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cortex | March 5, 2010I thought it's worth addressing this article one last time. Dr. Ronald Pies (professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse) has written three eloquent and extremely critical blog posts about the article and the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Here's his latest riposte:
Writer Jonah Lehrer caused quite a stir with his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, with the unfortunate title, "Depression's Upside." I have a detailed rejoinder to this misleading article posted on the Psychcentral website. The fault is not entirely Mr. Lehrer's however; his sources…
sciencepunk | March 5, 2010After a brief insurrection by their blue collar offspring, zombies, vampires have once more regained their prominence as the monster supreme, leaping out at us from every bookshelf, cinema screen and TV set. What better time then for Mark Jenkins to unleash his accomplished study of the bloodsucker legend, Vampire Forensics.
Published through National Geographic Books and accompanied by a television documentary, Vampire Forensics delves into the long history of the vampire, one which began millennia before a certain Bram Stoker set pen to parchment. Drawing upon the latest research in…
grrlscientist | March 5, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
cwilcox | March 4, 2010First off, the e-mails have been sent, and if you're a member of ResearchBlogging.Org, then you should haev a vote to cast in the ResearchBlogging Awards! So go vote for Observations of a Nerd for the best lay-level and biology blog as well as best research post of the year *cough* *cough* your favorites!
If you aren't a member, then I guess you'll just have to wait to see what happens. Good luck to all the contestants!
Anyhow, I've been awful busy this week starting my last rotation in a whole new lab, so I've been lagging on the goods. If you follow my twitter, you've gotten a little more,…
gregladen | March 4, 2010The ever-present fog of energetic gamma rays permeating the universe isn't created by what astronomers expected, new observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal, leaving scientists with a new cosmic mystery to solve.
The sky glows in gamma rays even far away from well-known bright sources, such as pulsars and gas clouds within our own Milky Way galaxy or the most luminous active galaxies. Conventionally, astronomers thought that the accumulated glow of active galactic nuclei -- black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies -- accounted for most of this gamma-ray…
agelman | March 4, 2010This looks interesting:
Jean-Luc Thiffeault
Mathematics Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison
"Do fish stir the ocean?"
As fish or other bodies move through a fluid, they stir their surroundings. This can be beneficial to some fish, since the plankton they eat depends on a well-stirred medium to feed on nutrients. Bacterial colonies also stir their environment, and this is even more crucial for them since at small scales there is no turbulence to help mixing. It has even been suggested that the total biomass in the ocean makes a significant contribution to large-scale vertical…
gregladen | March 4, 2010Apparently, there is a strange security bug in Windows XP whereby some web sites will ask you to press the F1 Key, and if you do, you are screwed.
"The vulnerability exists in the way that VBScript interacts with Windows Help files when using Internet Explorer," read the advisory. "If a malicious Web site displayed a specially crafted dialog box and a user pressed the F1 key, arbitrary code could be executed in the security context of the currently logged-on user."
details
cortex | March 4, 2010The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing.
When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1â¯a minimal amountâ¯and the responder would accept it. After…
gregladen | March 4, 2010I and the Bird #120: March is up at Sand Creek Almanac, which is Deb's blog, and it's from Minnesota! So, this edition is special because it is from my neighborhood, and because it is the Dozenteenth Edition!
Click here to visit I and the Bird Web Carnival.
mspringer | March 4, 2010If you read about science at all, you've heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's the canonical example of quantum weirdness, the strange idea that you can't simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle. Pack a particle into a small enough box and your accurate knowledge of position will necessarily cause that particle to have a very uncertain momentum, "bouncing" around crazily inside that box.
What you may not have read is that this isn't just quantum weirdness, it happens just as often in the classical world of waves. In fact, the very fact that quantum particles…
gregladen | March 3, 2010Diversity in Science Carnival #7: Black History Month - Broadening STEM Participation at every level at Urban Science Adventures.
Question of the day: What's more important to you: Getting the best personal healthcare coverage, or adequate universal coverage for everyone? (go comment and possibly win a USB drive thingie!)
What is Toast?
cortex | March 3, 2010One of the interesting subplots of this new research on the intellectual benefits of sadness - it seems to bolster our attention and make us more analytical - is that it helps illuminate the intertwined relationship of mood and cognition. For decades, we saw the mind as an information processing machine; the brain was just a bloody computer with lipid bi-layer microchips. The problem with this metaphor is that machines don't have feelings, which led us to overlook the role of feelings in shaping how we think.
Here's an experiment I described in the depression article:
Last year Forgas…
grrlscientist | March 2, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
gregladen | March 2, 2010To your doctor. I know you do.
And even if you don't, you won't want to miss the very interesting thread developing on this topic at Collective Imagination.
gregladen | March 2, 2010... are out. And here they are:
1
Wired Science - Wired Blog
2
Watts Up With That?
3
Climate Progress
4
RealClimate
5
Bad Astronomy
6
Climate Audit
7
Next Generation Science
8
Respectful Insolence
9
Deltoid
10
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
11
The Frontal Cortex
12
FuturePundit
13
BPS Research Digest
14
Uncertain Principles
15
Greg Laden's Blog
16
TierneyLab - New York Times blog
17
Gene Expression
18
A Blog Around The Clock
19
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
20
Stoat
Wikio: directory of blogs
mspringer | March 2, 2010There's an interesting science puff piece that's been circulating around various media outlets about the length of the day after the earthquake in Chile. At random, here's the NY Daily News version:
The quake that rocked the South American nation may have also knocked the Earth off its axis.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake near Chile may have also made our planet's days shorter, according to NASA scientist Richard Gross.
A minor change in the Earth's axis isn't expected to alter much in terms of weather. The planet's tilt influences the seasons, allowing for winter, spring, summer and fall, and…
gregladen | March 2, 2010The following video documents a project in the Bronx where students are given laptops and much of their school work (in the classroom and out) is done on Google Docs or using other resources.
Interesting changes happen.
The number of students at grade level in math increases from single digits to over half. That is an astounding difference, proving that in some cases environment contributes to a HUGE proportion of variation in intelligence as tested, in this case, by evaluations of math skills.
The teachers have realized they had been asking students to do something they themselves are…