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cortex | June 4, 2008Or so I say on the Bryant Park Project. We talk about tip-of-the-tongue moments, metacognition and why seeing a picture of a motorcycle will make you think about biopsies.
cortex | June 4, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells. What these new brain cells do, exactly, remains a mystery, but numerous studies have found a connection between reduced neurogenesis and rodent models of depression. This research strongly suggests that the most effective treatments for severe depression (Prozac and ECT) work by increasing the rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. For instance, if you…
petnoyer | June 4, 2008
You have to respect The Nature Conservancy (TNC) because they put their money where there mouth is. While some other organizations have a tendency to turn "conservation" into "conversation", TNC has a tendency to purchase property and throw up a no trespassing sign. Sure, it gets them into trouble sometimes, but privatizing a resource is a great way to avoid the Tragedy of the Commons. Eventually, these properties are absorbed into state of federal park lands, often in better shape than they would have been otherwise.
But what to do about the oceans? In some states, submerged lands in bays…
gregladen | June 3, 2008AP has called the race. They have used 11 delegates expected today to be awarded to Obama from primaries, which is a little premature in my view (I mean, why not wait until after the election like we are supposed to). It also includes, and this is very interesting. 16 super delegates that have told AP they are going to throw their lot in with Obama but who have not yet done so. The existence of a bunch of such super delegates was heavily hinted at by various media mucky mucks over the last couple of days.
The following is from the AP report. My Snark added where appropriate (according…
cortex | June 3, 2008The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most surprised by this factoid:
Cooling a home in Arizona produces 93 percent few carbon dioxide emissions than warming a house in New England
The math is quite simple. Most people set their thermostat to somewhere between 68 and 76 degrees. When it's really hot outside (let's pretend it's August in Phoenix, which means 105 and humid) that means you need to…
pharyngula_2 | June 3, 2008Everything you need to know about biology is in E. coli. Sure, there are some apparent differences between us and a bacterium, but it's all details … lots and lots of details. That sweet humming core of life — metabolism, replication, communication, evolution — it's all whirling away in the tiniest of us all, and so you can learn much that is universally applicable by focusing on just one kind of creature.
That, I think, is the message of Carl Zimmer's latest book, Microcosm(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I could argue a little bit with the idea, since a key principle in understanding evolution is…
cortex | June 3, 2008Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection of sarcasm, a rather sophisticated element of social cognition:
Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, used an innovative test developed in 2002, the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. It incorporates videotaped examples of exchanges in which a…
cmcclain | June 3, 2008All the writing about the Big 3, fueled an appetite for salmon. I thought what better way to start off every day this week with a little smoked salmon on bagel. Not two hours after I wrote the Big 3 post, I was purchasing smoke salmon from a grocer in my area who promotes their green image.
O' but I was taken in by Green Washing. Specifically number 6...fibbing. Using my own criteria for purchasing salmon, I bought Pacific Supreme Smoke Salmon. I thought I was going home with wild caught Pacific salmon. But no...I WAS DUPED!
This morning as I noticed the salmon was paler than I…
kevin z | June 2, 2008Congratulations to I'm a Chordata, Urochordata man, Dr. Byrnes!! He just turned in his signed PhD dissertation. Thats really awesome and I can't wait for him to get a job and hire me! Oh wait, he already has a postdoc lined up in an awesome lab.
As an undergrad I academically "grew up" in the lab next to Jarrett's lab and got to know several of the grad students and undergrads. Everyone out of both labs have gone on to great things, so we expect none the less of you newly-minted-doctor-byrnes!
sb admin | June 2, 2008At a summit at the World Science Festival, panelists agreed that the U.S. is losing its stature as a leader in science. Panelists cited two reasons: diminished funding for research, and âa perceived high-level disdain for science.â Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post explains:
Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of…
kevin z | June 2, 2008If you haven't read the FAIL Blog yet, you are missing out one of life's great pleasures: laughing at other's failures! It was imperative I share this video from the FAIL Blog with Deep Sea News readers, to serve as a warning if nothing else. You MUST get the FAIL Blog into your RSS feed, it fits nice and snugly next to LOLcats, LOLscience and LOLinverts.
grrlscientist | June 2, 2008If you've been conscious while reading my blog, you'll notice that I have started the summer by adding a few reader questions to my left sidebar for you to answer. Because I am a scientist, I love to collect data. But I am collecting this data for another reason: I am working on a book and would like to know more about who my readers are, so you can help me by answering these questions. Your answers are anonymous, but you also can add a comment to each poll that you answer by clicking on the "view" button for each question and using the comment section there, or you can comment here, or you…
kevin z | June 2, 2008The first Carnival of the Blue of its 2nd year. Carnie creator Mark Powell posts edition #13 and brings it all full circle with the most massive, packed ocean blogging. Its great to see so many diverse bloggers contributing to this carnival. Well, what are waiting for, go learn something!
Is that still the logo? Or have I revealed my age?
cortex | June 2, 2008What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a profoundly important influence on my personality.
That said, birth order is mostly bunk. Numerous scientific studies and meta-analyses have found that the phenomenon doesn't seem to exist. There are few, if any, personality traits that consistently correlate with a child's order within the family.
But I'm not giving up on my empirical hunch. Like all good rationalizers, I can…
mikethemadbiologist | June 2, 2008I'm typically not a big fan of science fairs, at least in terms of the competition. In my experience, too many of the winners simply had good projects handed to them by top notch researchers--it's not a reflection of the students' ingenuity. But this science project is ingenious:
Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.
Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found…
jessica.sachs | June 2, 2008I knew I'd love Carl's Microcosm for the delicious irony of using a mere "germ" to illustrate the mysteries of life itself. Well, I'm also partial to bacteria and their multicellular abilities, which Carl describes wonderfully. .
First, as the other science writer on the panel, I'd like to express my appreciation for Carl's way with a metaphor. I think for many of us, what makes science writing take flight are these wonderfully unexpected yet perfect comparisons that convey understanding along with a flash of sensory fireworks. For instance, Carl describes a (eukaryotic) cell's stained…
cortex | June 2, 2008I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment.
Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could recognize people, and remember all sorts of information about them, he had no idea what to call them. He'd lost the ability to remember any personal name, even the names of close friends and family members. He was forced to refer to his wife as "wife."
A few months before, the man, known as LS in the scientific literature, had been in a…
petnoyer | June 2, 2008
A placoderm fossil called "mother fish" has been recovered from Gogo, an ancient coral reef site off the Kimberley coast of Northwest Australia. The fossil was recovered with embryo and umbilical cord still attached, providing evidence of live birth and sex with penetration in the Middle Paleozoic Era, 200 million years before it was ever thought possible. This remarkable finding shows that egg-laying and live-birth evolved together, rather than sequentially.
The tail-first birthing process was probably similar to that of some species of sharks and rays living today, says the study,…
cmcclain | June 2, 2008Beware when you go on tropical holiday. Species richness of bacteria is higher in those waters. For many organisms on land (birds, mammals, snails, plants, insects, and more) diversity increases as one progresses toward the equator. For many marine groups, snails for example, the same patterns applies. This is referred to often as the LSDG or the latitudinal species diversity gradient.
What drives this pattern? The hypotheses are numerous but typically the two favorites are primary productivity and temperature. On one hand a bigger pie allows for more slices. On the other hand…
kevin z | June 1, 2008"Epsilonproteobacteria, it turns out, are one of the predominant groups of extremophiles in marine systems. In one environmental DNA sample taken from a hydrothermal vent, Epsilonproteobacteria represented nearly 50% of the inferred diversity (Sogin et al., 2006)."
Christopher Taylor, the curator of the Catalogue of Organisms (a regular read of mine), has an interesting post on Epsilonproteobacteria. I would just like to add that even the hydrothermal vent chemoautotrophic snail Alviniconcha hessleri contains Epsilonproteobacteria in its gills. Curiously, this has so far only been found in…