Links
neurophilosophy | December 30, 2007I've just found this Encyclopaedia of Computational Neuroscience on Scholarpedia. Each entry is written by an expert in the field, and is very comprehensive.
The project seems to have been started only recently, as many of the entries I've looked at are still empty. Although still incomplete, this is already a fantastic resource that's well worth looking at.
Here are just a few of the finished entries: grid cells by Edvard Moser, mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti, synaesthesia by V.S. Ramachandran, and the neural correlates of consciousness by Cristof Koch.
Others who have accepted the…
neurophilosophy | December 10, 2007The New York Times has just published its seventh annual list of the year's best ideas, which includes:
Alzheimer's telephone screening: a "telephone quiz" consisting of 50 questions, designed to measure the "cognitive vital signs", such as short-term memory loss, which can identify Alzheimer's Disease long before any visible symptoms;
The God Effect: the finding, made by Ara Norenzayan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, that thoughts of God make people act more altruistically; and,
Neurorealism: coined by bioethicist Eric Racine,…
neurophilosophy | November 30, 2007
Emotional Systems is the inaugural exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Centre La Strozzina at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. It begins tomorrow and runs until 3rd February, 2008.
The...installation...[includes] an exhibition, a publication and a programme of lectures designed to investigate the topic of emotions, proposing a reinterpretation of the correlation between the contemporary artist, the work of art and the user, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions.
The artists in the…
neurophilosophy | November 9, 2007Biological anthropologist Greg Laden and theoretical physicist Dave Bacon have just joined ScienceBlogs. Both of these blogs are fantastic, so go and check them out.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, it's safe to say that you're interested in neurobiology, so you'll probably want to read Greg's summary of the web focus on glial cells in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience.
neurophilosophy | November 8, 2007Today's New York Times contains a very good opinion piece about the benefits of physical exercise for maintaing and improving brain health, by Sandra Aamodt, editor-in-chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wong, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton.
There is good evidence that exercise can slow age-related cognitive decline. Specifically, it is known to improve the executive brain functions which control other cognitive processes, and which begin to decline in one's 70s. Executive function is better in elderly people who have remained athletic throughout…
neurophilosophy | November 1, 2007The 2007 Weblog Award finalists have just been announced, but for some reason, the list does not include links to the blogs. So here are the finalists in the Best Science Blogs category:
SciGuy
Junk Science
In the Pipeline
Journey by Starlight
Pharyngula
Bad Astronomy
Invasive Species Weblog
ScienceBase
Climate Audit
Bootstrap Analysis
neurophilosophy | October 28, 2007The New York Times Magazine contains a long article about the close ties between evangelical Christians and the Republican party.
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007Physicist Chad Orzel, who knows a lot more than I do about the mysterious world of quantum mechanics, criticizes the new model of quantum consciousness proposed by Efstratios Manousakis, which I described recently.
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2007And is James Watson in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease?
In this review of Craig Venter's autobiography A Life Decoded and James Watson's Avoid Boring People, Financial Times science editor Clive Cookson says that Venter's Nobel Prize prize is overdue, perhaps because of "the outdated bad-boy image he retains among some sections of the scientific establishment".
Venter and Watson were the first two people to have their personal genomes sequenced. Venter's genome was published last month in the open access journal PLoS Biology, and Watson's genome is available at the CSHL website.
In…
laelaps | October 15, 2007Welcome to the 10th edition of Oekologie, the best of what the blogosphere has to offer when it comes to the eponymous area of natural science. This edition is particularly special, however, in that it falls on Blog Action Day, so be sure to visit the event's main page to peruse the best of today's environmentally-focused posts.
Agriculture
Diversity is not only important to natural ecosystems, but it can be invaluable to agriculture as well. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog fills us in on why it's better to encourage variety when you're growing rice.
If you're interested in organic growing…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online.
It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism.
neurophilosophy | October 6, 2007
Left lateral view of the whole horse skeleton, from the Handbook of Animal Anatomy for Artists (1898, 1911-25), by Wilhelm Ellenberger, Hermann Baum and Hermann Dittrich. From the Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections (via BibliOdyssey).
I've just submitted this fantastic post about the evolution of the horse, by Brian Switek, for inclusion in Open Lab 2007, the anthology of the best science blogging of the year that will be published in January.
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007A list for the top 100 medical blogs of September is at the Dutch site Medblog.nl. The ranks are determined with an algorithm that uses 8 paramenters, including number of posts and comments, Google pagerank, Technorati rank and number of incoming links.
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2007For a limited time, the Nature Publishing Group is providing free access to recent research papers and reviews about neuroplasticity from 7 of its journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism and Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews (the latest addition to the NPG portfolio).
Below is a selection from the 16 articles that are available:
McClung, C. A. & Nestler, E. J. (2007). Neuroplasticity mediated by altered gene expression. Neuropsychopharm. Rev. doi: 10.1038/sj.npp.1301544. [Abstract/Full text/PDF]
Citri, A. &…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
The word eugenics immediately makes one think of the racial hygiene programs of the Nazis and the experiments performed by Joseph Mengele on those held in the concentration camps, but far fewer are aware that there was a large and powerful eugenics movement in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.
For example, by 1941, no less than 33 states endorsed policies for sterilizing "defective"members of society, such as criminals, the "feeble-minded", epileptics, the mentally ill and, of course, blacks (and non-whites in general).
Much of the eugenics research in the U.S. was…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
Below are a few quotes from this interview with theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, whose new book, A Many-colored Glass, is about to be published.
On science, religion and Richard Dawkins:
I think it's only a small fraction of people who think that [science and religion are at odds]. Perhaps they have louder voices than the others.
I think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way he's going about it. I don't deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007According to Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the answer is yes.
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007Ed Boyden, leader of the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group at MIT, has just started a blog.
I wrote about some of Boyden's work earlier this year. His is one of several groups that have used a light-sensitive bacterial protein called channelrhodopsin to develop an "optical switch" that can activate or inhibit neurons.
neurophilosophy | September 28, 2007At Wired, filmmaker Ridley Scott discusses the forthcoming remastered final cut of Blade Runner. This classic 1982 film depicts a dystopian futuristic society based on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and was recently voted as the best science fiction film ever made by 60 top scientists.
The interview includes quotes about the film from various people, including this one, in which Craig Venter, the billionaire geneticist who has just had his genome published, gives his views on cognitive enhancement:
The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that…
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007A handful of good blogs that I've found recently:
Neural Dump
Logical Science
Dave's Daily Dose of Science
Scientific Misconduct Blog