Miscellaneous
neurophilosophy | October 30, 2007European reseasrchers, led by David Penny of the University of Manchester, have used a medical imaging technique called Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography to digitally dissect and reconstruct a 1mm-long 53 million-year-old spider that is preserved in a piece of amber.
The pictures, and some links, are below.
Read more at ScienceDaily and the BBC, and see this post for more about the amazing arachnids.
neurophilosophy | October 27, 2007
(Image: Ben Osborne)
This photograph of an elephant at a watering hole, by Ben Osborne, has just been announced as the best overall photo in the 2007 Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
"I staked out this waterhole in Botswana's Chobe National Park for three weeks," Osborne says, "taking pictures from my vehicle of thirsty elephants and other animals coming to drink. Sometimes the waterhole overflowed, and this huge bull was the first to indulge in a head-to-toe spa. I focused on the centre of the action, an explosion of texture and colour."
This, and the winning images…
neurophilosophy | October 26, 2007In a new poll conducted for Halloween by the Associated Press and market research company IPSOS, one third of respondents said that they believe in ghosts and UFOs, and nearly one half said they believe in extrasensory perception.
A Yahoo! News story summarizes the main findings of the AP/ IPSOS poll.
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2007BioMed Central has just launched an online collection of biological images, film clips and animations.
The Biology Image Library is intended for educational and research purposes, and contains more than 11,000 images covering subjects which include neuroscience, developmental biology, and microbiology.
Although BioMed Central is an open access publisher, the Biology Image Library is only free from within academic institutions which are subscribed. A personal subscription costs $293 a year, and the publishers are offering a free trial which provides access to the whole site for 7 days.
mixingmemory | October 21, 2007
Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says.
(Cartoon from here. And yes, French was spoken in the EEA.)
In related news, a new study has determined that "cognitive linguistics" is just a metaphor for the way the mind actually works.
neurophilosophy | October 19, 2007James Watson has been suspended from his position as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory following the racist comments he made last week.
In last weekend's Sunday Times, Watson is quoted as saying that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."
He is now saying that his words were presented incorrectly, making them open to misinterpretation:
I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the…
neurophilosophy | October 17, 2007
(Photo by Felice Frankel)
Reseacher, author and science photographer Felice Frankel is the winner of this year's Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical and Scientific Photography.
Frankel is a researcher at MIT and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, where she is head of the Envisioning Science Program, which emphasizes the use of images to communicate science.
Frankel has written several books on this subject (the latest one, called Envisioning Science, was published by MIT Press in 2002), and some of her writing on it can be found…
neurophilosophy | October 17, 2007James Watson and Francis Crick made the most significant discovery of the twentieth century: they elucidated of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, and later shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work.
So Watson and Crick are very illustrious, to say the least. But when Watson continues to make racist statements such as this, he loses much of his credibility, and one finds it very difficult to take him seriously:
[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007According to an economic analysis carried out by the Home Office, immigrants earned more and paid more tax than native Britons did last year.
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007
The Royal Society has just put Robert Hooke's folio online.
The 320-year-old notebook, which had been missing for centuries, was discovered in January of last year. In it, Hooke provides details of his experiments, and of the workings of the newly-formed Royal Society, of which he was first administrator and then secretary.
Hooke was a contemporary - and a rival - of Isaac Newton. He was a polymath who made major contributions to many scientific disciplines, including astronomy, palaeontology, physics, and biology. For example, he was one of the first people to examine cells under the…
neurophilosophy | October 4, 2007Now showing on my YouTube channel:
The remarkable cognitive skills and tool-making abilities of crows (see this post)
A documentary about Clive Wearing, who has the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.
The alien jaws of the moray eel (explained here)
Crop-raiding chimps (explained here)
Asphyxio-balling (which is something that bees do, and not a fetish indulged in by Members of Parliament).
mixingmemory | October 2, 2007These pictures aren't my own, but they're of the weird things I've seen lately.
Coal Skink
White Grackle
This one was hanging out with about 5,000 (I shit you not) grackles of the normal black variety, so it stuck out like a sore thumb. And having been around grackles all my life, I'd never seen a white one before. It's an omen, I'm sure. Prepare for the apocalypse.
mixingmemory | October 1, 2007Go over to OmniBrain, read about Donors Choose, and if you like what they're doing, give 'em some money.
mixingmemory | September 29, 2007I know there are a few psychologists out there lurking around. This post is for you. I thought it might be interesting for some of you (all of you? any of you? hello, is this thing on?) to write a little bit about what you do as psychologists. That is, what you're researching, how you study it, perhaps your general perspective on cognition, why you got into cognition and your specific area(s) of research in particular, etc. It wouldn't have to be long (though it can be as long as you like), just a summary that, when combined with those from other psychologists, would give people a sense of…
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2007
The former Larsen Air Force Base Complex 1A Titan ICBM Facility is listed on eBay.
The facility comes complete with 16 underground buildings, including three 160 ft. tall missile silos, three 4-storey terminal equipment buildings, two antenna silos and a 100 ft. diameter control dome building. That amounts to 45,000 square feet of useable space, excluding tunnels.
The facility is situated on a 57-acre site in Central Washington, between Moses Lake and Ricksville - that's just 10 minutes away from Interstate 90. It could be yours for a mere $1.5m. (A downpayment of $300,000 is required.)
(…
mixingmemory | September 28, 2007This video is too cool not to post. Every commenter who knows why this happens, and can explain it, gets a cookie*.
If no one chimes in, and you're curious about how this works, let me know and I'll explain it in a future post.
UPDATE: Man, you folks are smart. You all get cookies. Well, all of you except mmf, whose dogs get the cookies.
*Said cookie will be made entirely by yourself at your own expense, but you still get it.
neurophilosophy | September 28, 2007
Today's issue of Science contains the winners of the 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the journal's website has an online exhibit that features all of the winning images.
The competition is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who created it with the editors of Science five years ago. The aim of the competition is to make science comprehensible to more people, and to encourage the growth of scientific literacy, at a time in which it seems to be becoming increasingly rare.
The image above comes from a poster by aeronautical engineer David Willis and…
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007
This image from Google Earth shows the swastika-shaped barracks at the Coronado Naval base near San Diego.
Following objections from the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Navy has set aside $600,000 of its 2008 budget for landscaping and rooftop adjustments that will camouflage the shape of the building.
"We told the Navy this was an incredibly inappropriate shape for a structure on a military installation," says Morris S. Casuto, the ADL's regional director. "[But we] never ascribed evil intent to the structure's design."
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007Both EurekAlert and ScienceDaily have a story called "Sense of taste different in women with anorexia nervosa". The stories have been "adapted" from a press release issued earlier today by the University of California, San Diego.
This "adaption" is nothing more than a reproduction of the press release, spelling mistakes included:
...a new study finds that women with anorexia have distinct differences in the insulta -- the specific part of the brain that is important for recognizing taste -- according to a new study by University of Pittsburgh and University of California, San Diego…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2007We have a new Science Blogger! She is ScienceWoman:
What I do write about are my experiences as an early career scientist who also happens to be a woman.
I share my life as the mother of a spunky seven-month old girl who has already “helped” with field work and seminars. I describe the dramas of being a first-year assistant professor, scrambling to write lectures and grant proposals and figure out what “service” means, while trying to be home for a little playtime before my daughter's 7 pm bedtime. I write blog posts while pumping breastmilk and strategize research ideas over the course of…