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PNAS: James Annan, Climate Change Researcher

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of James Annan) 1) What is your non-academic job? I'm a research scientist at a Govt lab, working in the field of climate change research. Currently I'm in Japan, which is probably a bit off-the-wall for most…

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Google Analytics

I've had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it's irritating as hell: Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog. The presence of sponsored results means there's action in the marketplace…

Iain M. Banks, Matter [Library of Babel]

The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in which a woman called Djan Seriy Anaplian and her drone companion Turminder Xuss disrupt a medieval-level army with very little effort (she's an agent of the somewhat disreputable Special Circumstances, the group within the Culture that meddles in the affairs of…

Abstraction, Compartmentalization, and Education

Given the amount of time I've spent writing about academic issues this week, it's only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work in the New York Times. Here's Ed's introduction: Except they don't really work. A new study shows that far from easily grasping mathematical concepts, students who are fed a diet of real-world problems fail to apply their knowledge to new situations. Instead, and against all expectations, they were much more likely to transfer their skills if they were…

On the Suckitude of Office 2007

My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I've been making up new lecture slides. At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I'd be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I've wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them…

Reviews and the junior faculty member

In 2009, I've done ~9 reviews of journal articles, including two in the past week, and not counting the 1-2 more looming in the next two weeks. During the same period, I've submitted one 1st author manuscript, still in review, but probably only going cost 3 reviewers some time. Anyone see a mass balance problem there? Or do y'all just see a case of a junior faculty member correctly working to build her international reputation in time for tenure? Or something else? 'Cause I'm no longer quite sure what to make of the situation. I'm dancing around the question of "How many reviews are enough?"…

Celebrating Steve Blackwell at SteveFest '09 and Florida Frontier Days

This is for all of my peeps in SW Florida and all who love folk music. I received a lovely e-mail last week from Robin Leach, wife of mandolin player Dan Leach (and mother of bassist Andy Leach), who came upon my posts about a very special musician. Dan played with a gentleman named Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58. Yesterday, my friends celebrated Steve's life and…

Twelve months of Terra Sig (2008)

Brothers Bora and Drug reminded me that it is time for the early December traditional meme of recording one's first sentence of each month's first post. Just as an aside, on my visit with this week with Anton and Bora to Ernie Hood's Radio In Vivo show to promote ScienceOnline'09, Ernie asked, "how do you pronounce Terra Sigillata?" You'll recall, I hope, that we named the blog Terra Sigillata because it was the name of the first trademarked drug: a planchet of fat and mineral-rich clay from the Greek isle of Lemnos. However, terra sigillata is also a kind of clayworks that is finished with…

The Pseudonymity Laboratory: Does Formal Certification Increase Credibility?

To those not following our discussion, PalMD and I (and a couple of pseudonymous women bloggers) will be leading a discussion session on the needs and justification for anonymity or pseudonymity in blogging at the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 conference (16-18 Jan 2009 in RTP, NC, USA). I've also been toying with the pros and cons of personally uncloaking and have been surprised that most readers and commenters don't really care whether I am Abel or [RealName]. The past posts in this series have focused on whether readers trust pseudonymous bloggers - "trust" is a powerful word that I now…

The Friday Fermentable: "Bee" Cautious With Some Wines

The irregular frequency of The Friday Fermentable has been due mostly to my focus on two cases of a (inexpensive) private label wine that has kept my summer drinking variety to a bare minimum. Thankfully, my guest blogger, Erleichda, has often come to the rescue with fabulous descriptions of his group wine dinners. The focus this time is instead a very interesting research letter published in this week's (16 August 2007) New England Journal of Medicine entitled, "Wine-Induced Anaphylaxis and and Sensitization to Hymenoptera Venom." The full text is currently available freely. Two Spanish…

Oath of a pharmacist and code of ethics

For those who have been asking over the last couple of days, here are the oath of a pharmacist as recited at US colleges of pharmacy and a code of ethics adopted in 1994 by the then-American Pharmaceutical Association (now the American Pharmacists Association; still APhA). There seems to be a strong focus on the patient in the code of ethics but there's also a bit of wiggle room that can be interpreted as one sees fit. Oath of a Pharmacist At this time, I vow to devote my professional life to the service of all humankind through the profession of pharmacy. I will consider the welfare of…

Conscientious objection by health professionals: day two

Yesterday's discussion of a pharmacist's right to refuse filling prescriptions based on moral or legal grounds generated some great discussion. I appreciate the thoughtful discussion of the commenters as well as two posts on the topic by Prof Janet Stemwedel. The first draws from her older post on the topic nearly two years ago, illustrating that we haven't come very far in this debate. As Janet noted then Obviously, we've got a tug-of-war here between the moral convictions of the health care professionals and the moral convictions of the patients. I'm also going to quote Janet heavily…

Why economics is the "dismal science"

We've all heard economics described as the "dismal science," yet it still qualifies for a Nobel prize. Many still grumble about the decision to tack on economics to the short list of true science Nobels, and while I don't know whether such complaints are justified, there is good reason to remain highly skeptical of the field's predictive powers in general. Take the just-released Tufts University study on the cost of climate change. The main authors of the study, which was commissioned by the Natural Resources Defence Council, are economists from the Global Development and Environment…

Placebo Nation: The antidepressant controversy

Another study purports to find that, for most people, Prozac and the other members of the antidepressant family of pharmaceuticals are no better than sugar pills. Expect Big Pharma to object, but not too loudly. At least, don't expect them to expend too much effort and money denouncing the findings. We've heard this before, and it would seem that neither patients nor the doctors that prescribe antidepressants care much about whether or not the drugs actually do what their makers claim they do. You can go all the way back to 1998 to find studies casting doubt on the efficacy of antidepressants…

On the other hand: a little dose of hope on the global warming front

No, there's no revolutionary finding that maybe the world isn't warming. At least, not yet. But a group of researchers has at least come across evidence that one of the dreaded feedback mechanisms that could accelerate the temperature rise beyond our ability to cope may not be such a threat after all. And just in time -- after all the fuss about record sea ice minima in the Arctic, we could use some good news. The ecosystems in question are also in the Arctic. It's the not-so-permanent permafrost of the northern peatlands, terrain that has over the milennia sequestered oodles carbon, that has…

No more ice ages, but so what?

Talk about alarmist climate science. A new study has confirmed earlier propositions that the most recent ice age will be the last, for at least half a million years, if we don't stop burning fossil fuels. But I say, this is not something we should be worried about. In "The long-term legacy of fossil fuels," (Tellus B, 59(4): 664-672, September 2007), Toby Tyrell, John Shepherd and Stephanie Castle at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton conclude that the ocean's ability to absorb all that carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere to keep our decadent lifestyles afloat will…

Islamic science: contradiction of terms?

The headline for this week's current reading on the Island is perhaps unfair. It's become trite to point out that algebra and algorithm, to name just two mathematical terms, are derived from Muslim scholars. But as Taner Edis, the author of the book "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam" argues in an interview with Salon's Steve Paulson, it's been a long time since Islam produced anything like a scientific advance. And even back in the 10th century, when Islam was the sole guardian of the ancient wisdom the Greeks, they weren't doing much of anything that resembles modern…

The X Factor (recycled)

I have resisted reposting pre-ScienceBlog posts as the lazy way out, but seeing as how many of my fellow bloggers have done it, what the heck? This one comes from a year ago, on the heels of the discovery of "Xena," what might be a tenth planet. It seems appropriate given that newspaper columnists are doing the same kind of recycling as we anticipate the outcome of a big meeting in Prague later this month, when astronomers will announce just what it is that gets to be called a planet. Astronomers have been finding new planets on an almost weekly basis for years. Until last week, though, they…

Barack Obama tackles the secular-faithful divide

Barack Obama is right. Barack Obama is also wrong. Not only should this not be surprising, it should be welcome. Because no other position is tenable when it comes to the subject of the role of faith in politics. Obama, widely considered one of the brightest hopes for the Democrats come 2012 (if not 2008, as a candidate for Veep perhap?), gave a speech on appealing to secular voters at gathering of progressive Christians called the Call to Renewal Conference a couple of days ago. The reaction from the blogosphere includes some bewilderingly negative comments from those who want no truck nor…

The Thermodynamic Argument For Fad Diets

Over the Christmas break I traveled to Louisiana to visit my family and to Georgia to visit my wife's family. In both cases (especially in the Georgia case!) the overarching theme was the consumption of delicious homemade food in quantities which were somewhere between preposterous and superhuman. I'm not the only one with this experience. The very first TV commercial I saw after the stroke of midnight at the dawn of this year was for a weight loss program. So was the second commercial. "Eh," I used to scoff, "Calories in < calories out. Simple as that. It's basic thermodynamics." But…

Inventing Relativity, 1860s style

By the 1860s, the classical theory of electricity and magnetism was on a very solid theoretical footing. Maxwell's equations describing the interplay of charges and currents with electric and magnetic fields were on paper by 1862, and with some changes in notation they're the exact same today. Relativity wouldn't be invented for another half-century or so, and that makes it all the more remarkable that Maxwell's equations don't actually need to be modified at all to work in a relativistic framework. Lorentz covariance is built right in, though it's a bit hidden. But Maxwell and Faraday and…

Toucan play at reducing the heating bill

Relative to its body size, the huge beak of the toco toucan is the largest of any bird. It allows the toucan to eat both fruit and small animals, and display to both mates and rivals. Darwin himself speculated that it acts as a billboard, shaped by sexual selection to display bright colours that could be attractive to potential mates. But the toucan's bill has another function that has only been discovered. Like the ears of an elephant, the toucan's bill is a radiator. It certainly has all the characteristics of a biological radiator. It's big and has a surface area that's 25-40 times…

Population Policy, Science, and Technology; A Conversation with the Guy Who Wrote the Book On It

Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism. Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy. Below, The World's Fair sits down with Professor Saul Halfon in the first of a two-part conversation about his new book, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women's Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy (Lexington Books, 2006). Professor Halfon is a science policy scholar and an Assistant Professor of STS at Virginia Tech. He's a respected and sought after teacher and a gifted researcher. He's a good guy…

A visit to 826 Valencia, San Francisco (plus a possible idea to take the Science Scouts to next level?)

Image by Baskervillain Last week I was in San Francisco for a meeting (sorry Janet for not touching base - I literally got my passport the day before flying out). This was actually the first work-related trip I've taken in about 5 years (the last being the workshop in Lagos, Nigeria), so it was with some amusement that this particular meeting happened to involve a pirate store. Which makes more sense when you realize that the Pirate Store (no joke) is actually a front for a non-profit organization known as 826 Valencia. This is a remarkable set up with a general mandate that reads:…

Is there a Santa? (this one has Popper, Pediatrics, and Psychotropic compounds)

(By Paul Clarkson and reprinted from the Science Creative Quarterly) Being a scientific investigation of a cultural conundrum Soon it will be Christmas Eve, and once more children will be divided into distinct factions. Here, Cyr [1] described younger children (<7 years) who believe in Santa Claus, and older children (>12 years) who have ditched this 'childish' belief. But he fails, by excluding from his questionnaire, to describe a third group who aren't really sure - the undecided voters if you like. And as the eldest child, I have spent a large part of my life in this group.…

Sleeping on it - how REM sleep boosts creative problem-solving

The German chemist Friedrich Kekule claimed to have intuited the chemical structure of the benzene ring after falling asleep in his chair and dreaming of an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail). He's certainly not the only person to have discovered a flash insight after waking from a good sleep. In science alone, many breakthroughs were apparently borne of a decent snooze, including Mendeleyev's creation of the Periodic Table and Loewi's experiments on the transmission of nervous signals through chemical messengers. Most of us have tried sleeping on a difficult problem before and using…

Scientists tickle apes to reveal evolutionary origins of human laughter

If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood. But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…

Playing shoot-em-up video games can improve some aspects of vision

Anyone who has played video games for too long is probably familiar with the sore, tired and dry eyes that accompany extended bouts of shooting things with rocket launchers. So it might come as a surprise that playing games could actually improve a key aspect of our eyesight. Renjie Li from the University of Rochester found that intensive practice at shoot-em-ups like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2 improved a person's ability to spot the difference between subtly contrasting shades of grey. In the real world, this "contrast sensitivity function" is reflected in the crispness of…

Sunday Function

You're a member of the French Resistance in the height of WWII. You're part of a network of resistance members who have to work with other resistance members they've never met before. For instance, an agent from Paris might have to meet up with an agent in Normandy to work together on sabotage before the invasion. But resistance is not something the Nazis take lightly, and they've deployed double agents who attempt to infiltrate the resistance. The agent in Normandy needs some way to verify that this person from Paris is in fact a resistance member rather than an enemy double agent. One…

Relativity from a Flashlight

Here's an experiment to try. It's a thought experiment - it would be almost impossible to carry out in reality, though more delicate experiments roughly along these lines have been done. You're in one of the space shuttles, or the Discovery One, or your favorite fictional but realistic spacecraft. It has a hallway extending the length of the spacecraft from bow to stern. You stand at one end of the hallway with a laser pointer, and shine a brief pulse of light down the other end. Make that a very brief pulse. You want the physical length of the pulse as it flies down the hall to be short…

Quantum Entanglement in the Interrogation Room

In every cop drama there's a scene where a suspect is being questioned in an interrogation room. The room contains a large mirror, and behind that mirror the detectives and district attorneys are observing and arguing about the progress of the case. The mirror is a two-way mirror. These kinds of mirrors aren't complicated. Light shines on them, and some fraction is reflected back while some fraction passes through. The suspect in the brightly lit room can't see the dark room beyond the mirror because the bright room light washes out the much smaller amount coming from the adjacent dark…

What good are the ScienceBlogs anyway?

Some group of bloggers has decided that today, Oct. 15, 2009, is "Blog Action Day." And this year's theme is climate change. Excellent, Smithers. My instincts are to ignore such declarations. It's always an International Year of This or National X Awareness Month, or World Y Day. Community newspapers take advantage of free copy and extra revenue by organizing special advertising supplements around them. I've always thought that they interfere with genuine news values by wasting space and resources on what are more or less abritrary pet-project campaigns. But I've been planning on writing a…

Graduate Programs in Science and Society at ASU

ASU has a number of exciting graduate programs in history, philosophy and social studies of science (with particular emphasis on the biological sciences). I am a faculty member for three of these programs (Biology & Society, Philosophy & Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology) and have worked with PhD and MA/MS students. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student who wants to study in these fields, please do not hesitate to use the contact information below or contact me with any questions you may have. We announce new graduate programs to study science and society…

More fizzle than sizzle

Like many on the blogosphere, I've had the opportunity to view Randy Olson's latest production Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. Billed as "an effort to understand the confusion around the global warming," the movie claims to be a "novel blend of three genres - mockumentary, documentary, and reality" and that alone illustrates the problem with the movie - it doesn't know what it's trying to be and after spending 85 minutes with it, I had no real clue what point Olson was trying to make and to whom he is making it. Indeed, it is only out of a sense of duty that I continued watching beyond the…

Self-Correcting Quantum Computers, Part IV

Quantum error correction and quantum hard drives in four dimension. Part IV of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: Prior parts: Part I, Part II, Part III. Quantum Error Correction Classical error correction worked by encoding classical information across multiple systems and thus protecting the information better than if it was encoded just locally. Fault-tolerant techniques extend these results to the building of actual robust classical computers. Given that quantum theory seems to be quite different from classical theory, an important question to…

Self-Correcting Quantum Computers, Part I

Quantum computing is hair-brained, but then again so is classical probabilistic computing. Part I of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers." Quantum Computing, a Harebrained Idea? Quantum computing, at first sight, sounds like a hairbrained idea with absolutely no possible possibility of actually working in the real world. The reasons for this are plentiful, at least when you first start learning about quantum computers. Quantum states (aka wave functions) are described by a continuum of values. Uh, oh, that…

Good News for Coffee Drinkers

href="http://www.researchblogging.org"> src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0pt none ;">Actually, this is only good news for coffee drinkers who also have late-stage hepatitis C.  A recent study in Hepatology showed a possible benefit to coffee consumption in patients with hepatitis C, First I will show the treatment of the study as shown in the popular press, then the actual journal article.   href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Gastroenterology/GeneralHepatology/16539">Coffee Could Stall Liver Disease Progression By…

This Is Depressing

The standard wisdom in management of Major Depression, is that medication plus psychotherapy is better that either treatment alone.  Many studies have shown this.  But this one does not. href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/66/11/1178?home">Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy and Brief Supportive Psychotherapy for Augmentation of Antidepressant Nonresponse in Chronic Depression The REVAMP Trial James H. Kocsis, MD; Alan J. Gelenberg, MD; Barbara O. Rothbaum, PhD; Daniel N. Klein, PhD; Madhukar H. Trivedi, MD; Rachel Manber, PhD; Martin B. Keller, MD;…

AU Report on the Lobbying Strategy of the Nuclear Industry

In his State of the Union speech last week, President Obama called for significant government investment in nuclear energy, telling Congress that "to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." The declaration brought members from both parties to their feet with some of the strongest applause of the evening (video above.) This week, as the NY Times reports, the Administration in its proposed budget plans to triple the size of the Energy…

Pew: Global Warming Dead Last Among Public Priorities

Call it a case of extreme optimistic bias: Many climate advocates point to polls that show when the public is asked directly, a majority say they are "concerned" about global warming and favor action. But what's missing from this poll assessment is where global warming sits relative to other political priorities. When you examine this comparison, public support for action turns up as soft, even among Dems and Independents, suggesting that it will be very difficult for Obama to rally the needed public input to pass meaningful legislation through Congress. One way to assess the strength of…

#10: The Ecology of Agro-Food Policy (Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)

Continuing on with the ten best from half of the World's Fair, as noted earlier, this is a reprint of a post that first ran in January 2009. I had a lot of agro-food posts, many of them about Food Miles, but picked just one from that category for this list (and this one not about food miles). In The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis writes about the difference between reductionist research methods and ecological ones. Gaddis is a well-known and influential Cold War historian at Yale. This accessible and undergrad-suitable book is a brief foray into historiography and the practice of…

Sick Building Syndrome and Uncertain Science: Part IV with author Michelle Murphy

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - - Part 4 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. - - - WF: The book is titled "Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty." Why is uncertainty a problem? Or, perhaps we should ask, where or when is uncertainty a problem? MM: Uncertainty, I would suggest, is a constitutive feature of much environmental politics, and particularly chemical exposures. Legal standards that demand we know the predictable…

What does Cuba have to do with the new $100 Barrel of Oil?

This post was written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.* 19 February 2008 was an historic day. For the first time in history, the price of oil at the close of the U.S. markets sat above $100. Ok, it was by only a penny, but that penny was probably the most significant penny anyone's see in years. And when you consider that in 2006 the U.S. consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil everyday, those pennies start to add up pretty quickly. The other major news event of the day was of course the announcement by Fidel Castro that he will step down from his top position in Cuba after nearly 50…

Using a mirror to combat phantom pain

CNN has a story about a Navy neurologist who tried using mirrors to help soldiers from Iraq with phantom pain. Phantom pain is pain in amputees that is perceived to originate in the amputated limb. What causes it is not exactly clear although many theories exist. However, it is often refractory to pain medication (this is common in so-called central pain or pain originating in the brain), so it can be really difficult to make these patients feel better. Dr. Jack Tsao, the Navy neurologist, had the idea that if you used a mirror to show the image of the opposing, intact limb where the…

Autoimmunity as a mechanism for Sympatric Speciation

The issue of sympatric speciation -- or how to separate species emerge from a single species without geographic isolation -- is a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. How can two species emerge without reproductive isolation of two separate groups? Wouldn't they all just breed together, hiding any new genes in heterozygotes? Bomblies et al. publishing in PLoS Bio have something interesting to say about that. The use a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana or thale grass to show that the answer might be in genes that regulate the immune response. Just to get some background, the genes…

Fantasy Journals like Fantasy Football

This is genius. These guys are proposing that we construct Fantasy Journals -- drafted sets of journal articles -- at meetings and scientific gatherings sort of like Fantasy Football. Each player would get access to say all the papers to be presented at the meeting (or a more limited number if that is too many). Your journal is selected from that number, and the winner is determined at the next year's meeting by the citation numbers for your papers. Bergstrom et al. list the possible benefits: This is a game that one would win by being good at picking the soon-to-be hot papers. Our lab…

Sex Hormones! The Chemistry Behind Testosterone Doping

One only has to turn on a TV, or browse through any news site, to read the story of disgraced Tour de France winner Flloyd Landis. Landis, an American, was reported to have an abnormally high testosterone to epitestosterone ratio in one of his urine samples given right before the end of of the race. Landis has vehemently denied the allegations, and a secondary "backup" test is being conducted; those results will be released this Saturday. If the test again comes up positive, Landis must relinquish his winner's jersey and title (he would be the second to do so). But, what is testosterone…

The Science of Magic

There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that magicians use to trick their audiences. The authors break down these into "visual illusions (after-images), optical illusions ('smoke and mirrors'), cognitive illusions (inattentional blindness), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, et cetera), and secret devices and mechanical artifacts (…

Scared by the light

WHO could have guessed that a protein isolated from pond scum would transform the way researchers investigate the brain? The protein, called channelrhodopsin (ChR), is found in algae and other microbes, and is related to the molecule in human photoreceptors that captures light particles. Both versions control the electrical currents that constantly flow in and out of cells; one regulates the algae's movements in response to light, the other generates the nervous impulses sent along the optic nerve to the brain. Unlike its human equivalent, the algal ChR controls the currents directly because…

Children with Williams Syndrome don't form racial stereotypes

WILLIAMS Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by the deletion of about 28 genes from the long arm of chromosome 7. It is characterized by mild to moderate mental retardation and "elfin" facial features. Most strikingly, individuals with WS exhibit highly gregarious social behaviour: they approach strangers readily and indiscriminately, behaving as if everybody were their friend. And, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology, they are the only known group of individuals who do not form racial stereotypes. Most of us stereotype others implicitly…