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Framing the Language Gene: FOXP2

You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online. Here is the summary of the article: Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…

Framing the Language Gene: FOXP2

You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online. Here is the summary of the article: Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ed Yong

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Dr. Lipson versus Dr. Brownstein: Science versus antivaccine misinformation and fear mongering in my own back yard

It always irritates me when I discover a new antivaccine crank in my state; so you can imagine how irritated I become when I discover one right in my very city (OK, metropolitan area). When that happens, it becomes a bit more personal than my usual mission to refute antivaccine misinformation. So I was most alarmed when I discovered just such a beast because a former ScienceBlogs colleague now writing for Forbes, Dr. Peter Lipson, took the time to deconstruct a very ill-informed piece of antivaccine propaganda. The offending post appeared on the blog of a "holistic" physician named Dr. David…

How To Use Linux

This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily. At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on Linux is OpenSource, as opposed to proprietary AND it is…

Climate Change Denialist Tattoos Definitely Go On the Butt, Man!

Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here. Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I believe in the big tent. But there is something to be said for even metaphorically making people take ownership of their politics - and the implications of their politics. I realize someone is going to be outraged by this - ah well, can't please everyone! I find it funny, not because I want to…

Digitizing the Library of Congress

I'm a bibliophile. I read books at an inordinate rate and have a tendency to buy them at an even faster rate. Here at Texas A&M I'm fortunate to have access to a library of more than four million volumes, a fantastic interlibrary loan service, and a breathtaking special collections library that among other things houses one of the largest and most comprehensive science fiction collections in the nation. I also very much love the aesthetics of the physical books themselves, and if/when electronic books finally displace the old paper copies it will be a sad day. But it could also be the…

The Republican War on Science

Chris Mooney is trying to kill me. It's true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (now available in a new paperback edition!), that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor. Fortunately, I've been inoculating myself for the past few years by reading his weblog (now also in a new edition!), so I managed to survive, although there were a few chest-clutching moments and one or two life-flashing-past-my-eyes experiences, which will be handy if I…

Carlos Cerna will someday demand his Ph.D.

When you tie a university to a religious ideology, you create stresses that show that the modern search for knowledge is the antithesis of religious dogma. I keep telling people that science and religion are in opposition, and here's a perfect example: La Sierra University is a Seventh Day Adventist college. SDAs are fundamentalists and literalists (although, isn't it strange how different literalist sects all seem to come up with different…ahem…interpretations of the Bible?) who as a point of doctrine believe in a young earth and seven day creation. La Sierra has a biology department, as…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XXIV: hatemongering

A lot of pundits seem dismayed and surprised at the moral depths to which Dishonest John McCain's campaign has sunk in the last week. I have to disagree. There is nothing surprising about it. This is his MO: do whatever he thinks is necessary. McCain has a long history of lack of principle and probity, whether it is in his personal life (a vile and abusive temper, disloyalty to his first wife) or his public life (corrupt behavior in the Savings and Loan scandal, chicanery on behalf of gaming interests and much more). Where I do agree with his new found critics is the frightening nature of his…

Timing Fall Crops

It is hard as heck to imagine that one of these days, I'll be longing for a hot day again, and for the fresh food that accompanies it, but it always happens. It is also hard, deep in the dog days, to realize that right now is when you have to start thinking about your fall garden. That's probably why so many of us start out beautifully, but peter out when the cold comes, running out of fresh things months before we have to. Indeed, after a decade of working my farm, including the years when we ran a CSA, and many other years when we were gardening for ourselves, or raising perennial food and…

Science vs. Britney Spears

Last week, most of the attention of the media, Old and New, revolved around the question if it is McCain supporters or Obama supporters who are more likely to think that Britney Spears is teh hawt (dunno what the answer is, but I recall seeing some statistics about the overwhelming lead by the Red States in porn consumption, TV watching, numbers of adult establishments and number of visits to such establishments per capita, and this may or may not correlate with the perception of Britney Spears as attractive to certain subsets of the male population). But her name has also been mentioned a…

Christian Reconstructionism and the Founding Fathers

Jon Rowe has an interesting post up about a new book, available online here, by Gary North, the Christian reconstructionist. The book is called Conspiracy in Philadelphia, and North's primary thesis is that the constitution itself was an illegal document that overstepped the boundaries of the mandate given to those at the convention and replaced the Articles of Confederation without going through the process mandated under those Articles. His secondary thesis is that the constitution itself was a blatantly Godless and atheistic document that not only overturned centuries of tradition whereby…

Debating Creationists

The big debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham was tonight. Click here for the video. The whole thing is close to three hours, so get comfortable if you want to watch it all. I was watching it live, but about two-thirds of the way through I kept losing the signal. I would reload the page, but then I'd get an error message twenty seconds later. So I gave up. They were just starting the “questions from the audience” phase, and I was not optimistic that that would be worth wading through. P. Z. Myers has the live blog if you want the abridged version. I mostly agree with his comments.…

Worldcon Wrap-Up

We are back in Niskayuna now, where SteelyKid is using her new powers of bipedal locomotion to help me burn off some of the excess calories from the weekend in Montreal. She's only been walking for a couple of weeks, but she can really move. I'm pretty fried, even after napping for two hours earlier today (we dropped SteelyKid off at day care on the way home, so we could unpack and rest a little), and I have a few commitments that will limit my blogging time in the next few days, but I figured I ought to throw out a few things about the last day or two of Worldcon. -- The Hugo results were…

Should this student have been suspended?

This is a troubling story if you just read the right-wing perspective: a student at Hamline University (an excellent liberal arts college in the Twin Cities) was suspended for writing a letter to the university administration. That shouldn't happen, I'd say — we want to encourage free speech. Even if the student seems to be a bit of a far-right nut, and if the letter was supporting that lunatic idea that school massacres wouldn't happen if everyone were carrying a concealed weapon, people should have the privilege of expressing their opinions. So I read John Leo's opinion piece on the issue…

The Biodiversity + Pokemon-ish Project: It's a go.

Don't you think it's twisted that so many kids know what this creature is, but so few can go about naming the birds in their backyard? - - - Well, I had briefly talked about this before, more as a whimsical train of thought, but there you have it - we're going to give it a go. Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, basically, this was inspired by a letter published in Science in 2002, entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon.." It starts: According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms.…

God and Theologians and Scientists and Dawkins

I saw two more reviews of Dawkins' new and widely discussed The God Delusion recently. Both were critical about the book. Both had points that I thought were very well made. One review is by Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books. The other is by Marilynne Robinson, in the November 2006 Harper's (not on-line). (Interesting to the Scienceblogs community itself is my completely different interpretation of Eagleton's review than PZ's.) Eagleton starts by saying this: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have…

The NSFW problem

Roger Ebert has a thoughtful post on the problem of not-safe-for-work images. It's a real problem, and it's a curious example of self-imposed censorship built on an artificial fear. I don't care who you are, you've all seen pornography, you've all heard profanity, yet somehow, if even a tasteful nude or an obscenity neatly typed in a small font face appears in a web post, people freak out: I could have viewed that in my workplace! My eyes aren't allowed to see a breast or a penis between the hours of 9 to 5! There's good reason for that, of course, and Ebert discusses some of it. I haven't…

A casual disregard for facts

A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this). While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear: 1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right 2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…

Noticing class privilege.

Via Bint Alshamsa, this is a version of a "social class awareness experience" used in the residence halls (and possibly also classrooms?) at Indiana State University by Will Barratt et al. In the classroom, students are asked to take a step forward for each of the statements that describe them; they don't talk about the exercise (and how they feel about it) until after they've gone through the whole list. Doing this online, I'm bolding the statements which describe my background. Also, I'm including a second list that Lauren added based on the suggestions Bint's commenters made as to other…

The Washington Post's war on Gore

In my post on the decision by Justice Burton to allow the showing of An Inconvenient Truth because it was "broadly accurate" I listed some of the reporters who wrongly claimed that the judge decided that AIT had nine errors. Mary Jordan's story was particularly bad. Most of the reporters eventually got around to telling their readers that the judge found AIT "broadly accurate", but Jordan only mentioned the negative parts of the decision. And Bob Somerby has more: "Al Gore's Film Has 9 Errors, British Judge Rules in Suit." That's the headline on page one, promoting this news report, filed…

Levels of expertise and peer review: when is it ok to criticize the process?

I had a weird experience dealing with journals and peer review a little while ago. Recent discussions of the CRU e-mail hack (especially Janet's) has made me think more about it, and wonder about how the scientific community ought to think about expertise when it comes to peer review. A little while ago, I was asked to be a reviewer for a journal article. That's a more common experience for people at research universities than for someone like me, but it's still something that's part of my job. I turned down the request because I didn't feel qualified to review the paper. That wouldn't have…

Authority control, then and now

Since the end of the year is a fairly quiet time for my particular professional niche, I've taken the opportunity to do some basic name authority control on author name-strings in the repository. Some basic what on what, now? Welcome back to my series on library information management and jargon. The problem is simple to understand. Consider me as an author. I took my husband's surname upon marriage; fortunately, I hadn't published anything previously, but I might have done—and if I had, how would you go about finding everything I've written, if it was published under two different names? "…

Epilogue

After careful reflection, I'd say it is worth reading The Origin of Species. Biology doesn't erase it's past, as I thought. It just forgets to cite it. The Origin is biology's hub -- all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it. This, I think, is partly because Darwin had such a complete vision of the living world, and partly because his ignorance of some areas was so great that he had to hedge his bets, and mention everything in just in case. The book is so rich that I could have written about entirely different subjects in each post. To give just one example, in…

In the middle of massive flooding in Texas, antivaxers fear...school vaccine mandates?

I've frequently distinguished between those who are vaccine-averse and the true, hard core antivaxers. The vaccine-averse tend to fear vaccines because of what they've heard about their supposed adverse effects, while it is the hard core antivaxers who are really originating and spreading the misinformation claiming that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, chronic disease, neurologic damage, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), just to name some. There are even those who claim that shaken baby syndrome is a "misdiagnosis" for vaccine injury. To them, it is, above all, always all…

Interview with Vikram Savkar of Scitable

Last spring I posted a review of Scitable at Nature. Since then Scitable seems to have expanded a bit, and I have given some more thought on its possible role in the ecology of the infosphere. Back in 2004 when I began to use Wikipedia regularly I was very impressed by the quality of the technical articles, but now that it's 2010 I have to say that far too often the Wikipedia entries are a bit thin in some domains. I suspect that my own expectations have started to outrun what is possible with Wikipedia, and probably I notice the "lack" because I've stopped going to Google as the first option…

Cut off Martin Cothran's internet access

Martin Cothran, the bigoted, anti-semite defending, Holocaust-denial whitewashing, misogynistic, homophobic, creationist, authoritarian, logic-impaired mouthpiece for the Kentucky theocracy movement wonders Is Internet access a human right?: In what sense is Internet access as a "right"? I listened to this week to an interview on NPR in which a guest--some expert on the Internet--was telling the NPR interviewer that Internet access is a "right"--not just any right but a "basic human right." This is the sort of incisive reporting we read Cothran for. "Some expert" said something or other, and…

Moving Overseas, Part 8

The good news is that things are really falling into place now -- something I thought would never ever happen. First, I walked through icy winds and a light dusting of snow to bring my ailing lory to my veterinarian, Simon Starkey, on Thursday morning to get blood drawn so they could look again to see if she's diabetic. The blood tests came back Friday morning, showing that she had blood glucose levels that were twice the normal values, which is something that can result from stress or from mild diabetes. Since she was so ill when I initially brought her in (yay, for poverty for making me…

Homage to The Velvet Claw (part I)

Those of us interested in the same subject often tend to have experienced the same sort of things. If you share my interests (as you probably do, given that you're here), you've probably watched a lot of Attenborough on TV. You've probably been to at least one of the bigger natural history museums of your country, probably more than once. You've probably spent more time than is considered usual looking at weird reptiles, or bat-eared foxes, or tapirs, or giraffes, or bats, or rhinos, at the zoo. You probably caught and kept weird insects and pond animals as a child. You've probably picked up…

The Voyage of the Beagle

Of his time on the Beagle (1832 - 1836), Darwin wrote, "The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career." Of the manuscript describing that voyage, he wrote, "The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books." Taking a cue from these reflections, I'd like to spend some time with this book, in celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday, coming up in just a few days. (Reposted and slightly revised from last year) An early version of "The Voyage."To begin with, it is…

How should we tax all that carbon?

Here's how I would have liked to have introduced this post: The good news is that, other than for an increasingly marginalized minority, the focus of attention on climate policy has shifted from the reality of global warming to the economic tools needed to address the problem. Sadly, climate change denialism remains relatively robust and widespread, with more half of all Americans and popular columnists of George F. Will's stature still unwilling to accept the science. I have no choice but to acknowledge the task of getting everyone on board will require more time and energy, even while we…

Spinning Plan B

This morning, I find posts at both Terra Sigillata and Pharyngula discussing the FDA's announcement that they are planning to reopen discussions with Barr Labs, the maker of the Plan B morning after contraceptive, regarding Barr Labs efforts to gain permission from the FDA to sell Plan B over the counter. Both of my SciBlings' articles are cautiously upbeat about this new Plan B development, as are at least some news articles. After reading the letter that the FDA sent to Barr, which putatively formed the basis for the release, it seems clear that the optimistic spin the FDA Press Office is…

The health freedom fighters attack

If there's one thing shared in common among nearly all advocates of pseudoscience, it is the belief that they know The Truth. More importantly, they know The Truth, and The Powers That Be don't want you to know The Truth and will do almost anything to makes sure that The Truth stays secret. Think about it. This sort of thinking is common, be it among advocates of alternative medicine, cold fusion advocates, HIV/AIDS denialists, 9/11 "Truthers," birthers, creationists, moon hoax believers, or Holocaust deniers. For instance, Mike Adams and Joe Mercola will tell you that the government in the…

Science and Politics Create the Perfect Storm in Chris Mooney's Storm World

Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming by Chris Mooney Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…

αEP: Shut up and sing!

This is one of a series of posts I'm working on over the next few days to criticize evolutionary psychology. More will be coming under the label αEP! Recently, Bob Costas, a sports announcer, spoke out about gun control. In reply, the right wing has been in a frenzy of denunciations — he should just shut up, he's not qualified to speak, he can't possibly have reasonable opinions about anything other than football (of course, these same angry commentators don't express similar opinions about Ted Nugent). It's called Shut Up and Sing Syndrome. Named after a Laura Ingraham book and a 2006…

Comments of the Week #146: From zero gravity to our Solar System's end

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” -Neil Gaiman Another week, another slew of fantastic stories down here at Starts With A Bang! If you've been wondering about what the Starts With A Bang Podcast is going to be about this month, wonder no longer! It's on the expanding Universe, and what's still so controversial about all…

Why are librarians hesitant to CANCEL ALL THE JOURNALS?

There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work. Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario…

The Right to Know: Why GMO Labeling Law Isn't So Black and White

Guest blogger Rob Hebert is a second-year student at Georgetown Law. Before moving to DC, he lived in Brooklyn, NY, just blocks from a bar that had over twenty-five beers on tap and thirty arcade machines that all played for a quarter. He can draw you a pretty interesting graph relating "Drinks Consumed" to "Last Score on Pac-Man." Consumer advocacy groups are a strange animal. It seems that for every influential lobbying group with a senator's ear, there are hundreds or thousands with only vague mission statements and no clear agenda for attaining their stated goals. I once spent a summer…

George Will is stuck in the 1930s

This is less than a year old (March 05, 2006), but instructive now that the campaigning has actually started...Also, click on the spiderweb icon to see interesting comments on the original post. ---------------------------------------- In his latest op-ed (here is a link from News and Observer: Edwards and poverty's character), George Will, writing in his typical "I-write-so-elegantly-you-will-never-detect-the-underlying-stupidity" mode, takes on John Edwards. Was it a slow week, lack of inspiration, or was it a depeche from the RNC, only George knows, but it contains several points that need…

A world without Baw Baw frogs?

I have not forgotten that 2008 is Year of the Frog: if you have, or if you didn't know this, please go back to December 2007 and read the explanatory article here. Some of you will also recall the EDGE project (EDGE = Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered), and here we look at an anuran that's one of many on the EDGE list. Myobatrachids, or southern frogs, or Australo-Papuan frogs, include some of the most incredible and bizarre of anurans. The Turtle frog Myobatrachus gouldii looks like a toy, is apparently sometimes mistaken for a baby turtle, and is one of just a few anuran…

Using Bad Math to Create Bad Models to Produce Bad Results

An astute reader pointed me towards a monstrosity of pompous bogus math. It's an oldie, but I hadn't seen it before, and it was just referenced by my old buddy Sal Cordova in a thread on one of the DI blogs. It's a "debate" posted online by Lee Spetner, in which he rehashes the typical bogus arguments against evolution. I'm going to ignore most of it; this kind of stuff has been refuted more than enough times. But in the course of this train wreck, he pretends to be making a mathematical argument about search spaces and optimization processes. It's a completely invalid argument - but it's…

Why does Impact Factor persist most strongly in smaller countries

A repost of a November 28, 2008 post: The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally. Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It…

Why does Impact Factor persist most strongly in smaller countries

The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally. Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It is interesting how cultural…

Classical Football 101

Welcome to classical football 101. This class will cover classical football from a historical perspective, starting with 17th century english village contests. We will then cover the development of association football and rugby football, through to the emergence of the modern conceptualization of the game in the late 19th century, with particular emphasis on the role of the grid, the introduction of the "forward pass" and the role of equipment improvement in improving the game in the early 20th century. We will cover the early Ivy League, in detail, and the post-World War II rise of "…

A Labor Day Special: Laboring for the Earth and Big Science

One nice new feature we've got here on scienceblogs is the Editor's Picks feature, found on the front page. While browsing it this weekend, I was drawn to this provocative article. In it, Benjamin Cohen writes of his interview with Rebecca Solnit, who says the following when asked about nuclear power as a viable solution to our energy concerns: Well, the first problem is that they still think like big science--that there is "the answer." In fact, there are hundreds of little answers that don't include nuclear, including scaling back our consumption and travel and building better and using a…

Creationist Challenges, take 1

The True.Origins website - a ripoff of the Talk.Origins Archive that I'm involved with - has posted an article about "debate dodgers". This is something that is quite common in creationist circles - make a ridiculous "challenge" to their opponents and then crow about how cowardly those heathen infidel evilutionists are not to take them up on it. This is merely the latest round of this well-worn tactic and it comes, not surprisingly to anyone who has followed the issue for any period of time, from the mind of Joseph Mastropaolo. JoMo, as he is not-so-affectionately referred to, is a…

This is your brain on racism. Or is that liberal guilt?

For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are basically complex graphs that represent the relationships of data gathered in very narrowly defined experiments and which are then statistically massaged with special-purpose software. But for most of us non-scientists (and even some scientists) it's easy to look at these images as objective snapshots of…

What is the Ecological Footprint of Disneyland?

Science Scout twitter feed This is reprinted posting, but a few friends have ben asking me about traveling to Disneyland in light of the swine flu happenings. In any event, these discussions have reminded me of my own ponderings when my family visited the magic kingdom last year. Specifically, the above was a question that continually haunted my consciousness. Disneyland was remarkably pristine in that cookie cutter, artificial, yet aesthetically pleasing way, but it must be a major sink in terms of waste, energy consumption, carbon emissions, etc. Or is it? Maybe in terms of…

New Ways to Treat Alzheimer's and the Peripheral Sink Hypothesis

You look away from a field for two seconds, and they get all crazy on you... I used to do only molecular biology focusing primarily on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Since I moved to a lab that studies behavior, I haven't been keeping up with the literature of Alzheimer's as much as I should so I was struck with how clever this paper is. Sagare et al. look at a new way to lower the A-Beta levels in Alzheimer's disease by putting a recombinant protein into the blood that binds it. A-Beta is the protein in Alzheimer's disease that forms plaques and causes the pathology by…