love the DOI. It's the best thing since sliced bread. Actually, it's better than sliced bread - I can slice my own bread - but I can't do what DOIs do so easily. If you've been living under a rock for a while, you might not know that a DOI is a document object identifier - it's a unique identifier at the article or chapter level (or really at any level - like each image, each paragraph, or the whole book). Like you have ISBNs for books and ISSNs for journal (titles).  What's really cool is that you can just put http://dx.doi.org/  in front of one, and get directed to the publisher's page…

WALL-E Movie - Short Review

Last Saturday, we went to see WALL-E with our 4 year old niece. It's the story of an ordinary cleaning robot (WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) that, well, keeps cleaning a city on earth long after humans have left earth. Humans left earth because they had turned it into a garbage heap. They have all run away from earth when it got too messy on a spaceship operated by a giant business corporation - the same corporation that ran earth aground. The escapees hope that once earth fixes herself, humans can all come back and re-colonize. Since many generations pass on…

On Barbers

Sunil reminds us of the pleasures of haircuts. When I first shaved my head hair off (2001 or thereabouts, when my hair retreated rapidly from the forehead and met the nape), I had recurring dreams in which I would get astonishingly hep haircuts by world's best hair artists. Slowly my brain descended into hairless reality and regained its composure. I also stopped looking ravenous at heads full of hair (photos of Sathya Sai Baba, a godman and miracle worker with an enviable afro, really messed me up, his miracles had only ill effects on my atheist head). These days, my brain has given up and…

Does the NCVS only count DGU by people who consider themselves victims?

In other words, the NCS only counts defensive uses against crimes. Andy Freeman said: Wrong. NCS doesn't get into defensive uses unless the victim thinks that a crime occurred even if it was successfully self-defended against. As in "Have you been the victim of a crime?" Someone who successfully self-defended against an armed robber might well answer "no". They weren't a victim. Yet, that's a self-defense against crime, one that the NCS wouldn't ever find out about. In fact the NCS does not ask "Have you been the victim of a crime?". Andy appears to have made that question up. The…

How my local school board meeting is like the health care industry

Attended my local school board meeting tonight, a friendly, almost cozy affair in the elementary school lunchroom. People we see around this small town daily; a principal I've watched Red Sox games with. The proximate issues: a continually rising budget despite falling enrollment, and -- related -- whether or not to ditch our aging middle school by merging it with the high school; an idea I like, since our 3 buildings have capacity for about 1200 students and we have about 800 (and fewer every year), and the middle school is an aging, ugly, and horridly inefficient mutt. We spend a lot of…

Why That Song's Stuck in Your Head

"Why do those holiday tunes get stuck in your head so much?" I was invited to pose this question to Dr. Robert Zatorre, Co-Director of the BRAMS: Brain Music and Sound lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. Dr. Zatorre is a leading expert in neuroscience research on the biological basis of music; if anyone is able to explain why Jingle Bell Rock is haunting me, it's him. Commonly known as earworms, some songs repeat in our mind. They are "typically annoying," said Dr. Zatorre. We often can't control it, the sounds won't go away, and they loop, repeating a refrain or…

Plastic Bags: To Rebate, Tax, or Outright Ban?

Plastic bags have some desirable traits. They require less energy and water to make than paper bags. Their impermeability means that they won't become a gooey, soggy mess over a little rotten egg. But the very thing that makes plastic bags so attractive must also make them an environmental catastrophe. The problem with plastic bags is that they are made of plastic, which can take more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, has a number of ill effects on human health, and, as litter, can kill seabirds and other marine life. Plus, there are just too many of them (check out this bibliography on…

Earthlings: Ethics, Animals, and Numb Scientists

I went to the Vancouver screening of the film Earthlings last night. Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, the film is an indictment of the pet, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical industries in their brutal treatment of animals. It has all the elements of a horror film: blood, guts, fear, screams. But one distinctly different emotion emerges: shame. After watching Earthlings, I felt nothing but shame to belong to the human race. There is only one moment of justice in the film: a scene with circus elephants that retaliate against the Big Top and wreak havoc. It ends badly, as one might…

Politics Tuesday: The Wingnuts Lose It Over LOST

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org Just when it looks like the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) might actually get through the Senate, the black helicopter crowd is at it again, claiming that ratifying the treaty would give the U.N. control over practically every activity the U.S. could ever want to undertake anywhere, at any time. In the face of a concerted effort by the Bush Administration and the extractive industries that would benefit from the treaty to get it passed, those who fear a "one world government," are putting up a valiant effort, led by Sens. Vitter (R-La.), DeMint (…

Grid Cells: Putting rats in their places and (maybe) meaning in life

Place fields tied to a single grid cell in a rat's entorhinal cortex. From Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, and Moser, "Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex," Nature, 11 August 2005. By permission of the authors. I wanted to give a heads-up and a link to a set of blog posts on spatial cognition that ScienceBlog readers might find of interest. These posts compose the first installment in Mind Matters, a new, researcher-authored "seminar blog" that (full disclosure dept:) I conceived, and yesterday launched, at sciam.com, the Scientific American website. In their posts,…