Search Content

Displaying results 57551 - 57600 of 87947

Who wants a tenure track position in beautiful Vancouver? I've got one! (well, seven actually)

(Well, actually 6 since the first ad below is just a bit of fun...) - - - JOB POSTING: "IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME" This is a call for outstanding candidates to apply for a tenure track assistant professor position within the context of the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. The successful applicant is expected to work in areas of interest to current faculty members, to interact with related groups within our network and to have demonstrated ability in producing research material of excellent quality and interest. Due to the competitive nature of this process,…

Science and Politics, Science in Politics, and Politics in Science: A Note, that is, on Endocrine Disruption

This one's about integrity, oversight, and endocrine disruption and how the tangled web grows bigger by the day. It's a guest post by Jody Roberts, of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. - - - Two news stories in last week's edition of Chemical and Engineering News perfectly demonstrate the complex interweaving of technical, social, and political processes in attempting to grapple with emerging sciences and environmental health. In the article, "Debating Science," we see once again the hot button issue of science and politics, science in politics, and politics in science. In "Test of Endocrine…

Environmentalism, Science, and Audience: Part III on The Humboldt Current

Part 1 | 2 | 3 - - - Part III with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. - - - WF: Okay, let me go back to modern environmentalism, which I only sort of brought up earlier. What does your book lead us to do with or in it? AS: This is a delicate issue, as some people have read my book as a polemic against mainstream environmentalism, and that's not what I intended. A critique, yes--not a polemic. I don't simply want to dump the insights of the 20th century or discredit thinkers like Aldo Leopold and…

How tool use is encoded in the brain

How is tool use encoded in the brain? Most movements involving tools involve the complex manipulation of objects in space, and it is possible that they could represented in the brain in this way -- i.e. as objects in space. On the other hand, the purpose of tools is to extend the range of motions available to the body, so it is also possible that tool use could be encode as an extension of the body representation onto the tool. Some cunning work by Umilta et al. at the University of Parma shows the second option is the case. The brain represents tools by incorporating them into…

The Omaha Shooting: Risks of Violence and Mental Illness

I was distressed to wake up this morning to coverage of another shooting, this time in a mall in Omaha. A teenager named Robert Hawkins went into the mall and shot 12 people, killing 8 thus far, and then shot himself. The scene resembled the Virginia Tech shooting in several regards, particularly because there is some indication that the shooter in both cases was mentally ill. The BBC had this coverage: Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people then himself on a gun rampage through a Nebraska mall, had "lots of emotional problems", says the woman who took him in after he left home. Debora…

Inverse relationship between working memory and neurogenesis

This is interesting. Researchers at Columbia have established that restricting neurogenesis in the hippocampus improves working memory: New research from Columbia University Medical Center may explain why people who are able to easily and accurately recall historical dates or long-ago events, may have a harder time with word recall or remembering the day's current events. They may have too much memory -- making it harder to filter out information and increasing the time it takes for new short-term memories to be processed and stored. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…

It's all science's fault

The Dallas News has drawn in a group of theologians to discuss the thesis that science is responsible for literalist religion. At least they aren't blaming atheism for creationism this time! British theologian and Anglican cleric Keith Ward contends that the growing role of science in the world, where countries depend upon scientists and inventors to drive their economies, has led to a growing literalism. Or so reports Michelle Boorstein on the Washington Post's On Faith blog. Writes Boorstein; "Keith Ward, a British philosopher who was for years the canon of Oxford's cathedral, argued…

A simple story gets complicated

People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of details. For example, we often hear homosexual behavior reduced to being a "choice," the product of a "gay gene," a "sin," or something similarly absolute and irreducible…suggesting that it is part of a diverse spectrum of sexual behaviors with multiple causes and that different individuals are…

Glimpsing memory traces in real time

MEMORY is one of the biggest enduring mysteries of modern neuroscience, and has perhaps been researched more intensively than any other aspect of brain function. The past few decades have yielded a great deal of knowledge about the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory, and it is now widely believed that memories are formed as a result of biochemical changes which ultimately lead to the strengthening of connections between nerve cells. It is, however, also clear that memories are not encoded at the level of single neurons. Instead, the memory trace is thought of as a flurry of…

Amnesia in the movies

Despite occuring only rarely, amnesia (or memory loss) has featured often in Hollywood films for almost a century. By 1926, at least 10 silent films which used amnesia as a plot device had been made; more recent productions, such as 50 First Dates and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, are therefore part of a well established tradition.   In a review published in the British Medical Journal in 2004, clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale of the Institute of Neurology in London points out that cinematic depictions of amnesia are consistenly inaccurate, and usually "bear no relation…

Gulp

Growing up as I did in the northeast, I always assumed that the really weird life forms lived somewhere else--the Amazonian rain forest, maybe, or the deep sea. But we've got at least one truly bizarre creature we can boast about: the star-nosed mole. Its star is actually 22 fleshy tendrils that extend from its snout. For a long time, it wasn't entirely clear what the moles used the star for. The moles were so quick at finding food--larvae, worms, and other creatures that turn up in their tunnels--that some scientists suggested that the star could detect the electric fields of animals. That…

What It's Like To Be A Bat: Seeing With Sound Via Sensory Substitution

In his famous essay, Thomas Nagel suggested that science's reductionist methods can never provide a complete understanding of the "subjective qualities" of consciousness. To illustrate this problem, he wrote that there was "no reason to suppose that" we would ever be able to comprehend what it's like to be a bat - because we can't truly understand the subjective experience of, for example, echolocation. Ironically, scientific advances in "sensory substitution" technology have demonstrated that it's possible to simulate (or stimulate) one modality (sight, hearing, touch) with sensory data…

Animal Rights and Human Rights

It's wonderful to see that my Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front has generated discussion on this important topic. The issue as I see it is really quite simple and boils down to two essential issues: the benefits to science versus the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research. Furthermore, our current understanding about primate cognition, emotional complexity, and their rich…

Haiti and the Loan that Wasn't

    Haitian girl wearing the Disney princess shirt made    in her country. Image: BBC NewsInter Press Service has just begun a new series focusing on the development loans to Haiti and the strings attached that have effectively removed the Haitian government from managing their own affairs. I spoke with IPS reporter William Fisher last week and this morning appeared on WZBC in Boston to discuss this story. This is the little known history of Haiti and forms the backdrop to why the earthquake that hit this island nation has been so devastating. According to Fisher's article: It is an unusual…

Prospect of Immortality

Every year, a few people decide to have their bodies frozen after death, in the hopes that the future will cure all that ails them. It's called cryonic preservation. You forgot it existed, right? So did I, but like all interesting things, cryonics is something that continues to exist, completely independently of your awareness of it. As a literary trope, life-extension through procedures homologous to cryonics is as old as the hills; even Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea, and it's stuck around ever since, popping up in the works of Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and…

The day I learned to stand up for myself, professionally

I probably should have noticed the warning signs about my graduate program earlier---like, in the first week, when I went to meet my temporary assigned advisor and he said "Oh, uh, I don't want any more students right now. Go find yourself another advisor." (I guess he didn't really understand the whole idea behind "temporary advisor".) I probably should have trusted my instincts to run away to saner pastures, but I decided to stick around for a bit. What I didn't realize at the time was that things would soon get much, much worse. Fast forward to the end of my first year. I had finished…

False claims in Kates' TN law review paper

Don B Kates, Jr. writes: In vol. 62 # 3 (1995) of the TN Law Rev, Henry Schaffer, three professors at Harvard and Columbia Medical Schools, and I have an article evaluating the medical/public health literature on firearms. Our general conclusion goes beyond simple negativity. We conclude that it is not just methodologically incompetent, but an ideologically based "literature of deceit." In almost 90 pages and with over 360 footnotes we document that the literature meets the specification of a model based on the law of actionable fraud, including overt misrepresentations, partial statements…

Brooding Angelmakers

Offspring Abandonment in the Ancient and Natural World In the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex the great kingdom of Thebes is condemned following a case of mistaken identity (and a little patricide). The sordid tale begins when the infant prince is abandoned by his parents (see right) after learning of a prophecy that his son will one day murder his father, marry his mother and assume the throne. His ankles pierced with a spike, young Oedipus is sent to be abandoned atop mount Cithaeron. While this tale sets up a beautiful tragedy it also hints at a common reality in both the ancient and…

Your genetic info -- not free, easy, or clear

After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene's apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email â several a week â from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested. This led to an interesting hunt. It was a hard question to answer. I couldn't just tell people to do what I did, for a psychiatric researcher/MD I'd known for years, who specializes in depression and serotonin, had done mine as a sort of favor to science and journalism. That researcher also stood by, had I needed…

Doug Bremner's "strike" at me and the PTSD establishment (not)

Skip this post if you don't want to read a writer responding point by point to a self-indulgent, insubstantial attack by a major academic. I should say right off that I've long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered about the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of the neurochemical model of depression. My regard for this work made his critique of attack on my article about PTSD, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," all the more disappointing. I'm not disappointed because…

One Year Later: Same Old Debate

Holy Macaroni (and I don't mean tuna noodle casserole)--this blog is one year old today! On April 8th last year, Randy Olson moved the Shifting Baselines blog to Scienceblogs and, for its launch, we staged a debate on whether or not to eat seafood. One year later, our seafood debate is still raging and relevant so I thought I would re-post our thoughts (but don't miss out on the original comments here). SHOULD WE CONTINUE TO EAT SEAFOOD? YES, SAYS RANDY OLSON: Until There Is Effective Leadership, There Is Little Point in Making Sacrifices I say we should not be expected to stop eating…

The evolution of rape?

There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it's so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It's just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel. I've just finished reading an article titled "Darwin's Rape Whistle: Have women evolved…

Unleashing Scientiae

It's late summer, and the harvest is bountiful, and so with the contributions to Scientiae. Thanks to all of you who submitted such fabulous posts. Some of you even wrote two posts! It must be that back-to-school enthusiasm. As you know, this month's theme for Scientiae is "Unleashed", chosen by moi. I wrote about furious women the other day, which will tell you a little about where "unleashed" came from (and just how long it's been fermenting in my brain). But I have to give a hat tip to Karmen at Chaotic Utopia for inspiring me to make it the theme of the carnival, in the course of…

Why Condoleezza Is More Electable Than Hillary Or Barack

It's called "social desirability bias". And the voting public suffers from it. It leads likely voters to "underestimate their own prejudices when talking to survey takers", says Dalton Conley in the Chronicle Review. We know we are supposed to treat all candidates the same, regardless of race or gender. So that's what we say when they ask us. But when we go to the polls, something happens. It's not that people walk into the voting booth and say "no way I'm voting for a woman!" No, they think "national security is really important to me" and they somehow convince themselves that the…

"Customer Service" at Southwest Airlines.

If getting there is half the fun, I don't want the other half, thanks. The family and I are on our way to New York at the moment. It's been too long since I've had a good slice of pizza and a good bagel, and visiting family and friends is a great excuse to fix that problem. We're in transit instead of there right now for a variety of reasons, mostly related to the weather. But not entirely. A large chunk of the problem can be chalked up to Southwest Airlines. An even larger chunk of my current state of anger comes from what they term "customer service" here at Chicago Midway. If you've…

Today's list of cool stories, most of which I won't be able to blog about.

Today is another high blogging load kind of day, and like many high blogging load days it coincides nicely with a high workload day, so there's no way I'm going to be able to write about everything cool. So, I'm going to do what I did yesterday - talk about them all really briefly now, and then hit one or two of the best later on. In the lineup today, we've got some real winners. One of my commenters highlighted a really stupid John McCain op-ed for me. That goes nicely with the White House's continuing demand that Congress stop messing around and bend to the Imperial Will already. The…

Open Access

Over the last couple of days, quite a number of articles have been posted here at Scienceblogs commenting on the for-profit academic publishing community's most recent efforts to fight mandatory open access to government science. The industry group representing the major publishers of academic journals in the US hired a well-known DC public relations attack dog to help them with their efforts. If these folks are worried enough to bay several hundred thousand dollars for his help, they clearly think that they have a lot to lose. Let's look at just what that might be. I'm going to do this in…

'Tis the season for peace, love, and swearing at bloody stupid airline people

When the time came to schedule this European odyssey that we're currently on, I discovered two things. First, that it was going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to fly on the 18th of December than on the 22nd, and second that it really is cheaper to book a regular round trip ticket than a multi-city ticket. That was all good, though, since it let me schedule a couple of days in London at the start of the trip. Or so I thought. When I'm on the road, I've got this habit of ignoring the news. There are just so many better things to do while traveling than waste time learning about the various…

The new phrenology

Morphological variation is important, it's interesting…and it's also common. It's one of my major scientific interests — I'm actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I'm even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I'll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist…

The human political animal

Suppose you come from Mars, freshly minted with your PhD degree in the ethology of terrestrial mammals, and you decide to study this ape species that uses language and technology. Suppose further it's about 10,000 years before now. What would you describe? That is the topic of this post. It's not the first time the "anthropologist from Mars" gambit has been used. Alfred Russel Wallace, who I suspect had some form of Asperberger's, described himself that way, and of course Oliver Sachs, who obviously does, did so too. I have spent my life thinking that somehow I was inserted by accident…

Do bacteria think?

Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it. Along comes someone, however, who notes that there is a formal resemblance between baseball and what some ants do in some hitherto undiscovered nest. So, they start to call it "ant baseball". So far, no harm. Then someone else comes along and starts making inferences about what ants do in terms of the rules of the game as…

Journalists and scientists - an antimatter explosion?

What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles. Tara, from the scientists' perspective, gave a list of rules for science journalists. Her commentators broadly agreed, ranging from gentle to vociferous. Chris Mooney leapt to the defence of what is, after all, his profession (and one he's damned good at if his book is anything to judge by), and…

The kangaroo is the first organism, but the fungus is not the biggest

So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack. The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…

Literary Darwinism?

Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism": Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick. Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…

Basic concepts: Ancestors

Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution. Ergo... The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram. That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles. The first wrinkle is…

Is the Earth even more sensitive to CO2 levels than we thought?

One of the more common arguments from skeptics of anthropogenic climate change is that the Earth has experienced periods during which atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were much much higher than they are today -- as much as 10 times higher. Why worry about a mere 30% increase over pre-industrial levels? There are several answers to that challenge. The most obvious is that while it may be true that CO2 levels have been several times higher that today's 387 parts per million, the Earth was also a very different place back then. The sea level was much higher, the temperature was much warmer and…

Lights! Action! Kids!

This is a guest post by Laura Younger, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007. Take a look at these static images from a video clip. Can you tell what the person is doing? It might be hard to make it out from these still pictures, but when you see the same thing in motion it becomes quite clear. Visit the Biomotion Lab and you'll quickly understand. What you see is called a point-light display. Lights are attached to joints on the body and filmed while a person is performing an action. The animated display makes it surprisingly clear that this person is walking. But, could a…

Most researchers don't understand error bars

Earlier today I posted a poll challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how error bars relate to significance. If published researchers can't do it, should we expect…

Setting the Koran on fire, vs. setting personal liberties on fire

You know, I'm something of an expert in the public desecration of sacred objects, and I'm seeing the same madness going on right now with Terry Jones and his plan to burn copies of the Koran that I saw in the response to throwing a cracker in the trash — only amplified to a ludicrous degree. People just aren't getting it; they're so blinded by an inappropriate attachment to magic relics that they're missing the real issues. I publicly destroyed a communion wafer once (OK, a few times). There was a simple reason for it: a few Catholics had responded hysterically to a student who didn't swallow…

Repost: The species that domesticated itself

The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.). Louis Leakey had a problem. During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species. When Mary fit all the pieces…

Implicit attitudes: How children develop biases about race

Twelve years ago, Greta and I were awakened by a rattling on the door of our Bronx apartment. It was about three A.M.; our children were asleep in the next room. "What should I do?" Greta whispered to me. She had woken first and was holding the deadbolt on the door locked so the intruder couldn't get in. "Call the police," I whispered, and took hold of the lock. I ventured a peek through our peephole. I could see only the grizzled razor stubble of a man who was clearly shorter than I was. He continued to struggle with the door. He was making progress picking our lock -- I had to forcefully…

When writing a pop-sci book, your editor is your friend

A few weeks ago the first packet of edits for Written in Stone was slipped under my door. I did not know exactly what to expect. As I opened the mailing sleeve I started having flashbacks of returned elementary school writing assignments, the pages cut and bleeding from the merciless slashes of the teacher's terrible red pen. Had my editor also cut my prose to ribbons? I took the sheaf of papers, covering the first two chapters of my book, and sat down with my laptop to start making corrections. Nothing on page one. So far, so good. A typo on page two, marked in black (thank god) ink. Not…

The Species That Domesticated Itself

The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.). Louis Leakey had a problem. During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species. When Mary fit all the pieces…

Was Smilodon a prehistoric can-opener?

A Smilodon fends off vultures at what would later be called the Rancho La Brea tar pits, situated in Los Angeles, California. Painting by Charles R. Knight. The feeding habits of saber-toothed cats have long perplexed scientists. How in the world did these cats kill prey with their almost comically-oversized teeth? Did Smilodon and its kin use their teeth like daggers to stab prey to death, or did they simply rip out a huge chunk of flesh from the side of a victim, leaving their prey to hemorrhage to death? While the stabbing hypothesis has generally been abandoned it is still a mystery…

Elitism and Psychology and Politics

href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/dilbert2033334071113.gif"> Click for full-sized version From: href="http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071113.html" rel="tag">Dilbert Internet Archive There is elitism, and anti-elitism.  In pure form, both are bad.  I recommend, as an alternative, something called mutual respect. In politics, there is a long history of us-versus-them-ism.  In the 2004 elections, this was used effectively, when certain persons got everyone all riled up about the spectre of gay marriage, which was sold to the public as a…

Sleaze and controversy from the American Freedom Association and Discovery Institute

Two years ago, a California science foundation gave permission to to the American Freedom Alliance ("freedom" is like "family" in these organizations; when you see it, you should be instantly suspicious) to show a movie in their IMAX theater. The film was titled "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record", and it was an Intelligent Design propaganda piece. This happens fairly often; these sleazy organizations love to present the illusion of being scientific, so they like to rent out halls in museums and universities in order to put on their shows. The physics auditorium on…

It never ends — Bemidji is afflicted with the toxin of creationism

So this past weekend, we had the Midwest Science of Origins conference here in Morris, Minnesota. At precisely the same time, about 190 miles north-north-east of us, in Bemidji, Minnesota, a team of lying clowns from the Institute for Creation Research were repeating the same bullshit that provoked our students to organize our conference. I hope the Bemidji State biology faculty were paying attention, and that their students are right now planning some remedial education for the community; I'd be happy to help if they want to contact me. It was a seminar titled "Rebuilding the Foundation:…

SCOTUS hears arguments in Mass et al. v EPA

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Massachusetts et al. v. EPA. In the case, several state governments are suing the EPA for failing to regulate CO2 as a greenhouse gas. There are many levels of legal conflict on which the justices could rule, summarized in the NYTimes coverage: On one level, the argument was about the meaning of the Clean Air Act, which the Environmental Protection Agency maintains does not treat carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases as air pollutants and thus does not give the agency the authority to regulate them. On another level, the argument was…

Perceiving the Mind

There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that doesn't mean we haven't learned anything about theory of mind, it does mean we may have missed some…

Bright Light and Melatonin Treatment Improves Dementia

A study published in title="Journal of the American Medical Association">JAMA indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000 href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux">lux), or bright light combined with href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin">melatonin, can improve symptoms in patients with dementia.  Melatonin alone appeared to have a slight adverse effect. This already has been reported by href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1813396,00.html">Time, the BBC, href="http://www.modernmedicine.com/modernmedicine/Neurology/Bright-Light-Can-Help-…