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Sproul interviews Stein

It has sometimes been said that the leaders of creationist ministries and advocates of intelligent design are charismatic, charming people who know how to play to the crowd. I don't believe it. Creationists are often just as loud, judgmental, and terse as the stereotype of evolutionary scientists that is so often hauled out to admonish students of nature for not being skilled enough at communicating their ideas effectively. Recently the Calvinist pastor R.C. Sproul interviewed Ben Stein about Expelled, and the result is the antithesis of stimulating discourse; (Note: The video did not load…

Imaging a Superior Mnemonist

In neuroscience, we spend most of our time trying to understand the function of the "normal" brain -- whatever that means -- hence, we are most interested in the average. Under most occasions when scientists take an interest in the abnormal neurology, it is usually someone with who has something wrong with them -- has brain damage or a disorder of some kind. In these cases, we try and understand what brain functions they have difficulty performing as a way to understand what each part of the brain does (and hopefully to someday be able to help them). The point is that when neurologists…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay".

Session description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your own in the future. Useful for anyone hoping to someday write for print or online publications. The session was led by…

Google's New Privacy Policy Unveiled

From Google: We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. This stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service now. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012. The privacy policy is here. The terms of service statement is here. Here's a few tidbits from the documents, but you should go look…

Announcing your findings (but not really).

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues: Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature. Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments "Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo". In other words, you wrote the equivalent of "Well, we've…

Biopunks, biohackers, and the movement to own your own DNA

On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They'd do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year's worth of their online subscription service. A much smaller version of that same genome survey would have cost you a thousand dollars or more only a couple of years ago. For your money, you get data on single nucleotide polymorphisms at about a million spots in your chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA: mutations that can tell you about your ancestors' migrations across the globe, about your propensity for certain diseases, and about…

Digital Humanities Librarian, York University Libraries

A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca. Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian Discipline/Field: Digital Humanities Librarian Home Faculty: Libraries Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library Affiliation/Union: YUFA Position Start Date: August 1, 2011 Digital Humanities Librarian (Continuing Appointment) Scott Reference Department York University Libraries seeks a creative, motivated, innovative…

Fiddler On The Roof

As I'm sure you already know, I saw 'Fiddler on the Roof' this weekend at the new Durham Performing Arts Center. Actually, I did not see it once, I saw it twice (complicated story how that happened). Bride of Coturnix and I went alone on Friday night, and we brought the kids with us on Saturday afternoon. Which was good timing as today Topol had to cancel and Tevye is being played by his understudy. First, I have to admit I am very happy that DPAC (the Durham Performing Arts Center) is doing so well. As Breakfast with Pandora says, building an enormous new art and performance center at this…

Europasaurus holgeri: the Smallest Giant

Mother and child, deep in conversation. Models of newly described miniature sauropod, Europasaurus holgeri, adult with juvenile (Europasaurus; "reptile from Europe", after "Europe" and the Greek, sauros for "lizard"; holgeri after Holger Ludtke, who discovered the first bones). Image courtesy of Freilichtmuseum Munchehagen (Munchehagen Dinosaur Museum). At first, it was not especially remarkable when self-taught paleontologist, Holger Luedtke, found some small sauropod bones in a German quarry in 1998. However, scientists realized quite recently that the group of at least 10 diminutive…

Another Week of GW News, March 22, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition March 22, 2009 Top Stories: Earth Hour, Maldives, US Polls, Copenhagen Melting Arctic, Polar Bear, Arctic Geopolitics, Grumbine, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, World…

Around the Web: Elsevier vs. Academia.edu vs. Researchers

This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders. Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see. Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…

EE Times Group to Feature 'Innovation Generation' at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, Dedicated to Helping Young Innovators Connect With the World of Technology

Shout out to EE Times Group for getting the word out about the Festival. SOURCE EE Times Group To Offer Teardowns of Popular Consumer Electronics and the Opportunity to Serve as Technology Journalists SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- EE Times Group, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry's decision makers, today announced its plans for the USA Science & Engineering Festival, a two-week celebration of science in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, which begins on October 10, 2010. The festival will offer…

ATF obstructs safety investigators examining blast at West Fertilizer

When they toured the devastation caused by the April 17 explosion at West Fertilizer, Texas' U.S. Senators pledged that investigators would get to the bottom of what happened.  The disaster killed 15, injured hundreds of residents, and destroyed dozens of homes and buildings.  Senator Ted Cruz said: "We need to allow time for a careful investigation of what occurred. We all want to know what happened here." Senator John Cornyn said: "I'm confident there will be exactly the kind of review you're talking about on the local level, state level and the federal level.  We have authorities from all…

The Inter-Ghost Connection

The other day I was chatting with my brother (the smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes) on the phone, and he said something that may have some truth to it - I was predisposed, from early childhood, to understand and like the Web and the blogs. How? By reading and re-reading a million times the books about the adventures of The Three Investigators. Actually, only four of the early books in the series were tranlated into Serbo-Croatian, but I read them over and over. Later, here in the USA, I managed to find and read a few more in English. What does that have to do with blogging? Well, back…

EPA and the new TSCA – Stakeholders push agency in divergent directions  

As the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins work under the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century (LCSA) – the updated Toxic Substances Control Act – more striking divisions are emerging between what environmental health advocates and what chemical manufacturing and industry groups want from the law. These go beyond what was voiced during the public meetings the EPA held in early August to gather input on the rules it will use to prioritize chemicals for review and evaluate those chemicals’ risks. A look at the written comments now submitted to the agency underscores…

Satellites Observe "Traffic Jams" in Antarctic Ice Stream Caused by Tides

A fascinating press release I want to pass along.  At first I thought it was maybe good news in that rising sea levels would slow glacier drainage into the oceans but the affect is the opposite: For the first time, researchers have closely observed how the ocean's tides can speed up or slow down the speed of glacial movement in Antarctica. The new data will help modelers better predict how glaciers will respond to rising sea levels. Caltech's Brent Minchew (PhD '16) and Mark Simons, along with their collaborators and in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), exploited four COSMO-…

A Female Viking Warrior Interred at Birka

In archaeology, we distinguish osteological sex from artefact gender. Osteo-sex is with very few exceptions (odd chromosomal setups) the same thing as what your genitals are like. Artefact gender is the material correlate of a role you play according to the conventions of your time: e.g. whether you keep your genitals in Y-fronts or lacy knickers. We judge these two parameters from separate source materials. Your skeleton can't tell us anything about your gender, and your grave goods can't tell us anything about your osteo-sex. They are in principle able to vary independently. Nevertheless,…

Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the Great State of California

Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn't automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they've experienced at the hands of reporters. Chris Mooney, a reporter, thinks the ranting is all misplaced, and wants us to understand that reporters who write about science are the best trained journalists of all. I thought I'd join the fray. I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He's not feeling the genuine pain being…

Minds of Babes, Agony of Defeat, Ocean Modeling, Oh MY

This week's Science is particularly rich in stories, it seems. These stories require a paid subscription, alas -- but the write-ups here, in Science's weekly mailing, make pretty good reading on their own for those without a subscription. My favorites: From the Minds of Babes I became fascinated with baby cognition when I did a story on Liz Spelke's work with infants while also raising a couple. Spelke and others have focused on the wee'ns's innate or very early powers of cognition, including numerosity and early logic and perception. Here, though, is an interesting study that proposes…

Welcome to the Club.

Hello, and welcome to the ScienceBlogs Book Club. This is a ScienceBlogs special feature: an online, round-table discussion of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, by Carl Zimmer. Carl will be joined on the blog by three expert guests—Jessica Snyder Sachs, John Dennehy, and PZ Myers. Microcosm reveals how a common bacterium, most often associated in this country with outbreaks of foodborne illness, has been a scientific workhorse for decades, quietly starring in some of the last century's most spectacular achievements in biology: the discovery of genes, the understanding of…

Disease hunting with whole genome sequences: the good news, and the bad news

Lupski, J.R., et al. (2010). Whole-genome sequencing in a patient with Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy. New England Journal of Medicine advance online 10.1056/nejmoa0908094 Roach, J.C., & et al. (2010). Analysis of genetic inheritance in a family quartet by whole-genome sequencing. Science : 10.1126/science.1186802 Two new papers out today - the first ever studies to employ whole-genome sequencing for disease gene discovery - neatly illustrate both the promise and the challenges lying ahead both for clinical and personal genomics. The first paper presents the final - and successful…

Data, Copyrights, And Slogans, Part II

In the first post, I talked about how factual data aren't creative works, and how compiling them into collections doesn't make them creative - at least in the US. This aspect of data rips away the core "incentive" provided by copyright law to creators: the right to sue people who make copies. It also has a second aspect, which is that the international treaties that govern copyright don't apply. Whatever one may think of those treaties, they do a fair amount to normalize the laws worldwide - a copyright on a Britney Spears tune applies in much the same way in wildly different countries. For…

Watch what you say about my university!

The problem with having eyes and ears everywhere is that sometimes they deliver sensory data that make you want to rip them out of your head or stuff them with cotton, respectively. An eagle-eyed reader pointed me toward some eyebrow-raising comments on another blog, which would not be of much interest except they purport to transmit information obtained from one of the fine science departments at my university. So, to uphold the honor of my university, I have to wade into this. First, a representative sampling of the comments from the poster in question. He writes: I will leave this site…

Arithmetic on the Abacus: Part 1

If you want to talk about mechanical computing tools, you can't ignore the abacus. It's the oldest computing tool in the world; and it's still very commonly used. It's also about as different from the slide rule as you could imagine. The abacus is really fundamentally an addition device; the slide-rule is fundamentally a multiplier. And the slide rule is very complicated - all those different scales, in logarithmic relationships; the abacus is thoroughly simple - just beads hanging on wires. But don't let that fool you: the abacus is is a remarkable device, which is capable of a really huge…

From the Archives: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of A Short History of Nearly Everything, is from September 25, 2006. ======= I'm a bit of two minds on this book. Really, I almost consider it two different books that I could review separately. The first, a book I…

Two years after crane collapse killed four workers in Texas, an update

When one of the nation's largest mobile cranes--the Versa TC 36000---collapsed on July 18, 2008 at the LyondellBasell refinery in Pasadena, TX, four workers lost their lives: Marion "Scooter" Hubert Odom III, 41; John D. Henry, 33; Daniel "DJ" Lee Johnson; Rocky Dale Strength, 30. I wrote about this terrible crane disaster at the time, and used the incident to comment on OSHA's failure to issue a more protective rule for cranes and derricks. (A new rule has been in the making at OSHA since at least 2003, and it may be issued in a few months.*) At the time of the incident, their…

This Week's Spectrum of Tactics for Interfering with Government Science

For those whoâve been following the investigations into how the Bush Administration interfered with government climate science, the news about political interference into Interior Department science had a familiar ring. Chris Mooney sums it up well: âSubstitute for Philip Cooney an Interior Department official named Julie MacDonald, and it's basically the same story as it was with climate change: A political appointee, friendly with industry, overruling the determinations of agency scientists.â (Cooney was chief of staff on the White Houseâs Council on Environmental Quality â previously with…

Homeopathy and Nosodes

I've been meaning to write something about homeopathy at some point, because it's just so wretchedly stupid. But until now, I haven't sat down to actually do it, because it can seem rather like beating a dead horse: it's just so over-the-top goofy, and the goofiness of it is so well documented that I wasn't really sure what I had to add. Then I came across something that was new to me. As I've mentioned before, I'm a New Yorker. I live just north of the city in one of the Westchester suburbs. The anthrax attacks that happened a few years ago were a very big deal in my area - in particular,…

The Templeton conundrum

Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter. There's a common argument, for instance, that a lot of biomedical research is untrustworthy because it is done at the behest of Big Pharma dollars — it's more persuasive to people than it should be, because there is a grain of truth to it, and it would be easy to get sucked into the lucrative world of the industry shill. However, we also have a counterbalance: scientists don't go into research because they want to be rich, and we are also educated with a set of principles that puts the integrity of our…

The ACA is safe for now, but it’s still very much in danger

Yesterday, House Republicans failed to find enough votes to pass their Affordable Care Act replacement. It was a very good day for the millions of Americans projected to lose their coverage under the GOP plan. But let’s be clear: Obamacare is not safe. In a last-ditch effort to round up more votes, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed an amendment that would have, beginning in 2018, allowed states to determine the kinds of essential health benefits required in insurance plans purchased with tax credits. Under Obama’s health care law, insurance plans sold via the federal health care…

How Twitter Starts The Next Big War, Unless You Act To Stop Them

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232?ref_src=t… A pair of American B-1 Lancer bombers is flying north northeast along the border of North Korean air space. Accompanying the bombers is a squadron of F-15C Eagle fighter jets. The crews are aware of the fact that North Korea may have a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, as a response to a tweet by the Russian-installed president of the United States, in which he threatened to kill the psychopathic leader of North Korea. (I fear for a big drop in Tom Clancy novels, as they are no longer challenging or…

The Nightmare That Was Christmas (Death Never Dies)

I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday, even though it happened years ago, even before you were born. I screamed silently, pinned on my back by the massive weight of a cotton blanket, legs frozen, the dark lights flickering as the human-like form approached, its arms raised in front like The Mummy or Frankenstein's Monster, hands ready to grab, closing in. A strange net-like pattern covered the featureless humanoid shape, moving around on its surface like Saint Elmo's fire dancing on Jacob's Ladder, undulating, letting off light, disintegrating and reforming and making a crackling…

The politics edition, pre-election special

In the politics edition I made some amazingly prescient comments that now appear somewhat dated. Not quite definitively wrong4 - next week will seal that - but before the election itself it will be fun to write down what I think to see how it stacks up against what happens. Less than two months ago I said What will happen? Labour will do badly, obviously and I don't see anyone disagreeing with that, then. Now we have the Torygraph saying stuff like Labour continue to narrow the gap on the Conservatives, with the General Election's latest polls and odds showing that Theresa May may not…

Uncertainty by David Lindley

One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum theory, though, and ran across Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science in the library, which promised to contain the information I was after, so I checked it out. As you can guess from the title, the book deals with the early development of quantum…

The Pope On Evolution

It is not just his controversial stance that the Church should dial back its dickishness towards homosexuals that has brought attention to Pope Francis. He has also weighed in on evolution: Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it. The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the…

Coercive Logic

Here's a logic puzzle for you: Suppose I offer you a million dollars, in return for which you agree to answer a certain yes/no question. You can answer either truthfully or falsely as you desire. That's it. Should you accept that offer? Solution below the fold. Those of you reading this who enjoy logic puzzles are probably familiar with Raymond Smullyan. I was pretty young, eight or nine I think, when I first discovered his writing. Somehow I noticed his book What is the Name of This Book? sitting in a bookstore, and I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. The book opened with some…

Against the gun control that won't work

The shootings in Connecticut are a monstrous act of incomprehensible horror. For all the atrocities visited upon the world in the last hundred years, this is still without doubt among the most appallingly evil acts ever performed by a single person. And he is dead, and beyond the reach of human justice. Normally I'd wait for the story to wane and passions to cool before commenting on the nakedly political aspects of a catastrophe, but this story is so hideous, so devastating, that many people have been viscerally compelled to speak: How can the permissive laws preferred by people like you…

Tenure and Money

With all of the renewed fuss the Discovery Institute is trying to stir up over the Gonzalez tenure thing, this seems like a really good time to talk about the role of money in the tenure process. I'm not going to do this because the money issue is one that the Discovery folks are frantically trying to distract attention from (they are) or because Gonzalez's inability to land external funds means that he'd be a very weak candidate for tenure even if he wasn't involved in ID (it does). I'm going to look at the role of money in the process because it's hugely important, for more reasons than…

Problems with Simon Baron-Cohen's Thesis

I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his core argument: So what has all of this got to do with autism? We know that autism runs in families, and that if a child with autism is a twin, the chances of the other twin also having autism is much higher if the twins are identical. This tells us that genes are likely to be an important part of the explanation, and that one should look at the parents of children with autism for clues.…

The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2)

Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty of gratuitous neuroscience to top it all off. First, let's look at what will inevitably piss conservatives off. Lakoff writes that there are "thoroughgoing progressives" who "hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues," and that these progressives "are the bedrock of our democracy" (p. 46). Progressives, then, need to "reclaim"…

What McCain and Obama and the Moderators Forgot

I'm sure I am not the only one who was underwhelmed by the series of Presidential debates.  Here is what the candidates and the moderators forgot... 1) Regarding energy problems:  Government should act more swiftly to promote solar and wind installations.  Specifically, they need to do more to promote small, distributed installations.  Because of economy of scale, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power generation does not scale down very well.  Wind and especially solar power can be scaled down reasonably .  This is not merely a question of where the power will come from; it is a question of…

Connections.

Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I'm recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP: On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change. Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon…

Sustainability starts with sustainable habits.

Another Earth Day rolls around, and I still have major qualms about the typical American approach to it (which seems to boil down to "Consumer choices will save the world!"). Possibly, viewing ourselves and each other primarily as consumers explains how we have had such a dramatic effect on the environment in the first place. Still, while we try to muster the political will and get ourselves together to respond collectively to the challenges to the Earth we all share, it's undeniable that our individual choices do have impacts. Here in the U.S., some of those impacts can be pretty big. So…

Eek! Keep Those Scary Bra-Burners Away From My Sexy Feminine Self!

Subtitle: It's really cool when feminists can help me advance my personal interests, as long as nobody sees me talking to them, 'cause, you know, they're ugly. Over at Isis's place, Victoria writes that she does not wish to be sexually harassed at scientific conferences, no matter what she is wearing. She does not want to feel responsible for controlling men's poor behavior through her sartorial choices. Zuska is on board with that. Victoria also writes that she wants "to maintain the feeling of being a sexy, feminine woman without sacrificing the science". Zuska is less sure what…

Lumping Dinosaurs: Stygimoloch a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus?

Paleontologist Jack Horner has proposed that the pachycephalosaurs Dracorex (upper left) and Stygimoloch (upper right) are really growth stages in the species Pachycephalosaurus (lower center), as presented in the November 23rd, 2007 issue of Science Pachycephalosaurus was always introduced to me as the ancient equivalent of a Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis), always looking for some excuse to bang their heads together. As I grew older I didn't really buy the head-to-head butting hypothesis, especially since the heads of these dinosaurs were domed and did not provide a wide, flat space to…

Information Addiction

I finally got the internet setup in my new apartment - I won't bore you with my customer service complaints - and I've never been so delighted to waste time on the web. At first, my information vacation was lovely, charming, an experiment in vintage living. It was like traveling back in time to 1994 - I'd wake up, buy an actual newspaper, and leisurely sip my coffee. No blogs, no twitter, no ESPN.com. I'm not going to lie and pretend that, once freed from the yoke of constant email updates, I suddenly found myself reading Tolstoy for hours on end - instead, I mostly watched more mediocre…

Winning antivaccine hearts and minds

I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for a long time. The reasons are many, but they boil down to a handful. First of all, it interests me. It interests me as an example of pseudoscience and quackery, how it spreads, and how antiscience cranks attack science. More importantly, it's dangerous. The antivaccine movement is a threat to public health, which is why it's important to study its origins, the methods its members use to attack vaccines, the misinformation it spreads, and how it spreads that misinformation. As a result, I've been consistently vilified and attacked by…

Anthrax case: reasonable doubt on the science

I've been looking at the documents deposited online by the Department of Justice making their case against Dr.Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist they allege is the lone anthrax attack culprit. My perusal of their case leaves a mixed impression. If their portrayal of his mental condition is at all accurate - and it is difficult to judge on the basis of the highly selected quotes from emails and hearsay evidence of unnamed sources -- then Ivins certainly is a plausible suspect. Selected leaking of information, not all of it verified could also make him a convenient and plausible patsy. I have…

Numbers arent enough

Okay, so there are like 20,000 polar bears left. 4,000 tigers. 1,600 Pandas. Meh, who cares, right? I mean, there are still some. 1,600 plus the ones in zoos. 'Endangered' animals are fine! Yeah... No. Minor problem with decreasing population numbers: Its more than just the numbers. Its genetic diversity within those numbers. If those 1,600 pandas are all we have left, and those 1,600 pandas are genetically similar, they are in big trouble. Easy example? Tasmanian Devils. While there are still 20,000-50,000 Tasmanian Devils left, they are being slaughtered by an infectious tumor. An…

Brain-muscle interface helps paralysed monkeys move

Researchers from the University of Washington have demonstrated that paralysed monkeys can move using a simple neuroprosthesis consisting of an external electrical circuit which connects individual neurons in the motor cortex to muscles in the arm. Similar prostheses have been used to move external devices such as a robotic arm, but they required sophisticated algorithms to decode the brain activity associated with generating movements. The researchers adopted the alternative strategy of creating an artificial connection by which the activity of single cells could directly stimulate the…