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razib | October 31, 2007OK, last update on this obviously because it is the last day of the month. A few readers really went wild in the last few days (in a good way) and from only 5 donors 508 students were impacted! (check the Leaderboard for the breakdown) Thank you very much! So if you have any spare cash and inclination, please check out the projects I'm sponsoring, this is your last day.
grrlscientist | October 31, 2007Okay, this is amazing! One of my readers, who shall remain anonymous unless that person chooses to reveal him(her)self, has sent an Amazon gift certificate to me to purchase a digital camera. WOW! So I ask you, dear readers, which digital camera do you recommend? I want to take close-up pictures of birds (and insects and flowers) as well as pictures of birds that I am looking at while birding, which requires some sort of distance-focusing ability. I assume I should also have a fairly large memory card for those wallpaper sized images that I hope to share with you .. but you are the experts…
cortex | October 31, 2007Our eighth graders might not understand basic scientific concepts, but America is still a beacon for the "stars" of science, at least according to a new analysis by two social scientists at UCLA:
America has 62 percent of the world's stars as residents, primarily because of its research universities which produce them.
Of course, there is nothing inevitable about this fact. Americans take it for granted that we're an aggregator of research talent, but that could quickly change. (Or has it already changed?) Unless we can find a way to improve science education (and fix our visa problems, so…
cortex | October 31, 2007Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has generously allowed me to answer a few of his excellent questions. Check it out.
Q: You seem to mostly focus on past artists but jokingly mentioned in a recent interview that maybe your next book will be called 'Kanye West was a neuroscientist'. Are there contemporary artists that you value as potentially inspiring progress in the brain sciences?
A: There are some obvious candidates, like Richard Powers and Ian McEwan, who have written wonderful novels about modern neuroscience. (See, for example, Galatea 2.2 or Saturday or The Echo Maker.) But I don't think it…
cortex | October 31, 2007It really is one of the great culinary techniques, and yet it's almost never used. I'm talking about salt roasting, and Russ Parsons has put together a lovely introduction to the subject. Basically, you bury a piece of protein in a mound of kosher salt. Put the dish in a hot oven and bake for 20 minutes or so. Then you just crack open the saline shell and peel away the salty skin. The resulting flesh is incredibly succulent and flavorful. The kitchen chemistry behind the technique is rather simple:
The salt melts and forms a crust, making a kind of "oven within an oven". The effect is quite…
cmcclain | October 31, 2007Slow news week but stumbled upon this over my morning cup of joe.
Illex argentinus which is the biggest in terms of volume, value and also size of the squid. Typical annual catches are around 150,000 tonnes with much of the catch destined for the Far East although significant amounts also go to Europe; the Loligo gahi are caught by large stern trawlers almost all of which are registered in the Falkland.
So I am starting a thread for you to post links to pictures of marine invertebrate inspired coins and stamps. As they come in I will add them to the post! While we are at it let's do…
cortex | October 30, 2007Ever wanted to fly through a neocortical column? Yeah, me too. The bad news is that, until I manage to shrink myself to the micron level, such a flight is probably impossible. This computer simulated video is probably the closest I'll get.
mikethemadbiologist | October 30, 2007Either one shouldn't take polls or 24 percent of the American public seriously. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive options. Kevin Drum summarizes the incongruence:
So 29% think government should be responsible for providing healthcare, but 53% approve of extending Medicare to cover everyone. Uh huh. And then this Blendon fellow suggests that maybe this contradiction is the result of people not realizing that Medicare is paid for with taxes. That's completely crazy, of course, but it's also quite possibly true.
I think this is not just ignorance, but the effect of several decades of…
cortex | October 30, 2007I've always wondered about why manual transmissions generally get better mileage than automatics. The answer is surprisingly simple: humans are better shifters.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy ratings, cars with manual transmissions typically beat their automatic peers by a mile or two per gallon. This is largely because manuals give you more control over an engine's exertions. Despite recent advances in slushbox design, humans are still better than automated systems at recognizing precisely when to shift gears. And smart shifting enables you to limit an engine…
cortex | October 30, 2007The Cartesian wall separating the mind and body has been so thoroughly deconstructed that it's newsworthy when a bodily condition is not affected by our mental state. After all, recent studies have shown that everything from chronic back pain to many auto-immune diseases are all modulated by various psychological factors, such as stress levels. But cancer appears to be relatively immune to the mind. Those tumor cells don't care about what you think or feel. Here's the Times:
The idea that emotional well-being can affect the course of disease finds no support in a new report on head and neck…
neurophilosophy | October 29, 2007I'm very flattered to have been given two Intellectual Blogger Awards (first by Eric and then by Kate; thank you both). Now, after hard deliberation, I can name five other intellectuals upon which the same honour should be bestowed.
All of the bloggers named below have given me inspiration in one way or another, and, I'm sure, will continue to do so.
So, in alphabetical order by surname...
Vaughan Bell is a neuropsychologist who is undergoing clinical training at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He writes about the kind of things that first got me interested in neuroscience, in posts…
harderkid13 | October 29, 2007While I would love to devote all of my time to neurobiology, I do have other classes that require my attention. In one of those classes I am writing a research paper on tuberculosis. While researching tuberculosis I began wondering if there were any strange cases where tuberculosis has neurobiological effects. A google search brought me to this article. While this is not exactly what I was looking for, it did pique my interest. It seems like drugs taken for one thing end up treating another as well. In Biochemistry we recently had to read an article about how the obesity drug Orlistat is a…
cmcclain | October 29, 2007In the words of Rick at MBSL&S
So let's just say you have a couple hundred thousand metric tons of iron filings laying around the house. While in the tub one day, you conceive of a terrific idea of dumping all that iron into the ocean, thus seeding phytoplankton growth (iron is a limiting nutrient for phytoplankton) and sequestering atmospheric carbon for centuries deep underwater. Voila! Hello carbon sink... goodbye global warming. And even better, you can sell shares of your iron filing dumping as carbon offsets to individuals and business who are looking to feel more carbon neutral. It…
jlynch | October 29, 2007Only three more days left for us to meet our challenge. So far we've only hit 34% of our goal and have raised $1,358 which will help 266 students.
I've added some new proposals to our slate in the hope that if you weren't interested before, you can now find a proposal that you like. You know what to do ...
cmcclain | October 29, 2007 Many of you have probably seen this already. No doubt, you have said something like
This thing has teeth where a beak should be -- disquietingly human teeth, at that.
The picture is disturbing to say the least and will haunt my dreams. So is the picture real? Yes.
The species is Promachoteuthis sulcus recently described by Young, Vecchione, and Roper. The published figure is...
What you see is the oral view of the brachial and buccal crown. The supposed teeth are papillae on the lips of the buccal mass common in cephalopods (See below).
Image from tolweb.org
cortex | October 29, 2007I linked to an interesting new paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience last week, but I thought it was worth talking a bit more about the journal itself. It's a brand new publication, which attempts to completely transform the peer review process. The journal grew out of frustration with the traditional scientific publication crapshoot, which the editors of Frontiers criticize as:
Complicated and time consuming,
Biased and controlled by local lobbies and powerful journals,
And not geared towards the needs of Authors. In this publishing system the prestige comes from where one publishes and not…
cortex | October 29, 2007A note to readers: For the next few weeks, this blog is going on a book tour. So if you're averse to self-promotion and blatant shows of immodesty (I promise to also link to the negative reviews!), or just aren't interested in Proust Was A Neuroscientist, then I kindly suggest you check back in December, when I'll be back talking about lots of other things beside myself. I promise this book related chatter won't last forever...
With that warning out of the way, the LA Times ran a very generous and thoughtful review of the book yesterday:
Jonah Lehrer, a science journalist with a neuroscience…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2007tags: vocabulary, United Nations, free rice, online quiz
This linked online vocabulary game has an interesting premise; for every correct answer you provide, ten grains of rice will be donated to the United Nations to end world hunger. How many grains of rice did you donate?
grrlscientist | October 27, 2007Well, it's been fun so far! I've traveled 1500 miles so I can dig in the dirt here in Texas -- it's amazing what a NYCer will do to re-experience her country-living childhood, huh? The dirt here is very rich with clay and so, when it dries out and the sun shines on it, it becomes as hard as a rock. So I ended up beating the clay to death with a hoe.
I also saw a crested caracara (a new life list bird for me), numerous turkey vultures, some black vultures that seem to enjoy city living, marsh hawks (northern harriers), cooper's and sharp-shinned harks, and red-tailed hawks. I also saw lots of…
laelaps | October 27, 2007I can't say that I'm a fan the music choice, but I have to admit, this bird can dance to the beat better than I can. This is Snowball, "a medium sulphur crested Eleanora cockatoo," who's apparently a big fan of the Backstreet Boys.