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Greetings from Maputo

After 19 hours via London (where I had the unfortunate Sea Cow sighting), I arrived (and felt like I put the 'poo'ped) in Maputo, Mozambique. Tomorrow I deliver a talk to the Mozambique Fisheries Division on the fisheries catch reconstructions I recently completed as part of my Ph.D. research (co-funded by the Sea Around Us project and WWF). Small-scale fisheries are often overlooked statistically, politically, and in economic terms. This is because small-scale fishers, as Dr. Daniel Pauly once explained during a talk, don't play golf. Their physical and socio-economic remoteness from…

Politics Tuesday: Words from a Master: Less Talk, More Action

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org For those of us who follow the world of ocean politics (and politics generally), Leon Panetta is the closest thing we have to a rock star. Panetta served as the chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission, and prior to that was President Clinton's Chief of Staff, head of the Office of Management & Budget, and a seven-term Congressman from Sam Farr's current district (Monterey/Santa Cruz). He was the guy who brought all the players together to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and was a major force in creating the still-standing…

The Shifting Baseline of American Money

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine focused on the income gap, which included Lauren Greenfield's latest documentary pieces on Kids and Money. They're nothing magical--just a straightforward look at L.A.'s teenagers, who represent the demographic with the largest spending power in the U.S. Last night, I also watched the film "Bobby"--with a remarkable cast and less than remarkable storyline. The film succeeded only in moments that used clips from Robert F. Kennedy's real speeches. In one, RFK was in rural coal-mining town where he spoke about the economic hardships and the hungry…

After an absence, I return with my head on a platter

That's my head, scanned by Joy Hirsch and Steven Thomas at Columbia University's and then digitized, burned onto a CD and mailed to me. I mashed it through the lovely, open-source Mac program Osirix, which allows me to imagize my brain, which I'm finding much different than imagining it, though the former does call the latter into play. Makes your head spin. This is just the outside of my head, of course, with only a bottom-up peek inside through an opening created when the MRI machine chopped and dropped my non-brain-containing parts. I'll move inside in future posts as I…

Big Pharma Out of Bounds Again

I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa…

Why I'm Staying...for now

By the latest count, ScienceBlogs has lost 11 bloggers over its mismanagement of the PepsiCo sponsored blog (which is now RIP). That's around a quarter of our Sciblings. Notably, we've lost some of my favorite bloggers, like Brian Switek and Scicurious. With the strong reaction many had to this PepsiCo fiasco, you might be wondering why I am still here. In part, it's because I don't feel that the incident was as bad as some of my peers did. Yes, it was poorly managed, and the blog needed to be well labeled as sponsored/ advertising/ something to make it blatantly distinct from the other…

The good, the gorgeous, and the not-so-much

Took this yesterday while playing with my new camera's "Panoramic" setting at Hanauma Bay. Yeah, it's that gorgeous here :) Ok, a couple more beautiful shots:The best place to play baseball. Ever. Perfect scenery But, like just about every beautiful island, Oahu has its share of invasive and introduced species which have wreaked havoc on the native and endemic species. Take this leaping little guy, for example: This is an Indian mongoose, one of the many introduced species which now calls most of the islands of Hawaii home. In the 1800s, as the islands became more and more in contact with the…

How To Accidentally Stop Whaling

Greenpeace protests with cute little stunts. The Sea Shepherd throws slick bombs and tries to foul props. And, so far, nothing has stopped the Japanese practice of "scientific" whaling. But now, an unlikely turn of events just might accomplish what years of efforts have failed to do: stop the Japanese fleet from catching whales. And we have obnoxious tourists to thank for it. The amazing spectacle of the icy continent attracts thousands of tourists a year who view their frozen surroundings from the comfort of warm, cozy cruise cabins. In the past few years, however, cruise ships have been…

Sex ed just got a little more complicated

It's amazing how the field of stem cell research has advanced so much in such a short amount of time. Today, just a little over a decade after the first stem cell line was produced, scientists announced another breakthrough - turning stem cells into sperm. In a paper published in the journal Stem Cells And Development (PDF), British scientists from Englandâs Newcastle University detail a technique for turning stem cells with male chromosomes into reproductive germline cells and prompt them to divide into sperm. Like non-stem derived sperm, the in vitro versions have 1/2 the amount of genetic…

Did they have to make it so pretty?

The NY Times has put together a lovely illustrated story about data collection on Greenland. The story is prettily terrifying, though. The ice is melting, and forming lakes of liquid water on the surface of the ice cap, which then drains away in fast-running rivers that cut deeper into the ice and then drain into holes that run even deeper into the glacier -- it's a dangerous place, and if you fall in, you'll be swept away and instantly dumped into a pit. It also means the ice sheet is porous and riddled with rot already. In addition to the personal terror for the researchers, this work is…

Sex v. Decongestants

Been feeling under the weather? Nose all stuffed up, barely able to breathe? Well, at least one doctor recommends that you get yourself off to treat that nasal drip, any way you can. Seriously - the suggestion was even published in Medical Hypotheses, a real journal. The author, Sina Zarrintan from Iran, points out that sex and masturbation might be safer means of relieving nasal decongestion than medications. The basic argument is simple. Stuffy noses are caused by the nasal membranes becoming swollen from inflamed blood vessels. Orgasms, by nature, turn on the sympathetic nervous system,…

Chemistry Nobel Prize for Biology?

My colleague, Coturnix, just raised the question of whether the awarding of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University is really an award for biology. A surprise to some of us "youngsters," Kornberg was recongized as the sole winner for elucidating the basic mechanism of eukaryotic transcription. Not a surprise that the winner was Kornberg, son of the Arthur Kornberg, who shared the 1959 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine with Severo Ochoa for elucidating the process of DNA replication; but, rather, that Kornberg was the sole winner. I'll leave that to…

Sooner or Later, We're Gonna Have a Really, Really, Really Bad Day

"Children are our hope for the future." THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death. "What does it contain, then?" ME. "Besides you, I mean!" Death gave him a puzzled look. I'M SORRY? Terry Pratchett "Sourcery" Bad Astronomy Blogger Phil Plait has written one of the most fantastically, outrageously, manically, humorously depressing books I've ever read, and I'm almost certain I mean that as a compliment. Death From The Skies provides a veritable smorgasbord of potentially deadly astronomical delights, each more exotic than the last. It's like having every Discovery Channel "The Sky Is…

Discovery Institute: Dishonest or Incompetent? I Report, You Decide.

First, the Discovery Institute didn't seem to know about the anti-evolution bill introduced in Florida last week. Now, they don't seem to actually understand what the bill does. Both of these things are quite strange, considering that the Discovery Institute folks actually wrote all of the substantive parts of the bill. Rob Crowther just devoted most of an article over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Blog to scolding the media for their coverage of the Florida legislation. Apparently, most of the news coverage made the outrageous claim that the "Academic Freedom Act" would…

The Ultimate Geekalicious Pocket Protector Nerd

As seen in the Chronicle of Higher Education! It all started innocently enough, with a protector acquired for a couple of bucks at the 2001 meeting of the American Chemical Society. After that he ordered some for his department. From there, the addiction -- er, collection -- grew. And grew - to 465 and counting. Beware the ACS meetings, my children! "I am not a weirdo," he says. "I just collect pocket protectors." Or so he told the Chronicle...but see what he says on his own website... "I'm not just a collector, I am also a wearer." John A. Pojman is one bad-ass pocket-protector wearin'…

The Pharyngula Mutating Meme

The Skeptical Alchemist tagged me with the Pharyngula Mutating Meme - a series of questions that can change as they get passed from blogger to blogger according to a set of simple rules. The original questions were: 1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is... 2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is... 3. The best sexy song in rock is... The Pharyngula mutating genre meme: There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way,…

A Tree Falls in the Bronx - and it is Good.

Jake Young just drew my attention to one of the most wonderful signs of Bronx revitalization I've heard of in years - a beaver is making its home on the banks of the Bronx River near the Bronx Zoo. This is absolutely fantastic news - more so than I think Jake, who is a fairly recent arrival to NYC, realizes. I grew up in the Bronx, not all that far from the Bronx River. In fact, the river ran through French Charlie's Park, where my brothers and I played little league baseball. Back then, the thought of a beaver - or almost any other mammal - making a home in the Bronx River would have been…

Quote of the Day - 25 December 2006

Merry Christmas. "DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. "Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. "Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.' "Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus? "VIRGINIA O'HANLON. "115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET." VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere…

Reductionism, molecular genetics, and philosophy

Well, I'm just back from the 3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference, convened by Paul Griffiths, which was titled "Idealization, mechanism and reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology". Speakers were Bill Bechtel (UC San Diego), Alex Rosenberg (Duke), Marcel Weber (Basel), Ingo Brigandt (Alberta), Mark Colyvan (Sydney), Stephen Downes (Utah), Karola Stotz (Indiana), James Tabery (Pittsburgh) and Rasmus Winther (UNAM, Mexico City), plus a host of people from around Australia. It was, I expected, going to be more of the same old boring stuff on reductionism in biology…

Law, theory, or something else?

An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop calling evolution a theory, and start calling it a "law". I disagree: The term "theory" has much wider application than "law", and in any event, the very same sorts of rhetorical ambiguity will be used for that too (a law requires a lawmaker, doesn't it? Hmm? So evolution is false, blah, blah, blah). In fact, "law" is the term that should be, and…

Microbial Species - postlude

As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end]. This then became a talk and later a paper, now in review. My argument was that there was a principle by which we could tell if microbes were a single species or not, depending on how regularly it exchanged its genetic material. Now the American Academy of Microbiology has caught up with me <insert smiley here>... A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the…

Back drop to the Nude Mouse story

(Actually posted this a little earlier, but we're learning the ins and outs of blogging, choosing categories etc). This is in regards to the Nude Mouse piece, shown earlier today... This wierd little conversation piece initially began as a query to the Believer for a fiction interview piece. My letter to Matt Derby went as follows: >Dear Matthew, So I've been quite enjoying your interviews of late, and wanted to query how it is that one gets involved. In this respect, I'm a little on the naive side, since my writing endeavours have only been in practice for the last year or so. However…

You call that progress?

It's taken me a while to assemble something cogent about the outcome of the CoP15, the Copenhagen conference that produced what some are calling "better than nothing." There are those who consider it a complete failure because the final accord, which didn't receive full approval, includes no specific carbon emissions reductions targets. Others point out that just getting China to agree to a watered-down provision on verification protocols was a major achievement and the best that could be hoped for. I doubt a useful evaluation will be forthcoming until much later in 2010. History's like that…

Excellent Review on Gene-Environment Interactions

This review in Nature Neuroscience is excellent. I have never seen the issue of gene-environment interactions laid out so eloquently. Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, so those of you not affiliated with a University may have to just live with this excerpt: The recent history of psychiatric research that has measured genetic differences at the DNA sequence level can be divided into three approaches, each with its own logic and assumptions. The first approach assumes direct linear relations between genes and behaviour (Fig. 1a). The goal of this approach has been to correlate…

Jonah Lehrer on Practice over Innate Ability

Fellow Scienceblogger Jonah Lehrer has this nice little vignette in Seed arguing that practice is more important than ability. Two examples that could be forwarded for the idea of innate genius are Mozart and Tiger Woods, two child prodigies that practiced a lot harder than most people give them credit for: Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week-- his father was known as a stern taskmaster--he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson's golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart's early symphonies are not nearly as…

Friday Flicks: A Review of Pirates of the Caribbean 2

As I have promised to do some sort of regular Friday movie review here goes. Incidentally, I don't know if this will be entirely regular -- sometimes I don't see movies. So we will see how it goes. Pirates of the Caribbean passed swimmingly the low expectations test: everyone thought with good reason that a movie inspired by a Disney ride would suck; therefore, when it did not suck, people were substantially impressed. Similarly, Johnny Depp exposes one to the awesome spectacle of what would happen if someone so addled by decades of drug use that reality often eludes them were to engage…

Opening knowledge -- or locking it up (when it's convenient)

The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a new initiative by commercial scholarly publishers to discredit the open access movement. Prism describes itself as an organization to "protect the quality of scientific research", which it hopes to do by opposing policies "that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing." What policies are they opposed to? Why, this one, which recommends that NIH-funded research results be freely available to the public when they are published. In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright.…

We recognize siblings based solely on facial similarity

This is a guest post by Christy Tucker, one of Greta's top student writers from Spring of 2007. Take a look at the following paintings. How alike are they? How can you tell--which clues help you determine similarity? Now, which of these girls are related? If only two of these young girls are related, how would you determine which two? Would they be the same ones that you thought looked very similar? Laurence Maloney and Maria Dal Martello studied observer's ratings of the similarity between two children's faces in relation to judgments on whether the two are siblings. Do we simply note…

Peer review for blogs?

Amardeep Singh suggests that bloggers might benefit from some form of peer review: The idea came to me as I've begun preparing a tenure file at my current university, acutely aware that my blog writing cannot be considered "peer-reviewed" publication by any current standard. Even the rewards of occasional Boing-Boing-ish popularity (my post on "Early Bengali Science Fiction" from awhile ago, for instance) do not help, since that is really popularity rather than review. But why not institute a review of some sort? But how to go about it? Getting scholars to review academic work is often like…

Brief thoughts on what's going on online

I've found a few articles that I've got couple sentences' worth of thoughts about, but not a couple paragraphs, so I'm going to write them all up here. This is sort of halfway between a news and an in other news post. 1. Neuroscience and science writing. Jonah Lehrer argues that it's okay for science writers to use generalizations like "the amygdala is the center of fear and anxiety" when actually all we can say for certain is that region is activated more when people claim they are afraid or anxious, compared to a "resting state." I agree; writers need to take shortcuts sometimes, but an…

The New Congress on Science

With the Dems now about to assume control of both houses of Congress, science policy is going to change. Big time. Indeed, in The Republican War on Science I pointed out that one reason the Reagan administration never messed with science as much as the current administration was because the Democratic Congress helped keep it in line. We can now expect the same thing to transpire with the Bush administration. The big changes I'm looking at will come in the following areas: 1. Committee Chairs. People like James Inhofe won't be able to build global warming hearings around people like Michael…

The emotion of shapes

Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful? How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more? If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 2 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (again, number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry. Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons…

Learning about stereotypes reduces their impact

"Boys are better at math" is a stereotype decades in the making, and it has in some cases been borne out by testing measures such as the SAT. The stereotype has been around so long that many wonder whether the stereotype is the effect or the cause of any actual differences in math ability. Many researchers have observed a "stereotype threat," which occurs when test-takers are made aware that they are being tested in an area in which the stereotype suggests they'll do poorly. For example, when boys and girls are given a math test and told that its purpose is to determine whether boys or girls…

Why we can't all be divas

Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern: Ave Maria, version 1 Ave Maria, version 2 (Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko) If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two excerpts. Maybe one seems to be played at a different tempo, or with different instrumentation, or is a bit longer or shorter. You probably won't think either clip sounds unpleasant, and you might not notice any differences at all. If you are a professional musician, on the other hand, you may find the second clip so appalling that…

Ten Hundred Words of Climate Science

Inspired by the internet comic “The Up-Goer Five”, which used only the 1,000 most commonly used words to describe the Saturn V Rocket, scientists across the internet are attempting to describe their work using the just this small set of words. And it’s tough! But one of Brookhaven’s atmospheric scientists was up to the challenge. Alistair Rogers, who works in our Environmental Sciences Department, gives it a go: Understanding change at the top of the world so we’ll know what is going to happen later When we drive cars and warm our homes we give out bad stuff that ends up in the air. The bad…

Solar Farm, East-Coast Style

Brookhaven will soon be home to the largest solar farm in the eastern United States. The Long Island Solar Farm, being constructed by BP Solar and the Long Island Power Authority on Brookhaven Lab's campus, will produce 32 megawatts of power when complete - enough to power about 4,500 homes. The Long Island Solar Farm Just about six months after site preparation work began in November, the farm is now more than halfway complete. To date, workers have mounted nearly 90,000 of the 164,000 solar panels that will make up the array and have installed 4,600 of the 6,800 racks that hold the…

One Ring to Bring Them All and in the Science Bind Them

A little more than one year ago, on the day of its groundbreaking ceremony, the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) construction site was nothing more than a whole lot of dirt. Today, it's...well, take a look for yourself. The NSLS-II construction site on the day of the groundbreaking ceremony, June 15, 2009, and... ...exactly one year later Construction is quickly progressing on the $912 million facility, which will be the world's most brilliant light source. Eh, what's a "light source?" Basically, it's a particle accelerator that, in a controlled manner, sheds light of…

Gagging the Mississippi

The Mississippi is a mess. I live in the agricultural, rural upper midwest, and one of the nasty surprises lurking beneath the rich green fields is that the rivers are ugly stews of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides from agricultural runoff. We have data that it hurts people, too: premature births and birth defects show seasonal fluctuations that peak for children conceived in the spring and summer, when the chemicals are being sprayed into the air and are dribbling into the streams. The villains are agribusiness and overproduction and the corn ethanol boondoggle and horrors like the…

Cliff Notes to the Katrina Anniversary Literature

Lots of people are putting out reports and such. A brief rundown of some things that have come across my desk: Center for American Progress (PDF). I really like the Center, but I must say I find their recently released hurricanes-and-global warming report a tad disappointing. Oddly, in my view the report is both too incautious with the science and yet also far too cautious when it comes to the policy. The complexities and uncertainties aren't really limned on the science front. And then while there's lots of talk about community-based preparedness measures, nothing CAP suggests (in my reading…

The "F" Word

FAITH Several folks have emailed asking why I've yet to write about RELIGION. Simply put, what I believe is that faith has no place in science. Will someone please stand up and explain the circular argument, the rhetoric, the tomfoolery and fiddlesticks that is the age old debate on how these two worlds converge? Convince me, and I'm ready and waiting at my laptop to jump in. I admit I'm no expert here. Although I studied religion as a Classics major, my perspectives are predominantly influenced by an inundation of our own cultural norms, societal movements, American education, and the…

Video Card Singularity

We all had some laughs when the two-bladed razor was improved with the addition of a third blade.  Late-night comedians joked about razors coming with four or even five blades. Then, we all had a few more chuckles when the four-bladed Schick Quattro actually made it to market, soon followed by the five-bladed Gillette Fusion.  This led to speculation about the natural end-point: href="http://agrumer.livejournal.com/414194.html"> class="inset" alt="" src="http://www.grumer.org/lj_images/razors.gif" border="0" height="256" width="264"> The same thing is happening inside our…

Another Health Insurance Lie

I support universal coverage in a single-payer system.  I won't belabor the point.  Today I just want to point out another insurance industry lie, printed in the New York Times today. It's in an article about Mrs. Clinton's health care finance reform proposal.  (Which I do not support.)   Mrs. Clinton was href="http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/us/politics/16clinton.html">quoted: But she is prepared once again to do battle with insurance companies, which she has said “spend tens of billions of dollars a year figuring out how not to cover people…

LOL FDA

I don't think this has ever happened before.  I was reading an article about the organizational chart at the href="http://www.fda.gov/" rel="tag">FDA and I laughed out loud.   Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather, it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush" kind of LOL. The chart is from this article: href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/10/960">Sidelining Safety — The FDA's Inadequate Response to the IOM, by Sheila Weiss Smith, Ph.D, in the latest NEJM (Volume 357:960-963).  (It's open-access.) I've written about this at length before ( href…

Pollution Worsening in Great Lakes

The news article does not state specifically why it is happening, but it is a trend over the past two years: href="http://www.thestar.com/Environment/article/232782">Great Lakes fish getting worse: Study Jul 05, 2007 11:36 AM Catherine Porter Toronto Star Environment Reporter Toxins that once only surfaced in big fish are making their way down the food chain, a sign that the Great Lakes are getting even more polluted, a new report says. In the past two years, smaller sizes of salmon, trout and carp have been slapped with strict consumption warnings - and some with outright…

Curing Cystic Fibrosis? With GMO's?

Not only that, but the genetically modified "organism" is an engineered HIV.  At least, that is what researchers at Emory College in London are contemplating. style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"> href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1533745.ece">Disabled Aids virus could provide cure for cystic fibrosis style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"> Mark Henderson, Science Editor style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"> March 19, 2007 style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;"> From The Times style="font-…

Thoughts on my AGU experience

Don't tell my university administrators, but sharing my latest science results is only a tiny fraction of the reason to go to a conference like AGU. Even hearing the latest and greatest science is not the entire reason. This is a lesson that is taking me a long time to learn. I get giddy with the thought of all the cool science I want to take in at AGU. I plan my schedule full from 8 am to 6 pm with talk after talk and poster after poster. Since the work I do crosses several sub-disciplines, I am often forced to make difficult choices between competing timeslots. When I was a wee grad student…

Am I a fool for thinking we can take a summer break from daycare?

There is an occasional faint light at the end of the tunnel of the academic year, and with that light come a lot of planning for the summer. I'm trying not to place unrealistic productivity expectations on the summer, but I also know that it is unrealistic to think that I will have the summer "off." As I start to make my summer plans, I'm realizing that I'm going to be out of town for ~5 weeks this summer, and that Minnow will be coming along with me. That fact, combined with really wanting to see Minnow more than just breakfast, dinner, bedtime and weekends has got me wondering whether we…

The growth cone

Dylan T. Burnette/ Nikon Small World.  The remarkable specificity of neuronal connectivity depends on accurate axon pathfinding during development. Pathfinding involves the detection of guidance cues in the environment by the growth cone, a motile chemotactic structure at the leading tip of the extending axon. The growth cone was discovered over 100 years ago by Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience. Cajal's description of the growth cone (or cono de  crecimiento) has not been bettered: From the functional point of view, one might say that the growth cone is like a…

The left brain/ right brain myth

This "right brain vs left brain test" from the Herald Sun is doing the rounds on the internet today. The article contains the so-called "spinning silhouette" optical illusion (below), and states that if you see the the dancer rotating in a clockwise direction "you use more of the right side of your brain and vice versa." You've probably heard this left/ right brain dichotomy before. It goes something like this: the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, deductive, mathematical, etc., while the right hemisphere is artistic, visual and imaginative. The idea stems at least partly from the…

How To Create a Fearless Mouse

Its hard to find a more stereotyped relationship than that of the cat and mouse. The cat hunts the mouse, and the mouse fears and runs from the cat. An innate fear response can be replicated in mice just but introducing it to feline urine, which contains olfactory clues which give the mouse information about the presence of a friend or foe. And in fact, an important group of olfactory sensory cells are responsible for detecting these molecules and translating it to a behavioral response which all mice are born with. Recent research by Kobayakawa et al. has discovered that deleting this group…