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How real is our memory?

Humans readily establish false memories. If you give adults a study list of words like hot, snow, warm, winter, ice, wet, chilly, weather, heat, freeze, shiver, frost, and then test them later, they will "remember" related words like cold that weren't actually on the list. They will be as sure that cold was on the original list as they are about all the words that really were there. Small children, age 5 to 7, by contrast, are very unlikely to make this type of error. They can memorize the words on the list, but they won't generate false memories. By the time they are 11 or so, kids begin to…

The influence of media violence on youth: Part 2

Yesterday we reported on the general reactions to studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll get into the specifics of those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on Youth." The history of research on media violence and its relationship to aggression (behavior intended to cause harm to others) is now more than 50 years long. The earliest studies focused on television and film, but now extensive research has also been conducted on music/music videos, news media, and video games. Nearly all the data from hundreds of studies…

The STS: A brain region for perceiving the intentions of others

Psychologists and neuroscientists can be said to be working on the same problem, but they tend to approach it from opposite directions. Psychologists generally look at behavior and then try to understand the mental processes that might cause that behavior. Neuroscientists look at brain activity and see how it corresponds to behavior. Then people who are considerably smarter than me try to synthesize the work of both psychologists and neuroscientists in order to come to a complete understanding of how we think and behave. One piece to add this puzzle is a recent study by Kevin Pelphrey, James…

LHC, RHIC at the "Ridge" of Nuclear Matter

This guest post is written by BNL theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan. After earning his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 1992, Venugopalan worked at several universities in the United States and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, before joining Brookhaven in 1998. He is the leader of the nuclear theory group in Brookhaven's physics department. Raju Venogopalan Last week, members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced that they've found a phenomenon that's similar to one observed by physicists at Brookhaven…

Can sexual selection account for giraffe necks?

A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo. Why do giraffes have long necks? We know that modern giraffes must have evolved gradually, but figuring out what selection pressures influenced giraffe evolution is another story altogether. One of the most popular recent explanations is that giraffes have long necks as a result of sexual selection. The "necks for sex" hypothesis is primarily inspired by the contests between male giraffes. In these duels the males stand side by side and whack each other with their necks and ossicones ("horns"). This can be seen in the video below; What does this…

How being a dick probably saved my life

I see that the don't-be-a-dick tone debate is still going on — I've been totally unimpressed with the arguments from the side of nice, not because I disagree with the idea that positive approaches work, but because they ignore the complexity of the problem and don't offer any solutions but only complaints (what are they going to do, break the fingers and gag anyone they judge as 'harming the cause'?) I side with Richard Dawkins' comment on the issue. We don't need to be trivially abusive, but on subjects we care about deeply, we should express ourselves with passion. You know I've had this…

Book Review: Unscientific America

I will try to keep this short, especially since the combined length of all the reviews of Unscientific America probably outstrips the length of the book itself.* I did not particularly like Unscientific America. Running a scant 132 pages, it is a scattershot survey of how scientists (according to authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum) have not pulled their weight in communicating important issues to the public. It is not an in-depth study of America's science culture wars but rather an extended op-ed whose content will be familiar to anyone who followed the various "framing" skirmishes…

Rolling Stone Knows How to Spin

Okay, I like Rolling Stone. As a drummer, it's kind of protocol. And James Lovelock is an interesting character - the very kind of fellow that I'd probably keep in good company were we of the same generation. I like those intelligent out-of-the-box types with big ideas. That said, I'm seriously not impressed with either in the November issue. Just check out the tagline of the Lovelock article: "One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible -- and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century." Sends a shiver down your…

Framing Beyond Atheism

Nisbet and PZ are arguing as usual over science communication and atheism... a prescription for a popular post on science blogs we all know well. Let's expand the discussion of framing and science to issues that actually matter* like climate change. On Friday, I posted a clip where Bill Nye had trouble defending global warming in a debate staged by Larry King for the purpose of entertainment. What follows is reposted from my comment (long buried by now), because it's relevant in the great communication discourse. I posted the clip because it highlights the importance of communication and…

Introducing Tropical Storm Barbara; New Research on Hurricane-Climate Feedbacks

Well, we've got a second named storm in the Northeast Pacific. As NHC forecaster James Franklin notes, this is an unusual (although not un-heard of) occurrence: THE DEPRESSION IS UPGRADED TO A 35 KT TROPICAL STORM. ONLY TWICE BEFORE...IN 1956 AND 1984...HAVE THERE BEEN TWO EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC NAMED STORMS IN MAY. Barbara is apparently steadily intensifying--the Wisconsin folks estimate the intensity at 45 knots by now. Because this storm could become a hurricane before striking Mexico, it is going to be watched very closely. Meanwhile, what is the point of a storm like Barbara, or any…

Gestures and learning: Using gestures -- not just seeing them -- can help kids learn

I was a member of my high school debate team, and I did fairly well, but my partner, Glenn, always got better marks from the judges. Most often, they praised his hand gestures, which were proclaimed to be "expressive" and "informative." One year our topic was arms control, and our opponents were arguing that "NATO standardization" could help reduce U.S. arms sales. Glenn didn't understand their argument, so during our precious three minutes of preparation time, I explained it to him. Then he stood up and delivered his rebuttal, using the most graceful hand gestures imaginable. The judges…

Emotion, risk, evolution, and gender

You're given $15. Which of these bets would you gamble your $15 on? An 80 percent chance of winning $18.75 A 40 percent chance of winning $37.50 A 20 percent chance of winning $75 A 5 percent chance of $300 Or would you just keep the original $15? The answer, it turns out, depends on your emotional state -- and your gender. We've discussed before how emotion can affect risk-taking: Fearful people, for example, tend to be less willing to take risks, while angry people seem more willing to. But what if the same emotion led to different risk reactions in different people? It might actually…

Toddlers play with impossibly small toys as if they're the real thing

When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite the fact that there was no steering wheel and the "seat" wasn't nearly as comfortable, at least to our adult eyes: We figured this behavior was just one of Jimmy's unique quirks. It didn't really bother us, except for the knowledge that we could have saved 20 bucks on the "real" scooter if we'd only known he would end up preferring the garbage truck. In 2003,…

Operant conditioning at the NC Zoo

You might think the zoo is an odd place for psychology bloggers to meet up. But on Saturday not only did Greta and I get a chance to connect with some of our readers and fellow bloggers, we also received some fascinating insight into the psychology of zookeeping. Our group toured the North Carolina Zoo, led by Jayne Owen Parker, Ph.D., the Director of Conservation Education of the Zoo Society. As we strolled from exhibit to exhibit and listened to Jayne's comments, we were struck by how frequently psychology enters into the daily routine of managing a zoo. Through operant conditioning, the…

Does music help us learn language?

One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out where one word ends and the next one begins. Since fluent speakers don't generally pause between words, it can be a daunting task. We've discussed one of the ways people do it in this post -- they focus in on consonant sounds. Other researchers have found that we also focus on the statistical properties of language. Certain syllables are likely to follow each other within individual words, but unlikely to follow each other between words. Take the phrase "between words." In English, within a single word we're much more likely to…

Body position affects memory for events

This article was originally posted on March 27, 2007 When we see a familiar face, or even a photo of a favorite car or pet, we're often flooded with memories from our past. Sometimes just seeing a person or object that's similar to the ones in our memory will trigger recollections we never knew we had. Maybe you've had a memory triggered by a scent or the texture of an object. Sometimes emotions such as happiness or anger will spur vivid memories, too. A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That's right: just holding your body…

History Week: A baby's psychological development at age 6 months

Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology. Today we consider the work of Millicent Washburn Shinn, one of the first women admitted to the University of California, Berkeley (in 1874), and the first to earn a Ph.D. there. In 1890, her niece Ruth was born, and Shinn spent hours carefully observing the child's every behavior. This "large mass of data" became the basis for a book that was welcomed by the scholars of the day, The Biography of a Baby, which, while not the first of its kind, certainly was one of the most thorough…

Does "counting your blessings" really help?

How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant. While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a…

Music, my muse

I just got home from work about half an hour ago. It's been another long day, although it really started at about 10 am in a coffee shop even if it ended at 9 pm in my office. Anyway. I came home after an hour and a half of talking with a colleague about our respective experiences in our department. She gave me a lift home, and I confess I was pretty worn out by the whole day, including our conversation. But then an amazing thing happened, and I want to tell you about it. I made up my little dinner (leftover spaghetti with feta and artichokes, and sauteed brussels sprouts with pine nuts,…

Quantum Information Graduate Program at Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is adding a quantum information graduate program, one step closer to being able to get a Ph.D. purely in quantum information. Application details here. Description of the program below the fold. About the Program The University of Waterloo, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Computing, offers graduate students unique opportunities to learn about and engage in world-leading research in quantum information through a wide range of advanced research projects and advanced courses on the foundations, applications and implementations of quantum information…

Cognitive Enhancers in Academic Doping

A commentary today in Nature, by Sahakian and Morein-Zamir, poses the question: if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you? But I ask, why wouldn't you? Interest in potions and drugs which increase awareness and "brain power" has been around for thousands of years. Many natural compounds from ginseng to coffee to cocaine have been touted as a dubious panacea for a muddled mind. However in the pharmaceutical age, we are now in possession of agents which actually do enhance cognition through changes in neurotransmitter release. For…

Common Anesthetic Causes Changes in Mouse Brains

Neuroscience has a long and sordid history with anesthetic chemicals. Take curare (d-Tubocurarine) for example. Better known as a South American "dart poison," curare causes paralysis but not loss of consciousness. However, this chemical was used during the early 1900s as a surgical anesthetic for women and children until the 1940s when it was recognized as merely a paralytic. Its quite chilling to think of the numerous surgeries which were performed on completely conscious individuals who were paralyzed but unanestisized. Later procedures mixed muscle relaxants with an anesthetic, and…

It's not just Catholics

Is this like some bizarre religion-wide side-effect or something? Because Catholicism and Buddhism seem like such wildly different faiths, but here we go again, chronic incidents of child rape by priests…Buddhist priests. And like the Catholic side of the story, they've got some of these priests dead to rights, with DNA/paternity tests and admissions and all kinds of testimony, and once again, it is the crime of the religious hierarchy to both enable it and hide the culprits from justice. A Tribune review of sexual abuse cases involving several Theravada Buddhist temples found minimal…

Science policy is more than science

Yuval Levin has an editorial in today's WaPo that makes a very good point: Science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so. There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in…

Johnny! It's Rude to Correct the Founding Fathers!

During President Obama's Inauguration, the staffer said to me, "the President-elect looks nervous." I said, "Why should he be nervous? All he has to do now is get through the Oath without screwing it up!" Which, of course, he immediately did. It wasn't Obama's fault, though - Chief Justice John Roberts appears to have prompted the gaffe by speaking the word "faithfully" out of turn. In a NYT editorial, famous linguist Steven Pinker hypothesizes why. How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists…

It's like Sunday afternoon football, with computers

I'm off to a wedding this weekend, so no posts for a few days. But I wanted to give you a heads up that six computers will be competing in a Turing test on Sunday. The competitors, named Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal, must converse for five minutes and fool their human questioners into thinking that they're also human - or at least make the questioners uncertain whether they're human or machine. This imitation game, devised by Alan Turing in 1950, is rightly or wrongly considered the definitive test for successful artificial intelligence: If any…

Paul Knoepfler has a blog

Hey, this is good news: Nature included a short opinion piece from a stem cell biologist on his experiences blogging, writing the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog — I'll have to start following it. He has some good general advice for scientists starting to blog, although I have some reservations about the first bit. Here are some tips for beginners. Start slowly; wait a day after writing and reread your draft before posting. Try to avoid discussing your own institution, and critique papers or theories in the field in a constructive manner. It is important that you include your own opinions, but…

They're like lice — you can't just shake them off

It takes real effort to purge yourself of parasites, and Australia's got 'em: rabbits, cane toads, and now…chaplains. In a nation that prides itself on its secular government, Australia has this bizarre and inappropriate relic, the National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP), which somehow manages to suck large sums of money out of the government to pay to infest the schools with useless little leeches whose sole purpose seems to be the indoctrination of nonsense into the brains of children. Being subject to individual State and Territory education policies, since its introduction, the NSCP…

Bill Gates on American Competitiveness

Bill Gates, writing in the Washington Post, makes two concrete appeals to help maintain American competitiveness: Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies. Education has always been the gateway to a better life in this country, and our primary and secondary schools were long considered the world's best. But on an international math test in…

Hello, Science Blogs!

Hello, Science Blogs readers. Many of you may be new to Mixing Memory, so I thought that for the first post at the new site, I would introduce myself a little. By a little, I mean a very little, because in case you hadn't noticed, I blog anonymously. Maybe that will change someday, but for the moment, I feel that I have good reasons for doing so. Here's what I can tell you: I'm a cognitive psychologist who studies a wide range of higher-order stuff (i.e., I don't do vision). For the cognitive science initiates among you, I work mostly within the symbolic tradition. That doesn't mean that I…

ScienceDebate08: Obama Takes Up the Challenge!

Sheril reports that Barack Obama has taken up the challenge and answered the 14 questions posed by the ScienceDebate08 coalition. These 14 issues run the gamut from space to health to security and education. In particular to myself and you the reader, there was one very important question about the ocean's health: 9. Ocean Health. Scientists estimate that some 75 percent of the world's fisheries are in serious decline and habitats around the world like coral reefs are seriously threatened. What steps, if any, should the United States take during your presidency to protect ocean health? "…

The South

In my first month of blogging, way back in September of 2004, I posted a picture that my father (I think) had taken when he, my son, and I went to hang out in Centennial Park in Nashville while I was visiting home that summer. Here's the picture: I remarked in the post that Nashville is just about the last place you'd expect to find a life-sized replica of the Parthenon, complete with a giant statue of Athena inside (to learn a little about why it's there, go here). I said this as someone who was born in Nashville, grew up 20 minutes away, and has been to Centennial Park many, many times…

The Basics of Statistics V: A Quick Example

So the last post was pretty dense, and I haven't used an example since the first post, so I thought I'd throw one out there that you can play with. In what follows, I pretend to use the equations, but I'm actually doing all this in Excel. If you've got Excel, here are some helpful functions. AVERAGE gives you the mean of a range of numbers, VAR gives you the variance, and STDEV gives you the standard deviation. Note that VAR and STDEV give you the variance and standard deviation for a sample (i.e., using n-1 instead of n). If you want population variance and standard deviation, use VARP and…

Are Conservatives Less Creative?

The belief that creativity and political conservatism are negatively correlated is widespread not only among the general public (except, maybe, among some conservatives), but among researchers in a variety of fields. And there are some indirect empirical justifications for this belief. Political conservatism is associated with less openness to experience (as measured with Big Five inventories), and highly positively correlated with fear of uncertainty. Both relationships imply less creativity. However, only with a paper by Stephen Dollinger(1) in press in the journal Personality and…

Majority Opinion: Churches Should Keep Out Of Politics

Within the past year, public sentiment has shifted.  It has been changing slowly, but steadily.  Sometime in the past year, it reached the crossover point.  Now there is a simple majority who think that religious groups should stay out of politics. From the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press class="l">: alt="" title="click" src="http://people-press.org/reports/images/445-1.gif" border="0" height="288" width="285"> href="http://people-press.org/report/445/religion-politics">More Americans Question Religion's Role In Politics Some Social Conservative…

75th Anniversary of the CCC...Something To Think About

This month href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-18-ccc75th_N.htm">marks the 75th anniversary of the href="http://www.cccalumni.org/history1.html">Civilian Conservation Corps.  This item caught my attention, because I had an uncle who was part of the CCC.  He did forestry work in the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_of_Michigan">U.P.  This helped my father's family eat during the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression">Great Depression. Currently the world economy is teetering on the brink of a recession.  The triple threat of…

FDA Proposes Looser Marketing Rule

The US Food and Drug Administration is a weird chimera: it contains some elements of rule-bound regulatory hell, and some elements of laissez-faire libertarianism.  On the libertarian side, they allow physicians to prescribe any drug that they have approved, even if was not approved for the use for which it is being prescribed.  On the rule-bound side, they have incredibly complex rules for how the drugs can be marketed.   One such rule is that drug companies are not allowed to market a drug for any purpose for which the drug has not been approved explicitly.  That particular rule has been…

The Nuclear Pore Complex - What else is in it?

I've written much about the Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC). This large molecular gate controls the flow of molecules into and out of the nucleus. Recent work (see this post and this new paper) describes how filaments containing "FG repeats" form a matrix in the center of the pore that blocks the movement of large but not small particles. To cross the pore (the black blobs in the pic below), big macromolecules must associate with factors (or nuclear transport receptors, NTRs - red blobs) that can melt and become part of the matrix (the squiggly spaghetti strings). From a top-down view, the NPC…

What I taught today: gene regulation and signaling

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Today was more context and a bit of a caution for my developmental biology course. I warned them that we'd be primarily talking about animals and plants (and mostly animals at that), but that actually, all of the general processes we're describing are found in bacteria and other single…

Melissa Moore on Introns

Yesterday Melissa Moore gave a talk at the School of Public Health here at Harvard Med School. She had lots of data - on nonsense mediated decay (how cells degrade mRNA transcripts with premature stop codons that arise through various mechanisms) and on nonfunctional ribosome decay (NRD). Here is some neat info from her intro on introns & NMD: - Since 90% of the gene coding region is introns, exons are for all practical purposes modular. When DNA is duplication or swaped within a gene or between genes, chances are that genes will be cut and ligated at intronic sequences. (Thus the exons…

Eating Lipids to Fuse Mitos

A couple of weeks back I wrote about dynamins and mitochondrial fusion. Well the latest piece of the puzzle came in ... I just saw a paper in the latest issue of Nature Cell Biology on this very topic. Apparently a mitochondrial version of phospholipase D (MitoPLD) may act downstream of the dynamin like molecule Mfn1 to promote fusion of the outer mitochondrial membrane. Now remember mitos have two membranes. If two mitos want to get together they must fuse the outer membranes. This requires a dynamin protein (Mfn1 in mammals). After this fusion the two inner mitochondrial membranes can come…

How Doa10p gets into the nucleus, or another freaky experiment done in yeast

I heard about this paper (Deng and Hochstrasser. Nature (06) 443:827-831) and took a look at it over the weekend. Wow! There are lots of goodies in there. And it showcases how manipulable yeast are. (As you can tell I am really jealous of researchers who use yeast as a model system.) The premise of the paper is not bad either. There had been some rumours that proteins could get degraded within the nucleus through the ubiquitin/proteosome pathway. Now to some this idea was heretical but this new paper gives some mechanistic info into how this process occurs. Doa10p is an E3 ligase, that is…

Permanent budget crisis.

There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they're essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students -- especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs. Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped at the 23 campuses in the CSU system. Practically, this means 10,000 or so qualified applicants will be turned away. In…

The Vegetarian's Hundred.

Sean assesses his familiarity with the Omnivore's Hundred. I thought about playing along, but it's pretty meaty, while my diet is not so much. However, Sean was kind enough to post a link to the Vegetarian's Hundred, a list of one hundred vegetarian food items everyone should try at least once. (Unless you're vegan, at which point maybe you need to propose your own hundred.) If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog. I'm going to add the…

The system as it currently exists.

Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement: Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to "take it down". We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog. In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who…

Friday Sprog Blogging: what we found by the bay.

Last weekend, while I was still in the throes of grading, my better half decided to take the Free-Ride offspring on a hike (or, in the Free-Ride vernacular, a "death march"). The younger Free-Ride offspring reports back on some of the salient details. Dr. Free-Ride: Can you tell me what you saw on your death march by the bay? Younger offspring: We saw lots of cool things. One of them was a snake skin. And we saw lots of pickleweed, which we tried. Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, you tasted it? Younger offspring: Uh huh. I only like the salty bits. Dr. Free-Ride: What kind of critters did you see…

At least the walruses are safe, and any day now @Nifty will save the Gulf

British Petroleum isn't so awful after all — it turns out that they have an almost 600 page long emergency response plan to deal with blowouts on their offshore oil wells. All the answers are in there, and I'm sure that they'll soon be implemented. You can read those plans yourself and feel the warm glow of confidence that all is in good hands. Lists "Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters [and] Walruses" as "Sensitive Biological Resources" in the Gulf, suggesting that portions were cribbed from previous Arctic exploratory planning; Gives a web site for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to…

A message about science worth communicating to the public.

In light of all the recent discussion about the "framing" of the Expelled! expulsion, it occurs to me that maybe part of the reason that the argument seems so unproductive is that the parties involved haven't really agreed on what, exactly, they're trying to communicate to the public at large. Here's my suggestion for a message worth communicating clearly: science isn't politics. The community of scientists is not like an organized political party. There isn't a Ministry of Information. When things are working as scientists think they should, all the voices are heard -- and each person…

Look out, children! There's an ethicist!

This is not breaking news (unless your news cycle is more geological), but it strikes me as relevant on the day that I deliver my penultimate lecture in the newly-created ethics module in the Introduction to Engineering class at my university: Can you trust an ethicist to behave ethically? Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust asked other philosophers, who presumably have a good bit of data on the everyday conduct of professional ethicists. The majority seemed to think that ethicists were no more ethical in their behavior than are other sorts of philosophers. Brian Leiter suggested that a finer…

Blogger Challenge 2007: how we did

The results of our drive to raise funds for teachers and students with DonorsChoose are, in a word, astounding. Ginny reported the morning-after stats: ScienceBlogs readers donated $54,335 for 155 classroom projects. With $15,000 in matching funds from Seed Media Group, that means our readers put $69,335 toward U.S. science literacy. That $15,000 from Seed Media Group fully funded 33 more projects and gave a chunk of money to a 34th. But my most recent calculation shows that a total of $72,920 went to the 20 challenges mounted by ScienceBlogs bloggers -- which means that an additional $3,…