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Evolution and Cancer

Jonathan Wells wrote a paper a while back that proposed a "ID-derived" explanation for cancer. I've written about that before (here, here , here, here, and here) as have others. Thus, this is of interest: In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The Wistar Institute, and his colleagues report that precancerous tumors containing a population of highly diverse cells were more likely to evolve into cancer than those containing genetically similar cells. The finding suggests that, in at least some forms of cancer, the more genetically diverse a…

I should use Internet Explorer and Register too? Why, oh, why?

I was trying to view a tamil magazine website. The scrawny bouncers at the door of Sloppy Coders Paradise stop me with a message: "Use Internet Explorer only please". Huh, my firefox fingers bristle at the affront. Still I am not unduely surprised. I was aware the website was probably the work of a web development company with moderate to sloppy software skills. Oh well. Alright, perhaps the website will have some redeeming quality in its content. I use IE and enter. The moment I step in, the website asks me to install a particular tamil font. Well, I pause a moment to consider if I should…

Neuron Culture top 5 hits for May

In reverse order: 5.  David Sloan Wilson, pissing off the angry atheists. "I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist." This sparked some lively action in the comments. 4. Lively or not, Wilson and Dawkins lost fourth place to snail jokes. A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails.  3. A walking tour that lets you See exactly where Phineas Gage lost his mind   2. "Push" science journalism, or how diversity matters more than size We're constantly told -- we writers are, anyway -- that people won't read long stories. They're hard to sell to editors,…

Chocolate Pudding Letters Review : A New High Profile Journal

I'm excited to announce that I've been named an associate editor for a new high profile journal, Chocolate Pudding Letters Review. Read below for our first call for papers: CALL FOR PAPERS! We are now accepting papers for the 1st issue of CPLR! DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY! Leading scientists anticipate that CPLR will become the premier outlet for major breakthroughs in the study of chocolate pudding (CP) and other viscous edible creations (VECs). Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, 1) theoretical reviews, 2) empirical works, 3) recipes, 4) novel…

Ohhh the Irony! Enzyme responsible for Alzheimers can suppress tumors

Clearly I'm not a medicine bio person - but this just had to make it onto the blog. Researchers at Burnham Institute for Medical Research ("Burnham") have provided the first evidence that gamma-secretase, an enzyme key to the progression of Alzheimer's, acts as a tumor suppressor by altering the pathway of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a potential treatment target for cancer. Expedited to publication online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these findings reveal a limitation of targeting gamma-secretase for treatment of Alzheimer's and potentially other diseases.…

An online abortion poll — for real

I'm about as pro-choice as you can get; I'm even willing to say that I'm pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I'm also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way to trivialize a significant life decision, Pete and Alisha! They have an online poll, and you can go vote right now. Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion? Give Birth 77.3% (118,301 votes) Have an Abortion 22.7% (34,741 votes) Clearly, looking at those numbers, the 'bots have been at work,…

Medicine and logic

I have an ambivalent relationship with the medical profession. On the one hand - my left - I lost a finger because a general practitioner refused to investigate a wart, that turn cancerous. On the other, I think medicine is one of this civilisation's greatest achievements, at least when it is made available to people. But I don't think highly of medical practice. So it comes as a great pleasure to read a medical practitioner saying: So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Unfortunately, the online…

Penis Transplant Rejected (Psychologically By Wife)

I feel really bad for this guy: Surgeons in China who said they performed the first successful penis transplant had to remove the donated organ because of the severe psychological problems it caused to the recipient and his wife. Dr Weilie Hu and surgeons at Guangzhou General Hospital in China performed the complex 15-hour surgery on a 44-year old man whose penis had been damaged in a traumatic accident. The microsurgery to attach the penis, which had been donated by the parents of a 22-year-old brain-dead man, was successful but Hu and his team removed it two weeks later. "Because of a…

40 Percent of World of Warcraft Players Addicted, Sex Insufficient Motivation to be Exposed to Sunlight

Apparently the sexual drive is insufficient at motivating many people to leave their apartments: Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And with millions of gamers hooked on mega-popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), she believes the problem is growing rapidly. In fact, Orzack says as much as 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game. TwitchGuru talks with Orzack to find out more about the issue of game addiction, and…

Kennedy In Science, Kirshenbaum Around The Clock

Lots going on just one day into February... In Science magazine, Donald Kennedy has an excellent editorial called 'The Real Debate': We in the United States are sliding down a ramp that will take us, in just 4 days, to the much anticipated "Super Tuesday" in the presidential nomination cycle, when voters in over 20 states participate in preliminary elections to select their favorite candidate. I have prepared for this by watching, in alternating stages of boredom and disbelief, the numerous "debates" staged by the creative powers who run television. I wonder whether the same sensations haven…

The 2007 List: Ten Most Dangerous College Classes

Now, if only they would offer these online for free... 10. Collegiate Sexualities at Occidental College. 9. Body Politics: Power, Pain, and Pleasure at Williams College. 8. Issues Dividing America at Columbia University. 7. Whiteness and Multiculturalism at Ithaca College. 6. Truth, Lies, Politics, and Policy at Portland State University. 5. Introduction to Labor Studies at the University of Washington. 4. Speaking Out at Bucknell College. 3. Imperialism in American History at the University of California, Irvine. 2. Movements in Social Justice at Occidental College…

Removing an Organ Makes Female Act Like Male

At least in mice, that is: rendering the href="http://neuro.fsu.edu/%7Emmered/index.htm">vomeronasal organ inactive by deleting the gene href="http://www.informatics.jax.org/searches/accession_report.cgi?id=MGI%3A109527">TRPC2 (transient receptor potential cation channel, subfamily C, member 2) results in profound behavioral changes.  This was reported on Nature News: href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070730/full/070730-13.html">Nose goes, gender bends.  They include a video (link below the fold) of mouse sexual behavior (which may not be safe for work, depending on the…

Chris Mooney on the deniers

Welcome to the new year, and now that I'm back from a little family vacation I'd like to applaud PAL for the excellent job he did summarizing our thesis, and the job he's done in general in the last year. I'm busy doing my last 3rd year clerkship in neurology (even though I'm graduating in 2009 - it's complicated) and it's wonderful to have him at our side fighting the good fight. Objects of interest in the last couple of weeks include (former?) framing ally Chris Mooney breaking with Matt Nisbett on the necessary language for addressing denialism. In his article defending the Obama…

The spread of disorder - can graffiti promote littering and theft?

Imagine walking through a neighbourhood and seeing graffiti, litter, and shopping trolleys strewn about the place. Are these problems to be solved, or petty annoyances that can be ignored in the light of more serious offences? A new study suggests that the former is right - even the most trivial of transgressions can spread and spiral because their very presence stimulates more of the same behaviour. Through a series of stunning real-world experiments, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen have shown that disorder breeds more disorder. The mere presence of graffiti, for…

"All Labor Has Worth"

From the archives: One of the things that is often neglected on Martin Luther King day is his dedication to economic justice. What is forgotten--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say how very delighted I…

Grand Rounds v.2 n.33

Welcome to Grand Rounds at Aetiology! Grab a cup of joe, take a seat, and enjoy the best of this week's medical blogging. Just make sure to wash your hands when you're done...you never know what's lying around here, between the kids, the dog, and the lab... First, a programming note. Just a few weeks back, our Grand Rounds host was The Fat Doctor. Since then, she has suffered several strokes. As of the time I'm writing this, there hasn't been an update since Friday, but it seems like things are going OK. Check out her blog and please send along your well wishes; though it appears she…

University of Colorado student died of opium tea overdose

After writing this post, I came across Alex's obituary and guestbook on Legacy.com. By all accounts, Alex was a great kid - loved and admired by many - an accomplished hockey player and musician with a love for the mountains. This could have been you or I, or worse, one of our own children. Breaking my heart this morning is news from Boulder that last month's death of 20-year-old CU student, Alexander McGuiggan, was from consumption of "opium tea." Police department spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said investigators believe McGuiggan and others had acquired poppy plants -- which are available…

Does Anyone at S&P Have Links to the Trader Who Bet $1 Billion That the U.S. Would Be Downgraded?

Not that either the SEC or the Holder-led Justice Department would do anything about it. This happened July 21: Jack Barnes writes : Someone dropped a bomb on the bond market Thursday - a $1 billion Armageddon trade betting the United States will lose its AAA credit rating. In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world. The massive trade wasn't placed in bonds themselves; it was placed in the futures market. The trade was for block trades of 5,370 10-year Treasury futures executed at 124-03 and 3,100 Treasury bond futures…

Dodd Has a Good Bailout Plan

It's not great, and I would like to see more things in it that can be negotiated away, but it still hits most of the points I raised. Outsourced to Ian Welsh: So yeah, the Dodd plan. Good plan. Buying up mortgages for 15% less than the current market value of the house, then reissuing a clean mortgage to homeowners helps the banks while still giving them a slight haircut (but only slight, odds are home prices will drop more than 15% before the slide is over.) It helps homeowners stay in their houses. It sets a market price so that banks know what mortgages are worth and thus what the…

Economist Paul Samuelson on Irrationality

I've written before (here) about the problems I have with the new trend in economics to misuse irrationality and to wrongly credit it for phenomena. So, a long-time reader sent along a Conor Clarke interview with Paul Samuelson, in which he discusses irrationality (boldface questions; italics mine): Okay, what's the distinction there? I'm curious what you think about some recent developments in economics, some of the movements that are hot right now -- like behavioral economics, part of which wants to challenge the notion of humans as utility maximizing rational agents. In my view behavioral…

So Much for Compassionate Conservatism: The Hunger Edition

Leave it to conservatives to actually conduct the War on Christmas (Got Scrooge?). I give you National Review editor Kate O'Beirne on the problem of hunger (italics mine): O'BEIRNE: And then the title of our gathering is so crucial; "Less of Washington and More of Ourselves". The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows... broad bipartisan support. And if we're going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't…

Low Input Projects

It is easy to get fixated on the big things that you need to do to have an impact.  You need to build a barn, buy a higher-mileage vehicle, pay down the mortgage, build a three month stash of food.  These are big or biggish projects, and often they depend on you finding time and energy and money in a world where those resources are limited. I notice that when I'm fixated on big projects I can't get done, I tend to ignore smaller ones that would be really useful.  If I don't have time or energy or money for the big things on my list, I can forget the other kinds of projects - low input, high…

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

You know you're getting old when you start liking Kipling. Still, at least I'm not quoting MacDonough's Song at you. The solstice is past and the bleak days are getting longer. Unless you're south, of course. As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But…

Counterknowledge, by Damian Thompson [Library of Babel]

This caught my eye at the library yesterday, because it looked like a compact survey of kookery, and I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, it's probably the most blog-like book I've read in quite some time-- bits of the chapters could easily be posted at Orac's place, and nobody would think it odd. The endnotes are even full of URL's, and there is the inevitable blog. Thompson defines "counterknowledge" on the first page, after listing off a bunch of popular kook theories: This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact-- packaged so effectively, indeed, that the twenty-first…

2006: The Best Music

It's that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend? The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a "best of 2006" list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the collection, and also what I rated them. This isn't a foolproof method-- I bought some old albums and greatest hits packages, so the really basic algorithm would claim that "I Can't Hardly Wait" was among the best songs of 2006-- but it's better than relying solely on my memory. I tend to rate songs on…

Bird and Mammal Field Guides for Africa

As long as we are on the subject (this week) of field guides, I thought I'd go ahead and suggest what guides you might take if you happen to be planning a trip to Central, East or southern Africa1 But since we are doing Africa, we need to do mammals as well as birds. But let's start with the birds. The standard bird guide for southern Africa is Newman's Birds of Southern Africa and there was a time years ago that this was actually the best book for East and Central Africa as well, owing to a lack of other available field guides. Today, East Africa is well covered by the sometimes hard to…

Theory and Correlation

In quantum mechanics, particles like electrons can be observed in one of two spin states: up or down. The theory, however, doesn't require the state to be completely determined before we look at it. Any given electron doesn't have to be in one of those spin eigenstates; it can be in a superposition of spin up and spin down. It's like Schroedinger's cat being in a superposition of alive and dead, but less dramatic. For instance, a particular electron may be in a state which has a probability of 60% of being in an up state and 40% of being in the down state. Once measured it will…

Why the skepticism over the idea of consuming less? (plus a bit about Stevie Wonder)

There is, it appears, a nice discussion going on over at a post that Ben recently put up regarding the use of nuclear energy. And quite a few of the commentary take a stance that the ideal for citizens to consume less, is at best unrealistic and at worst an impedent to our right towards progression. I'm not sure if this sits well with me. It seems too easy to say that because humans have needs to expand, to produce more, to (dammit!) play around with charts and the like so that consumption needn't slow down, then why ask for the sacrifice? Indeed, no-one is really going to do it anyway.…

Immaturity Theory; Frankly I Resent That

Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To whit: The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue. Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be…

Dear My Senator, Not In My Back Yard

A letter Dear My Senator, Thank you very much for being one of the 90 senators who voted for Amendment 1133 to H.R. 2346. I have long felt, as I'm sure you do, that keeping terrorists out of my own backyard is of vital importance to the security of our Great nation (not to mention to the security of my dog, who also uses my backyard. And I say this even though my backyard has lots of weeds and I could use some help cleaning it up.) It is, I'm sure you'll agree, completely and totally wrong to attempt to deal with these people by giving them the same sort of justice that we Americans enjoy…

Whooping cough on the rise

Apparently, it's time once again to remind people why vaccination is important. Pertussis ("whooping cough") is a nasty vaccine-preventable illness that is highly contagious and can be deadly to little ones. And it's making a comeback. The Michigan Department of Community Health is tracking this disturbing trend: Michigan saw a significant increase in reported cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in the second half of 2008 compared to the first half of the year, prompting officials to remind parents and doctors of the importance of vaccinating infants as well as teens and adults against…

More "support" for the troops.

Every time I see a yellow "Support the Troops" ribbon on a car that's sporting Republican bumper stickers, I want to vomit. Republicans love to talk up patriotism, and they love to use "support the troops" as a campaign slogan. But when push comes to shove, when the time arrives to actually support the troops, they are nowhere to be found. There are many, many examples of this, but it might just be harder to find a better one than the Pentagon appropriations bill that just came out of the conference committee. The military pay raise built into the bill is one issue. The bill provides for a…

Naming scents can help you imagine them (and better appreciate wine?)

In 2007 I received a really cool Christmas present that I still haven't used. It's a kit to help identify the various components of the aroma in a glass of wine. I haven't used it because I wanted to wait for the right occasion -- say, a party with some of my wine-loving friends. But I've also been secretly skeptical whether it would really help. The kit has tiny vials that are supposed to represent individual aromas: "oak," "hazelnut," "coffee," "cherry," and so on. What does identifying an aroma have to do with deciding whether you like a glass of wine? As it turns out, more than you might…

End of term textbook assessment

One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it's a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn't the kind of thing you'd pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end…

The laws of conditional probability are false

This is all standard physics. Consider the two-slit experiment--a light beam, two slits, and a screen--with y being the place on the screen that lights up. For simplicity, think of the screen as one-dimensional. So y is a continuous random variable. Consider four experiments: 1. Slit 1 is open, slit 2 is closed. Shine light through the slit and observe where the screen lights up. Or shoot photons through one at a time, it doesn't matter. Either way you get a distribution, which we can call p1(y). 2. Slit 1 is closed, slit 2 is open. Same thing. Now we get p2(y). 3. Both slits are…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: No planes no brains

I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…

Ah, Zugunruhe!

How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006) I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately: Zugunruhe brooks no confusion. It has a Germanic certainty, and there can be no doubt what it means, once you know what it means. I confess that I only learned the word this week. If I understand the paper about it by Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in…

Open Access vs. genetic privacy

Is the case for open access truly "open and shut"? Will open access impede science by limiting genetic studies with families? tags: genetics, genetic privacy, bioethics, open access Microsoft's brave new world The April ALPSP conference began with songs for the open access choir. Microsoft's Lee Dirks painted visions of a utopian future where everything will be open, labs shall be judged by the worthiness of their databases, and even scientists will learn to share. According to Dirks, "Open access to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm." Since I've had a few data…

What will it take to make every workplace as safe as the corner office? Some Labor Day thoughts

by Elizabeth Grossman "What kind of uproar do you think there would be if CEOs were dying at the same rate as workers, whatever the data?" asked Steve Mitchell UAW Local 974 Health & Safety Representative, just before Labor Day in an online discussion about current U.S. occupational health and safety statistics. As David Michaels, Assistant Secretary for Labor for Safety and Health, pointed out in his July 19th letter to colleagues marking the 40th anniversary of OSHA, "Fourteen workers die on the job each day, far from the headlines... [and] Every year, more than four million workers are…

ScienceBlogs Screws Up

ScienceBlogs has made a distressing move: they've given PepsiCo a blog. It's called Food Frontiers and will feature content written by PepsiCo scientists. For now, I'm not going to get into PepsiCo's contribution to public health problems or what kind of content we might expect to see on the blog. Instead, I want to focus on how ScienceBlogs works and what readers expect and are entitled to. ScienceBlogs, a venture of Seed Media Group, is a business. It looks for bloggers who are writing interesting science-related content and offers them a spot as part of the ScienceBlogs community. Bloggers…

Ah, Zugunruhe!

How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006) I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately: Zugunruhe brooks no confusion. It has a Germanic certainty, and there can be no doubt what it means, once you know what it means. I confess that I only learned the word this week. If I understand the paper about it by Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in…

Science Debate 2008 - my Question #2: Science Funding

To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to: - correct my factual errors - call me on my BS - tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask - if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so. Here is the second one, so…

Links for 2010-04-22

Scathing Amazon Reviewer Revealed as Author Orlando Figes' Wife - AOL News Why didn't I try-- oh, right. Because Kate has integrity, as do I. That's why. (tags: books literature history stupid internet) Backreaction: It comes soon enough "I think of the future frequently - and more often than not I think it could come sooner. But sometimes I am stunned when I read things I've been talking about actually become reality." (tags: computing internet society culture technology science) A gassy mystery: Researchers discover surprising exoplanetary atmosphere At what point does "New planet…

Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical

This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as "placebo technoradicalism." The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn't actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the opening, most of the grand promises made in TED talks have yet to pan out: "So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change." I found this kind of amusing, because a day earlier the link being passed around a lot of my social media…

Links for 2011-01-21

Surviving the World - Lesson 862 - Middle Aged "I like the idea that you are greeted by a yeti either as you leave this world or when you first arrive in the afterlife. If you're creating a new religion or lifestyle, may I suggest you implement this concept into your theology?" (tags: comics internet silly surviving-world) Community gun ownership and Tulsa at Tobias Buckell Online "I understand the momentum of gun ownership in the US, and find most people I know who own weapons do actually either hunt (and eat their hunt) or keep it for home protection (there are the nuts who fetishize…

Links for 2010-01-15

Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum : Built on Facts "Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics." (tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts education history) Cocktail Party Physics: shameless self-promotion The Damn Book is finally…

The ecology of HDTV

With a little over a year left for analog television broadcasts, just about every non-Luddite who hasn't already bought an HDTV will be doing so in 2008. For most, the selection process will boil down to getting the largest set in their price range. More sophisticated buyers will weigh the pros and cons of the plasma, LCD, rear-projection technologies. But there is another criteria that we should consider: the science of power consumption. Analog TV will be history on Feb. 17, 2009. The U.S. government has already started offering $40 coupons for those who want to continue using their old-…

Who ya gonna call?

Mark H at the Denialism blog asks if a story on CNN's website about how to get rid of ghosts in your house is a joke. Turns out the original story is from the online version of This Old House magazine (to which I subscribe, living as I do in an old house in need of renovations.) And considering how down to earth the magazine is, a seemingly serious piece on ghosts must be a joke, right? Perhaps it was intended that way, But it wasn't taken that wasy by many readers who posted comments. The story, by Keith Pandolfi, begins with an interview with a real, professional ghost-buster, Troy Taylor.…

Interview w/ The Scientist on Ida's Media Strategy

I did an interview this morning with Elie Dolgin of The Scientist magazine discussing the "going broad" media strategy surrounding Darwinius masillae aka Ida the fossil. The magazine has the Q&A interview up on their site. The user registration is free and well worth the 2 seconds in order to access the wealth of content at the magazine's Web site. Below are my comments. As I've noted, this week's events will serve as a long standing case study for science communication scholars and professionals to analyze and debate. The Scientist: How unusual is this amount of media attention for a…

Where do you think you are? A brain scan can tell

Spatial navigation is a complex mental task which is strongly dependent upon memory. As we make our way around a new environment, we look for easily recognisable landmarks and try to remember how their locations are related in space, so that when we return to it we can negotiate our path.  We know that spatial representations are encoded in the medial temporal lobe, and numerous studies implicate the hippocampus in particular as being crucial for the formation of spatial memories. Information about the environment is believed to be encoded by large populations of neurons distributed…