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Single cells in the monkey brain encode abstract mathematical concepts

OUR ability to use and manipulate numbers is integral to everyday life - we use them to label, rank, count and measure almost everything we encounter. It was long thought that numerical competence is dependent on language and, therefore, that numerosity is restricted to our species. Although the symbolic representation of numbers, using numerals and words, is indeed unique to humans, we now know that animals are also capable of manipulating numerical information. One study published in 1998, for example, showed that rhesus monkeys can form spontaneous representations of small numbers and…

How to morph into another person

Your face is a major component of your self-identity, but when you look into a mirror, how do you know that the person you are seeing is really you? Is it because the person in the reflection looks just like you? Or because the reflection moves when you move? Or perhaps because you see the face in the reflection being touched when you reach up to touch yours. Recent studies have shown that recognizing our own bodies depends upon integrated information from the senses of vision, touch and proprioception (the sense of how our bodies are positioned in space). These cues can easily be…

SURVEY OF ENVIRO REPORTING ACROSS FOUR REGIONS: Pacific NW Most Likely to Feature Enviro Beat; Few Cover Area Full-Time; Compared to Public & All Journalists, Enviro Reporters More Likely to Be Political Independents; Local Agencies, Groups Top Sources

In the latest issue of the journal Science Communication, David Sachsman, James Simon, and JoAnn Valenti report on their findings from a census survey of environmental reporters across the Pacific Northwest, New England, the South, and Rocky Mountain regions. Here are some key findings from the study: Pacific Northwest News Orgs Most Likely to Feature Environmental Beat Audience demand seems to shape the decision to invest in the environmental beat. News organizations in the Pacific Northwest were more likely than their counterparts in other regions to have environmental reporters on…

Of Sweet Potatoes, Social Cognition, and Spiritual Hullabaloo

I did my Ph.D. using monkeys as a model system, and as such I have quite an affinity for the little buggers. They may not be cute, they may not smell good, and they're definitely not cuddly, but they're completely endearing due to their penchant for outsmarting their H. sapiens bretheren. Unfortunately, not even an irascible, crusty old primate is immune from pseudoscientific nonsense. The Hundredth Monkey is one example. The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon is often referred to by pop psych weirdos and New Age crazies. If you hang around any internet forums, eventually some incense-burning…

Why The Simplest Theory Is Never The Right One: Occam's Razor Has A Double Edge

Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often called "Occam's razor." This kind of argument has been used on both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate (is natural selection or divine creation the more parsimonious theory?) and in at least one reductio ad absurdum argument against religion. Simple theories have many advantages: they are often falsifiable or motivate various predictions, and can be easily communicated as well as widely understood. But there are numerous reasons to suspect that this simple "theory of theories" is…

Why You Can't Correctly Divide a Line In Half (unless you're 10 years old)

Hemispatial neglect might be the most striking example of brain trauma's cognitive effects: patients with damage to right parietal regions appear unaware of the left half of space. For example, they'll often shave only the right side of their face, will only eat food from the right half of their plate, and when asked to copy a variety of drawings will include only their right half. As you can tell from these examples, right parietal cortex is particularly important for our understanding of space. Although left parietal cortex may be involved in similar computations, the right-sided region…

Eight notes on reproductive ethics

Reproductive ethics is a field I'm not all that familiar with, but it's been a big deal lately, so I've been thinking about it a bit. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has a few broadsheets on ethics, which are actually rather helpful. Reproductive medicine is a great field for looking at ethical problems. Let's examine two of them to learn something about the ethics of the field (and of course, about ourselves as well): Parental factors, that is, facts about the parents, may be important in reproductive medicine. When doctors become part of the reproductive process, someone…

Add it up

For effect, I'm just going to say something here, something that your outer skeptic -- nay, even your inner skeptic -- might immediately buck against. Don't worry; I'm not going to start talking about the healing power of Lemurian Seed Crystals. I will only present you with this deceptively simple idea: "The world is a better place than it was before." Or, alternately: "The world, on the whole, is improving." You may, very rightly, protest: they did kill the electric car, after all. Global warming is probably going to melt the Internet, and we are in a state of constant and meaningless war…

Keck AO Observations: Multiple Asteroid Systems

By Dr. Franck Marchis Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute I mentioned in my previous post that we observed several known multiple asteroid systems during our last observing run with the W.M. Keck Observatory and its Adaptive Optics Systems. If you have been following my personal blogs and/or the scientific articles of our group (you are courageous...) you know this is the scientific topic which is taking most of my time recently. Today, as you can see if you explore our VOBAD database, we know 192 companions of asteroids. What I…

The Unseen and Unknowable Has No Place in Science

Allow me to lay it out as simply as I can. It is my view that religion and science are incompatible in a very specific and important way. I say this as someone who previously drank the Kool-Aid and spent countless hours studying what was described to me as the Holy Spirit. I have been confirmed in the Lutheran tradition and have recited the Nicene Creed so often throughout my life that, as an adult, I no longer paid any attention to what the words were saying. They came out of me as rote, like a wind-up monkey who clapped his symbols at the turn of a crank. We believe in one God, the…

Why I've Gone Back to Seed - or 'Why I Blog More Happily Now'

With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs. Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit. Since then, however, as I blogged off in the hinterland, I've come to better see how this slippery but flexible form can hold a valuable place in both my own writing and in the changing world of journalism. I've been particularly swayed by the work of bloggers innovatively exploiting the immediacy,…

Terra Sig readers lead in "awesomeness"..

...not to mention you are discriminating, generous, good-looking and intelligent! What am I talking about? First, recognize that our move to Sb has increased our daily visits steadily into the triple digits but we are still only floating around positions 32 to 40 among our 44 SiBlings. But, be still, dear readers - we are kicking butt in two measures of DonorsChoose contributions. Pledge coordinator (and Sb 2.0 pledgemistress) Dr Janet Stemwedel was procrastinating on real work yesterday to calcuate that Terra Sig is #1 among ScienceBloggers for DonorsChoose contributions per 1000 unique…

Product Review: Finis Swimp3 1G

If your face is regularly complimented with goggle rings and you spend hours every week following the black line, this review might just interest you. If don't know what I'm talking about, it won't. I like to swim. This is a good thing, since I'm currently employed as a head guard, and spend more than 40 hours a week at the pool. I'm required to swim at least 500 meters every workday, and I usually go well beyond that. And I really, really enjoy it - far more than I've enjoyed any other form of physical exertion. But - let's face it - a long workout, especially distance sets in a 25…

PZ and the Pope - Take 2

Judging by the comments, it would appear that I wasn't as clear in my last post as I should have been. I apologize. Let me try again. Here's what PZ wrote: I think I'd have a few questions for this pope. Like, "What about over-population, Ratzi dear? What's the devout Catholic plan for dealing with that rather serious environmental issue?" and "Hey, have you noticed all those hell-holes of destruction in Africa? How does catholicism help people achieve economic and individual autonomy, huh?" I read that as covering two separate points: overpopulation, and the major problems faced by…

Women and Their Sexy Hawt Bodies: Reprise

So, to recap: A couple of women are having a conversation, and the topic turns to tit-ogling. "No one should be staring at my tits in the workplace," they all agree. "That makes me uncomfortable, creates a hostile work environment, and constitutes sexual harassment! How difficult is it to look at my eyes? Staring and ogling is a threatening display of power enacted in a sexual manner. This isn't the Mad Men era. Haven't men figured out how to behave in a professional situation by now?" A dude at the table next to them has been listening in and feels compelled to pipe up: "Ladeez…

Celebrating Black Independence Day, Honoring the Divine Nine

Why would you celebrate Black Independence Day on July 3rd? It took the work of slaves to build America; the slaves came before the nation, so Black Independence Day would logically precede the traditional Independence Day, July 4th. On July 3rd, I joined about 200 others in downtown Philadelphia, at 6th and Market Streets, to celebrate Black Independence Day and to honor in particular the 9 slaves transported to Philadelphia by George Washington (of the 316 slaves at his Mt. Vernon Plantation), and in general, all slaves whose labor helped build this nation. (See here for background…

Central Florida's Mujeres Universitarias Asociadas

Since I brought up the X-Gals, I've been thinking of another model of group support in academe, the Mujeres Universitiarias Asociadas at Central Florida. They were featured in an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education special issue on diversity. The Mujeres (pronounced moo-HAIR-ays) typically gather over lunch each month. They share tips on such issues as which campus administrator to approach with a problem and which to avoid. They have coached one another on compiling tenure portfolios and offered pointers on applying for the university's $5,000 teaching award. They have…

Genome comparison 101

Over at The Loom, Carl Zimmer tells us that a group of academics and a Conneticut biotech company are about to begin sequencing the Neandertal genome. Sequencing the Neandertal genome gets them all of the possible "Damn, that's cool!" points, but it's also got the potential to greatly increase our understanding of human evolution - particularly if it's the start of a project to sequence more ancient hominids. Sequencing the Neandertal genome is one of those things that would have been pure science fiction just a couple of years ago. If they manage to pull this off, it will be an absolutely…

Yet another "new" species concept

Another group (in this case, pair) of scientists have come up with a species concept. In this case, it's published in the Journal of Mammalogy [304kb PDF], and it turns on species being protected gene pools. It's not new. It's not even a repeat of prior concepts. It's a collation of several species concepts, given a single name - the "Genetic Species Concept". And the authors know this: unlike many such papers they give citations as far back as the teens and 20s. The concept they give relies on the recent explosion of techniques for sequencing DNA, however, and that is new. New technology,…

Species description: Creationists

I was bemoaning to Paul Griffiths and Sahotra Sarkar, admittedly over a beer, that unlike them (they are both birdwatchers), I lacked a special organism I could be expert about. This is a grievous fault in a philosopher of biology, so we wondered what I could choose as my "target organisms". Sahotra suggested I name and describe creationists (well, actually he suggested he would, but I'm stealing this from him) as a species. It's important to do this, so that when we describe the behavior of these creatures (pun intended) in the wild, we know exactly what we are discussing. One wouldn't want…

The outfielder problem: The psychology behind catching fly balls

It's football season in America: The NFL playoffs are about to start, and tonight, the elected / computer-ranked top college team will be determined. What better time than now to think about ... baseball! Baseball players, unlike most football players, must solve one of the most complicated perceptual puzzles in sports: how to predict the path of a moving target obeying the laws of physics, and move to intercept it. The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a…

Physicists undertake stamp-collecting

Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics. So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories. Why this is more than a "gotcha!" is that since the late nineteenth century, philosophers of science have…

Is Energy Independence Feasible?

Several bloggers and columnists have been expressing skepticism as to the concept of energy independence, and I think they make some good arguments. John Fialka in the WSJ: The allure of energy independence is easy to see. It reinforces the belief that Americans can control their own economic destiny and appeals to a "deep-seated cultural feeling that we are Fortress America and we will not be vulnerable to unstable regimes," says David Jhirad, a former Clinton administration energy official who is vice president at World Resources Institute, an environmental-research group. In fact, experts…

Laws, theories and models

A 6th grade maths and science teacher emailed me about whether theories could become laws. Below the fold is his request and my reply. The short answer is that when laws grow up, they become theories, not the other way around. Cameron Peters wrote: Dr. Wilkins, I was hoping you might be able to provide some insight on a question that is circulating amongst the NSTA email list serve concerning laws and theories. Specifically, there is some disagreement ( I would say confusion) of the difference between the two and, in particular, why a theory cannot become a law. Also, the question has arisen…

Another goldang meme

This one started at Nature Networks, where I am not a blogger, but as Larry and Bora have answered it, among others, I figured I'd have a go too... 1. What is your blog about? Basically the philosophical implications of science, although that extends into the distance a bit when I get angry about antiscience or political moves that either interfere with science or rely on bad science. 2. What will you never write about? There's not much I won't write about. I'm a philosopher, so a mere lack of knowledge hardly fazes me. I can express complex views on any topic even if, or rather…

Human GPS: Some of us are better equipped than others (with movies!)

This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007 How well do you think you can navigate through these woods? How about when your field of view is significantly reduced? When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of…

How to type fast: Learn a musical instrument and never, EVER look at the keyboard (Casual Fridays)

I'm a fast typist, but Greta types much faster than me. I've taken a few years of piano lessons, but Greta could read music before she could read, and she still plays oboe and English horn with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. Could her 30+ years of musical training be the reason she's a faster typist? This week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my observations about my personal typing quirks, but it quickly morphed into a new justification for music lessons. Commenter (and perception of music blogger) Scott Spiegelberg felt his musical training might have had something to do…

Multiple object tracking: How pilots can fly, and how we can possibly play Asteroids

Last year, my dad got his pilot's license. He took me up with him a couple months later, and while the view was spectacular, the most surprising aspect of flying is how much of a pilot's time is spent avoiding other aircraft. You might think there's plenty of room up there, and you'd be right, but it also means you have to scan a vast space to locate other planes. Once you spot one, you need to keep track of it to make sure you're not on a collision course. Sometimes, you'll need to track four or more other planes. Is there a limit to how many objects we can track? And how, exactly, do we…

Do women perceive color differently from men?

[article originally posted September 27, 2005] All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it. In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "…

Kerry Emanuel, Star of AMS 2007

It's really amazing how many awards are being showered on MIT hurricane theorist Kerry Emanuel (image credit Donna Coveney, MIT News Office) at this year's American Meteorological Society meeting. Emanuel assuredly deserves it in a scientific sense, but I can't help but think that the timing of this is also significant, as I will explain after listing the awards. First and most prominently, Emanuel has won the Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, which is the AMS's highest award given to an atmospheric scientist. The prize is officially awarded on Wednesday, but I'm told by AMS press folks…

Off to Brooklyn

I'm leaving Westchester this morning and heading down south to stay with my brother, his wife, and their we-think Tibetan terrier in Crown Heights. On Thursday I'm heading into the city for I-can't-say-what-yet, but suffice it to say that I will be posting some news on this blog relating to that soon. Meanwhile, all of you who haven't already, meet my brother Davy, via this article that mentioned him in the New York Times: HEADLINE: Picking a Guitarist, Fluent in Monk and More BYLINE: By NATE CHINEN DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 BODY: The organizers of the Thelonious Monk International…

My Darwin Day Remarks

I didn't end up giving my special comments about Charles Darwin at my talk last night; a snap judgment led me to decide that I would be wiser to dive right into my speech given the unexpected format of the event. So instead, I've decided to publish here what I had planned to say at the beginning of my talk. Here goes: I'm no ace with numbers, so I may mess this up. But it's my understanding that, if he were still alive today, Charles Darwin would be 197 years old. It's hard not to play the game of imagining what he would think of us. I think it's safe to say that, though he might be dismayed…

More on videotaped confessions: Can court procedure mitigate abuse?

What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to result in an accurate assessment of whether that confession was voluntary or coerced. But the Lassiter team's study was still open to some key criticisms. First, the study participants were all college students -- certainly not a typical jury demographic. Second, jurors don't see videotaped confessions in isolation -- when a confession is…

Coerced confessions: Is videotaping part of the problem, or part of the solution?

College student Bradley Page dropped his girlfriend off in a park one evening, only to learn later that she had been murdered and buried in a shallow grave. Police investigating the death interviewed him about the incident, repeatedly asking him why he could have left her alone in that park. "It was the biggest mistake of my life," he responded in anguish. Eventually, the officers told him that witnesses had seen him near where the body was buried and that his fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. These statements astonished Page, who hadn't even remembered leaving his apartment.…

Music training helps people understand emotions in speech

Just listening to music, despite the hype associated with the "Mozart Effect," appears to have little influence on IQ or other abilities. It does seem to make us more aroused and put us in a better mood, which can improve performance on tests, but it doesn't actually make us any smarter. But what about actual long-term training in music? Clearly musical training can make us better able to perform and appreciate music, but can it also improve our performance in areas? With its mathematically based notation system, music has been shown to improve mathematical reasoning skills. But surely music…

Do women perceive color differently from men?

All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it. In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "Normal" color vision is possible because we have…

The psychology of "sour grapes": Even amnesics have cognitive dissonance

Last week I mentioned that Greta had been discussing a study with her class that was related to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. When most of her students hadn't heard the story, it provided the opportunity for a lengthy aside: our Casual Fridays study about which stories people had and hadn't heard. Greta didn't bring up the story in class to embarrass her students about their apparent lack of knowledge of children's stories; she mentioned it because it's probably the easiest way to understand an important psychological phenomenon called "behavior-induced attitude change." The fable…

We don't always need to be paying attention to perceive shapes

Take a look at these pictures. Each picture depicts four shapes -- irregular vertical columns spanning the height of the picture. It's easy to tell which letter is on a column and which is not, right? If our readers are typical, over 90 percent would agree that a is on a column and b is not. But why? The space defined by the irregular vertical lines is equal in both cases. The only difference between the two figures is which direction the "pointy" curves face and which direction the convex, "smooth" curves face. Yet nearly everyone agrees that areas defined by the convex curves (like those…

"Outing" admired gays and lesbians may decrease prejudice

"Outing" gays and lesbians has always been a controversial practice, especially when done without the outed person's consent. But even when an individual outs him or herself, some people argue that outing is inappropriate because of the negative stereotypes that are evoked. But there's a subtler sort of outing as well: even if a person is publicly out, not everyone is immediately aware of it. While most Americans know that Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian, fewer people might be aware that Alice Walker is too. While they might know Freddy Mercury was gay, they might not know about Cole Porter. It…

Neurobiology of Addiction to Alcohol

Why is it that recovering persons with alcoholism should not drink near-beer (beer with little or no alcohol)?   ...Hank had been dry for several weeks thanks to a radical withdrawal program, but a simple walk past Pete's Tavern on any given night almost erased his will to abstain. During the daytime he did not feel a craving for alcohol, but when he passed the bar in the evening--when he saw the warm light through the windows and heard the glasses clinking--he would be sorely tempted to run inside for a beer. Addiction researchers call this phenomenon "conditioned desire." If a person had…

Arch Gen Psychiatry: Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment

What can you say?   Arch Gen Psychiatry is one of those non-open-access journals that publishes one free-access article in each issue.  Usually the free article is not particularly interesting; they do not seem to make use of the open-access articles routinely to make material of general public interest available to all.  This is an exception. At first, I was almost offended that this article was published.  Why bother to even pose the question?  The question, in this case, being whether there is any scientific basis for distinguishing between torture and other bad things. href="http://…

The neurogenetics of traumatic memories

It is well known that traumatic memories, or those with other emotional significance, are more persistent than trivial or mundane ones. The death of a loved one, for example, is far more readily recalled than an uneventful car journey to work. Evolutionarily, enhanced memory of a highly emotional event - say, a situation when one's life is in danger - is an advantage, because that information will be potentially life-saving if that situation is encountered again. But persistent memories of such events can have adverse effects, as they can lead to conditions such as post-traumatic stress…

Alpha male pheromones stimulate neurogenesis in the female brain

Females have a natural preference for mating with dominant males, because this confers a genetic advantage upon the offspring produced. When selecting a mate, animals rely on chemical cues called pheromones, which relay information about the social status and genetic health of a potential mate. Reproductive success therefore depends upon the encoding and recall of olfactory memories; the neural circuitry in which these memories are formed consists of the olfactory bulb and the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. But although both these sites are principle regions for neurogenesis (formation…

CT scans suggest that the "heretical" pharaoh was Tutankhamun's father

Most people recognize Tutankhamun as the boy-king of ancient Egypt. He is the most well-known pharaoh because his tomb was discovered apparently intact* and, more importantly, because it contained the magnificent gold mask that has become an icon of Egypt. Tutankhamun was otherwise unremarkable, as was his mother Nefertiti, who is renowned only for her beauty. Of far greater interest, and importance, than both Tutankhamun and Nefertiti was the pharaoh who some believe was Tutankhamun's father: Akhenaten, the so-called "heretical" pharaoh. Akhenaten was an eighteenth dynasty pharaoh…

Tone deafness linked to spatial processing deficits

Tone deafness (or amusia) is an impairment in the ability to discriminate changes in the pitch of a melody. The condition, which was first described in 1878, affects about 4% of the population. It arises in early childhood and continues throughout adulthood. Neuroimaging studies show that amusia is not associated with abnormal neural activity in the auditory cortex (the region of the temporal lobe involved in processing auditory information). It is also now known that the condition is specific to musical tones; tone deaf individuals (hereafter referred to as amusics) are able to perceive the…

God is more than a flying brain

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam From Paluzzi et al., Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007 For a few years, Nature Reviews Neuroscience stuck to a humorous theme in its cover art: everyday objects that mimic brains. A dandelion, spilled wine, a rock, a cave painting: if you know what features to look for, a surprising number of things resemble brains. We are a species that sees faces on the Martian surface and the Moon; we're very good at pattern recognition, and it's probably evolutionarily better for our brains to err on the side of "recognizing" something that isn't there, than…

Science Vault: 60s Flashback, LSD as a Treatment for Autism

[This is part of a series I'm doing here on Retrospectacle called 'Science Vault.' Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.) I'll probably try to do it once a week (and if you have suggestions, please do email me with them.)] Its been a few weeks since anything truly old and shocking as come across my plate as fodder for my 'Science Vault' series, but when I saw this paper, I knew I had to blog it.…

The Diamond Mess

I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan: With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…

Are biology graduate students the unhappiest?

The myriad miseries of graduate school are reserved to no one discipline, but there may be something to the contention that biology graduate programs are particularly bad. Here's what Mike the Mad Biologist says, in response to Science Professor, and I think he's quite right: The basic problem stems (so to speak) from too many biology Ph.D.s and not enough funding, leading to an immensely cutthroat environment--and one that is psychologically damaging to boot. . . .So why does this dysfunctional cultural paradigm exist? I think it has to do with two things: specialization and Ph.D. training…

Younger Scientists Feeling Funding Crunch

At the Society for Neuroscience meeting last month, there was a special symposium regarding the current NIH funding situation that was supposed to be given by the current director of the NIH, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni. Due to his plane being delayed, he was a no-show, although the talk was instead given by a few of the directors of NIH divisions. The gist of the talk was this: despite the NIH's budget being doubled a few years back, demand for grants has risen much faster and hence the paylines have decline dramatically. And we should all shut up and stop complaining, and ride out the low-funding…