neuroscience
omnibrain | December 2, 2010It seems that there are some cool pictures/film floating around showing some of the results of the wacky shit that the military did back in the day in order to win wars in some very very unconventional ways. Here's something NPR dug up:
The Army had a few periods of experimenting with LSD and other drugs. While not secret, these tests are not as well-known as some of the similar LSD tests conducted by the CIA, such as MK-ULTRA and Operation Paperclip, where the U.S. government recruited former Nazi scientists.
This test, circa 1958, was conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and was part…
omnibrain | November 30, 2010The NYTimes has a great article, slide show and video with some phenomenal pictures of the brain. Well worth checking out.
Enjoy!
bioephemera | November 29, 2010Just in: Carl Schoonover's Portraits of the Mind, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, gets the New York Times Science section treatment. Check out their video interview with Carl; his account of the book's genesis illustrates the benefits that accrue when scientists take the opportunity to share the things that excite them about their work with nonscientists. And congratulations to Carl for all the well-deserved attention!
omnibrain | November 29, 2010yes you. Or perhaps you've fallen off of your midlife crisis testosterone penis boat?
This here inflatable brain could save your life. Order only if you are experiencing an actual emergency drowning situation.
Alternatively you could buy this for me for XMas... if only you knew where to send it.
omnibrain | November 28, 2010Jessica @ Bioephemera found some really great plastinated bull cocks and I have to agree with her on not buying them. But... I LOVE these brains! Too bad they're 1500 euros :/
bioephemera | November 19, 2010This year's winner of the BioScapes digital imaging competition, Igor Siwanowicz, triumphed with a somewhat unusual portrait. To most biologists, it should be clear what anatomical structures are shown here - but what species could this be?
Igor Siwanowicz, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, Munich, Germany.
First Prize, 2010 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®.
click through for the answer, and for my picks of the other winners. . .
That's Dr. Siwanowicz' frontal section of Daddy Longlegs (Phalangium opilio) eyes, showing lenses (two large ovals), retinas and optic nerves…
cevans | November 17, 2010
A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.
It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…
bioephemera | November 10, 2010
For health organizations, federal agencies and nonprofits alike, it's a challenge to get anyone to pay attention long enough to hear your prevention messages, much less to actually change their behavior as a result. It's even harder with kids. It's not that they don't care about science; quite the contrary, they love it - especially if it's gross. It's more that they don't want to hear an authority figure talking down to them about the parade of terribles that will befall them if they binge drink, have unprotected sex, etc. Be honest: can you think back to your high school health classes…
bioephemera | November 4, 2010
Hippocampus: Broad Overview
Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes, 2005
from Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover
The first time I created a transgenic neuron, it was in a worm, C. elegans -- a tiny, transparent cousin of the earthworm. I injected DNA into the embryonic worm, let it grow up, and voila: there was one eerie green blotch like a little Pac-Man ghost, its long green axon a lime racing stripe running along the worm's transparent body. The worm wiggled, but I was the one hooked: science is beautiful.
You…
bioephemera | October 24, 2010
Have e-books killed tree-books? I hope not - I love hefting a brand-new book in my hand and letting the pages fan open. It's sensual and anticipation-laden, like opening a bottle of good wine. But perhaps science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is hedging his bets on the future of paper books: he's released his latest collection, Brain Cuttings, exclusively for Kindle, iPad, and other mobile devices. I clicked over to read an excerpt, and this was the first passage I saw:
Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer--not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your…
bioephemera | October 23, 2010Just in: the 2010 Imagine Science Films Festival's Nature Scientific Merit award, given to "a short film that exemplifies science in narrative filmmaking in a compelling, credible and inspiring manner," is An Eyeful of Sound, a short film about audio-visual synaesthesia by Samantha Moore.
Here's the trailer:

An Eyeful of Sound - trailer from Samantha Moore on Vimeo.
It's a little hard from that clip to get a sense of what the film is like. But it's great that an organization is finally calling attention to science-themed short films. Bravo, ISFF.
Related: The Eyeful of Sound…
bioephemera | October 8, 2010This, this and this all came close, but in the end, it took a book: a yummy new neuroscience, history of science, beauty of science, wow-brains-are-beautiful book.
The other day I heard about something that I just HAD to blog, hiatus/retirement be damned! Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, a new book by neurobiology PhD candidate Carl Schoonover, is coming out in a few weeks, and I'm lucky enough to have a preview copy sitting here before me.
This book encapsulates my original vision for BioE - a narrative that brings science history together…
jgoldman | September 7, 2010This talk, from last spring's TEDxUSC (for those not in the know, USC held the first ever TEDx event, in 2009), is made of awesome, and worth watching in its entirety. It will be especially interesting for those who have read The Invisible Gorilla.
As I'm always looking for good teaching tips, here are a few good things that the presenter, Al Seckel, did.
1. His powerpoint, with few exceptions, is mostly not-text. When there is text, it is limited to just a few bulletpoints. (this is true until the last 3-4 minutes, when it gets too text-heavy)
2. He uses still images, videos, audio, and…
neurophilosophy | August 30, 2010This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders, by Franz Vollenweider & Michael Kometer. This article will be freely available, with registration, until September 23. See the Table of Contents for more information on this Blog Focus, and read the other blog posts:
Serotonin, Psychedelics and Depression (by Neuroskeptic)
Ketamine for Depression: Yay or Neigh? (by The Neurocritic)
Visions of a…
neurophilosophy | August 20, 2010DO you think that you perceive your body and the world around you as they really are? If your answer to that question is "yes", then think again. Our perceptions are little more than the brain's best guess of the nature of reality, constructed from fragments of information it receives through the senses. This is demonstrated by visual illusions, which produce discrepancies between physical reality and what we see of it, and by illusions of bodily awareness, which distort the way we perceive our bodies.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have long used illusions to investigate the mechanisms…
elerner | August 19, 2010Letters and numbers are often mentally grouped together; they're both simple sets of symbols that are the building blocks for much more complex concepts, and mastering their relationships is a cornerstone of early education. But while illiteracy becomes a major social stigma almost immediately after a young person is introduced to letters, most people can proudly declare their innumeracy (aside from basics, like telling time or counting change) throughout their lives. This is doubly strange, as our ability to think about and compare sets of items of differing amounts precedes our verbal…
neurotopia | August 12, 2010There's a slick new online Sci Fi rag called Lightspeed. I like this one because they also publish nonfiction pieces that are relevant to their fiction stories. Ok I'm a bit biased because they asked me to write a nonfiction piece for them. In the same issue there was a story called Manumission by Tobias Buckell, which used intentionally created memory loss as a plot device for a story that is part noir, part Heinlein, and all funky fun. My piece loosely relates to the story, but explores a bit more of what memory loss means for an individual's perception of themselves.
Do drop by and…
neurophilosophy | July 31, 2010THOUGHTS and actions are intimately linked, and the mere thought of an action is much like actually performing it. The brain prepares for an action by generating a motor simulation of it, praticising its execution of the movements by going through the motions invisibly. Seeing a manipulable object such as a tool, for example, automatically triggers a simulation of using it - a mental image of reaching out and grasping it with the hand that is nearest to the handle.
Motor simulations and movements are known to influence thought processes. Magnetic stimulation of the motor cortex influences…
jgoldman | July 29, 2010Have you heard about NCBI ROFL? It's a previously-independent blog that has been incorporated into "Discoblog," one of the blogs at Discover Magazine. What they do is find amusing or funny abstracts by searching Pubmed (which is run by the NCBI - National Center for Biomedical Information) and just post the abstracts. No commentary, no interpretation, just the text of the abstract. A lot of times I actually find the abstracts that they choose to post amusing. It is amusing that someone has decided to use superglue to remove objects that are stuck in peoples' ears, or that wooden kitchen…