The Neurophile

Roger Ebert on El Topo

2007-10-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

This is sort of totally random, but Roger Ebert just put up an excellent essay on El Topo on the "Great Movies" section of his website to commemorate its long-awaited release on DVD.

Since we here at the Neurophile are avowed fans of the works of Mad Genius Alejandro Jodorowsky, I felt sort of obliged to link to it.

I'm working with people who are sane!

2007-10-04T17:16:00.001-05:00

Holy crap! The lab I'm rotating in doesn't require that our lab notebooks be the standard design with numbered pages, obvious if you ever take out any pages, etc. You know, the way everyone's always required to use them because 20 years ago everyone actually had to use notebooks because they didn't all have laptops and it was physically possible to keep your data in a non-electronic fashion.

It's so sensible!

...I have this horrible urge to go get an old-fashioned lab notebook, just so I'll be able to find everything when I need it.

Tonight's Reading Made Me Laugh

2007-10-02T22:34:00.000-05:00

from The Neuron: Cell and Molecular Biology 3E, by Irwin B. Levitan & Leonard K. Kaczmarek, chapter 3:

The plasma membrane of a nerve cell or, indeed, of any cell provides a resistance to the flow of ions between the intracellular and extracellular compartments. Accordingly, it can be thought of as an electrical resistor, with the membrane resistance, R_m, being measured in ohms (Ω). In addition, the lipid bilayer provides an extremely thin insulating layer between two conducting solutions. This allows the membrane to act as an electrical capacitor, a device that is capable of separating and storing electrical charge. The membrance capacitance, C_{m, is measured in farads (F). These considerations allow us to describe the electrical properties of the lipid bilayer membrane simply in terms of an equivalent electrical circuit, as shown in Figure 3-4a. This description is introduced not to torment the student of cell and molecular biology, but rather because it is extremely useful in understanding the electrical behavior of biological membranes under a variety of physiological conditions.}

(Bold emphasis mine)

All Kinds of Neato

2007-09-26T22:34:00.001-05:00

Arkansas nuns excommunicated for membership in a Canadian sect that claims to be founded by the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.

This Title Sucks

2007-09-26T18:43:00.000-05:00

Well, that's a comment I wasn't expecting to see.

First day of class

2007-09-26T13:22:00.000-05:00

Just got out of my first class, NEUBEH 501A: Introduction to Neurobiology. Based on the syllabus and the first lecture; it looks like a lot of the same old, same old... but I'm sure I'll regret having said that.

After we got through the standard first class period stuff, the rest of the lecture worked its way around one simple topic:

Neurons are just like other cells... but different.

Theyre the same in that they have all of the standard cell paraphernalia and do all of the standard cell things. They have a full complement of organelles in the soma, they homeostatically regulate their living conditions, all that.

But they're different both because they have specialized functions and because the specializations lead to special needs. They need to be exceptionally long (extreme example: some sensory neurons in the dorsal root ganglion need to carry sensory information from your toes to the somatosensory cortex in your brain; those can easily top 2 meters in us tall folk, and then think about the giraffe!); but the extreme length of these processes leads to a fundamential specialized need: the need to ship proteins and assorted cell products from the soma where they are manufactured to one end or the other of your body. Neurons are also extremely polarized due to their need for fast electric signaling, which is also required for their ability to rapidly exocytose materials (exocytosis = ejecting material from a cell). In addition, neurons have an extraordinarily long life cycle: although some neurons can be replaced during the course of a human life time, they are definitely in the minority.

There was then some small discussion of the specializations underlying different types of neurons, but my battery is about to die so I'll leave it at that for now.

I don't know, man, I didn't do it!

2007-09-26T10:05:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the RSS feed crapping out like that. Don't look at me, I haven't posted in ages! It's TOTALLY blogger's fault!

Things I have that make me happy

2007-08-23T16:03:00.000-05:00

#1.) A poster proof! It's all shiny and everything!

#2.) The first figure done for my paper. And decent revisions of both the Intro & the Methods section. No Results or Discussion yet... next week is gonna be hell.

Today's Epiphany

2007-08-20T10:52:00.000-05:00

Just so you know, I finally have a legitimate excuse for horribly erratic posting habits, as I'm currently simultaneously preparing to move across the country and writing my first paper for publication.

So I'm taking a break from the latter to finish revising my poster for SfN (since I realized that the standard turnaround for posters is 5 days, which would mean that if I turn it in today it'll be back the day before we load up our PODS), and I had an epiphany about the difference between writing for a scientific audience and well, pretty much any other kind of writing I've done.

A key element of writing for a general audience is to have a host of synonyms at your disposal, so you can always insert whatever word sounds best into a given sentence. Also, you need to be able to avoid using the same words in consecutive sentences when possible as your sentences will sounds homogeneous and monotonous. But in science writing, you need to choose a some word and stick with it. Use the same term to describe the same thing every. Single. Time. Otherwise, your audience will just get confused and wonder if you're talking about different phenomena. I realize this is not a major grand epiphany for most people, and is probably a bit obvious. But it's part and parcel of explaining all of the writing problems I've had when working on things in the lab. My secret to good writing has always been to write for the ear; I just get the text out there and then revise and revise until the prose has some flow to it. But when I try to do that on my poster or in my paper, it's actually counter-productive since I'm just messing things up when I try to liven up the words.

Google Search Terms Q & A

2007-08-07T15:38:00.000-05:00

In response to the person who arrived at my blog using the google search terms "3-minute depression cure does it work?":

No. I'm pretty sure that no, it doesn't.

Your Tuesday Sort-Of SciAm Moment

2007-08-07T15:34:00.000-05:00

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--from The Gulag Archipelago--as quoted in Michael Shermer's Skeptic column from the latest issue of Scientific American:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Suddenly I understand why my mom had all those Solzhenitsyn books on the shelf when I was growing up.

New Candidate for Most Useless Headline Ever

2007-08-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

Reuters: Brain chemical has key role in ADHD

Two Observations From Jamba Juice & One From an Airplane

2007-08-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

#1: The second most horrifying sentence I've heard thus far this week: "I'm gonna have to run back to get a band-aid soon because this thing fell on me again and I'm bleeding all over the place." This, from the person preparing my breakfast.

#2: I think this is the first business I've ever entered that with a sign up informing customers of their ticker symbol.

#3: The most horrifying sentence I've heard thus far this week, uttered on my flight from Charlotte by the hideously obese, greasy truck driver that is every Northerner's nightmare: "Why don't you just get out of the way so I can get my butt up in that?" And yes, he was talking to me.

FYI

2007-08-01T22:39:00.000-05:00

We had some bridge-related shenanigans in Minneapolis today; but AFAIK me and mine are all OK.

From the What-The-Hey? Department:

2007-08-01T16:21:00.000-05:00

From this AP article, in which we learn the Senate is moving (once again) to put tobacco under the FDA's jurisdiction; but we also learn the following:

The committee adopted an amendment by Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., that would ban clove cigarettes, reversing a controversial decision by Kennedy to allow the FDA to make that decision.

Kennedy, the panel's chairman, said he was responding to several senators who contacted him with concerns that a ban on cloves would not be compliant with World Trade Organization rules. But Kennedy agreed to the ban after several senators objected.

Most cloves are marketed in Asia, and Philip Morris, a unit of New York-based Altria Group Inc., recently launched a Marlboro cigarette flavored with cloves in Indonesia.

Kennedy said at the meeting that Philip Morris had "nothing to do with our decision" and he supported the clove ban as long as it is WTO compliant.

This doesn't make sense on so many levels. I think the "Marlboro cloves launched in Indonesia" is a red herring caused by bad copywriting. My guess is that the point of the clove ban is because Marlboro doesn't make money on cloves in the US--you know, where the ban would take place--which really makes the rest of the article make a lot more sense. Because otherwise: is there some extensive "ban cloves but not tobacco cigarettes" lobby I've never heard of before?

Ask a Stupid Question...

2007-08-01T16:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, so bitwise linked to this article about priming in the NYT, and true to form I got obsessively distracted halfway through... by the font for the "Mental Health & Behavior" section. Does it really jump out at anyone else that the section heading is in a different font than, well, anyone else? Or am I just deranged?

If You're Minnesotan and You Know It...

2007-08-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

Then this is the funniest thing ever. Well, if you follow the Timberwolves obsessively: T-Hud's album sells 78 copies. I think there are more posters advertising it than that on my bus ride to work. Admittedly, all of those are within a block of the Electric Fetus, but still...

No wonder they bought out his contract.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2007-08-01T10:47:00.001-05:00

This picture makes me want to cry:

On the upside, the article reminded me that Wally is playing for Seattle now (having been traded for Jesus), so I'll get to see him up close again once we move out there. On the downside, Wally's body is falling apart so he doesn't play like he used to.

It's a world of pain and misery, until I remember that I'm moving to Kevin Durant country.

Today's SciAm Moment

2007-08-01T10:19:00.001-05:00

Another excerpt from the July 2007 issue of Scientific American, this time from the Fact or Fiction? column (yes, guess what I've been reading on the bus to work):

Most modern cars, however, are designed to employ a specific compression ratio, a measure of how much room is available to the fuel when the piston is at the bottom and the top of the cylinder. This compression ratio—somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to one—tolerates lower octane fuels (such as regular gasoline, good old 87 octane) without knocking. "The compression ratio is fixed by the designer of the engine," Green says. "The regular fuel will burn properly and the premium fuel will burn properly and therefore there is no reason you should pay the extra money."...

...Such high compression ratios—and the premium fuels that go with them—could be turned to efficiency, rather than speed, Green notes, especially if put into the engines of lighter cars like his Honda Civic. Other automotive fuels, such as ethanol, can also offer high octane ratings, allowing oil companies to use more volatile gasoline in such blends. But for standard cars on the road today, purchasing premium gasoline is simply paying a premium for a fuel that delivers no added benefits. "If you think you need it," Green says, "you're being very eccentric."

Holy Crap!

2007-08-01T08:33:00.000-05:00

I was just in the shower when I suddenly realized that the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned!

Your Mildly Amusing Comic Book Moment of the Day

2007-07-31T22:25:00.000-05:00

Manoman I wish I had a scanner right now. On the other hand, it may require a somewhat specific sense of humor to find the following caption excerpt insanely funny (emphasis from original):

Dr. Strange, mystic master--Valkyrie, woman warrior--The Hulk, big green strong person...

As found in Giant-Size Defenders #5, reprinted in Essential Defenders volume 2.

War is Funny?

2007-07-31T12:41:00.001-05:00

War Is Boring #1
Originally uploaded by david_axe

I just discovered War is Boring, a comic featuring the adventures of David Axe; war journalist, Danger Room contributor, and author of the similarly-titled blog War is Boring.

There's not a lot of it, but it's all pretty entertaining.

Once Again: Scientists Continue to Prove That Scientists Just Hate Mice

2007-07-31T09:57:00.000-05:00

From Joe Z. Tsien's article "The Memory Code" from the July 2007 issue of Scientific American (emphasis mine):

Witnessing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, surviving an earthquake or even plummeting 13 stories in Disney's Tower of Terror are things that are hard to forget. So we developed tests that would mimic this type of emotionally charged, episodic event. Such experiences should produce memories that are long-lasting and strong. And encoding such robust memories, we reasoned, might involve a large number of cells in the hippocampus, thus making it more likely that we would be able to find cells activated by the experience and gather enough data to unravel any patterns and organizing principles involved in the process.

The episodic events we chose include a lab version of an earthquake (induced by shaking a small container holding a mouse), a sudden blast of air to the animal's back (meant to mimic an owl attack from the sky) and a brief vertical free fall inside a small "elevator" (which, when we first started doing these experiments, was provided by a cookie jar we had in the lab).

Really, the part that had me ROTFLing was the image of some undergrad at Boston University who gets to explain to people that he got his research credits for picking up a mouse cage and shaking it around.

Must Read: High Amusement

2007-07-25T18:53:00.000-05:00

TPM brings us the full dirt on the scary-sounding "ice packs full of clay" being used by terrorists practicing bombing runs.

That Sound? That Was The Internet Exploding

2007-07-16T15:49:00.001-05:00

That sound you just heard? That was the internet exploding in a hail of guitars. Suddenly, everywhere on the internet is awash in the same rumor:

Emanuel Fialik of Pilgrim Management GmbH, which represents German industrial metal pioneers RAMMSTEIN, has issued the following press release:

"On the 13th of July 2007 the industrial gothic top act RAMMSTEIN announces that after the release of the next studio album, which is about to get finished, the current singer and frontman Till Lindemann will leave the band...

..."The new singer which was found and signed to be the new RAMMSTEIN frontman is the co-founder and ex-member of the electro industrial act KMFDM and current singer of SLICK IDIOT — En Esch — who recently moved to Berlin to join the band.

If true, it must be said that that's a combination with that's potential. And En Esch has desperately needed someone to rein him in since he left KMFDM. But most importantly? Given Rammstein's predilections for setting things (especially lead singers) on fire, here's a suggestion for all the metal press out there: whatever you do, DO NOT ASK En Esch about that time his apartment caught on fire.

Trust me on this.

Real World Supervillians Brought to Justice?

2007-07-11T10:46:00.001-05:00

AP: Two indicted in collar-bomb case.

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, already imprisoned for killing her boyfriend, was notified Tuesday that she may face charges of bank robbery, conspiracy and a firearms count, lawyer Lawrence D'Ambrosio said. He says Diehl-Armstrong, 58, is innocent.

Just in case you were so blown away that your brain has blocked out the massive bizarreness:

On Aug. 28, 2003, 46-year-old Brian Wells set out to deliver an order for two pizzas to a mysterious address that turned out to be the location of a TV tower. He turned up about an hour later and roughly two miles away at a PNC Bank branch in Summit Township, with a note demanding money and saying he had a bomb.

Wells took the money from a teller, got into his car and was soon captured by police. Hanging from his neck under his T-shirt was a triple-banded metal collar and a device with a locking mechanism that kept it in place. Attached to the collar was a bomb.

"It's going to go off," Wells said. "I'm not lying."

Someone had started a timer on the bomb, Wells said, and forced him to rob the bank.

While police waited for the bomb squad, the bomb exploded, killing Wells. Police found a gun resembling a cane in the car and a nine-page handwritten letter that included detailed instructions on what Wells was to do with the bank money and how he could unlock the collar by going through a kind of scavenger hunt, looking for clues and landmarks.

The note also included a list of rules and a threat that Wells would be "destroyed" if he failed to complete his mission.

If you haven't heard about this previously, I think you can understand why it left a lasting impression. I'm glad to see something finally happening with this case, because every once in a while someone will remind me of it and I'll start thinking about how little I would want to live in a world where I could walk around the corner and run into Dr. Doom.

Trailer Links For Me To Look At Later

2007-07-10T01:17:00.001-05:00

#1. Twitch: Trail of the Screaming Forehead (follow-up to The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

#2. Twitch: The Drummer

YES!

2007-07-09T22:09:00.001-05:00

WE GOT ONE!

We Read Books, Too

2007-07-09T13:10:00.000-05:00

Having finished Godel, Escher, Bach last week; I decided to take a second attempt at working my way through Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I originally picked it up back in February during my whirlwind tour of college campuses across the country, making it about halfway through before I stopped visiting schools and thus stopped having lots of random chunks of downtime.

I'll hopefully give you a bit of actual discussion later, but for now I offer you this random Quote of the Day:

In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant.

From Chapter II, p. 15 of the 3rd edition, this is about the closest he gets to me being able to accept some of the basic stipulations he needs to build his thesis off of. On the other hand, it's also a great description of about 2/3 of the work I did this Spring. Feel free to make of that what you will.

Some Things Are Both Shiny AND Useful

2007-07-09T10:22:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Comics Should Be Good, I discovered my new favorite piece of webjunk: the Kill Your Boyfriend random quote generator. My first quote:

"All the books I ever read had scenes where the girl has sex for the first time and it's a big disappointment. Why did they lie to me? This is brilliant!"

Quote of the Day

2007-07-06T16:05:00.001-05:00

Via Wonkette commenter Omnilation:

Oh, on the contrary, Ms. Noonan, many of use would give up our right kidneys not to understand a single word you're saying.

Apparently I Missed Out on That "Obama Girl" Phenomenon

2007-07-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is seriously one of the strangest things I've ever seen... and I've seen some pretty strange things:

Can hot pretend (I assume) lesbians launch our first woman presidency? If not, then nothing else can.

Grabbed from Wonkette.

Random Movie Review: Fatal Contact

2007-07-04T01:20:00.000-05:00

Fatal Contact (2006)
aka: Hak kuen (Cantonese title)
Written & Directed by Dennis Law
Starring Wu Jing (aka Jacky Wu), Ronald Cheng, and Miki Yeung.

I find it interesting that what seems to be most noteworthy about this movie to me is what it's missing. Which is to say: if it had had a slightly tighter script, it could easily have been an classic. Or if it had been somewhat better directed, it could easily have been an amazing film. You can understand why I find it a bit ironic to discover that it was written & directed by the same person. On a similar note, I found the consistency and solidity of a few characters to be one of the most appealing parts of the film; but what one of the things the movie is missing most is solid character development.

The premise: Wu Jing is a member of the Chinese National Wushu team who gets talked by his girlfriend into becoming an underground Sanda fighter. As one could expect, lots of great fight scenes ensue. People have been saying for years that Wu Jing is the next Jet Li, and I've been inclined to agree ever since I first saw him in 2005's SPL (released in the US as Kill Zone). All he really needs is a breakthrough film--a solid enough lead in a good enough movie--to catapult himself to stardom. And this movie comes perilously close, which is why I feel a bit let down that it doesn't quite make it.

Ultimately, there's a lot of interesting themes swirling around in this movie; conflicts and foils abound regarding loyalty, fealty, and trust on the one side with greed and suspicion on the other. The nice thing is that we get clear characters who embody these traits in their own fashion; the annoying thing is that it's incredibly clear who represents each to the extent that we're never really surprised by any character's actions, because we knew going in that that's exactly the sort of thing they'd do. It also has the common HK problem of giving us characters who would rather tell us how they feel on certain topics rather than show it through their actions.

But it doesn't quite succeed as an action movie either. It's not to say that the action isn't excellent, because it really is. It's just that the escalation from match to match eventually reaches the point where each fight feels arbitrary: each time, you're just sort of asking yourself, "Are we done yet? Or are they going to find yet another way to show us they're taking it to the next level?" And those are questions that a movie really doesn't want you to start asking yourself.

The most frustrating part about the movie is it's inability to decide whether it's an action comedy or a dramatic tragedy. And as much as I respect what it was trying to do with the latter, it was really the former that's more enjoyable. And just as you think that's where it's going, they pull out a (really rather well) telegraphed plot twist that turns into a depressingly nihilistic ending. The final scenes are really well done and could easily show up in a great movie; it just shows up at the point where I've decided that this movie isn't the one I want to see end that way.

But I'm probably coming down too hard on this movie: it's quite good, and it's immensely entertaining. If you're a fan of MMA & kung fu flicks, then you'll definitely derive enough enjoyment from it. And it's definitely a good movie in it's own right--easily 3.5 or 4 stars out of 5--it's just in that category of films that are good enough to make you wish they were even better.

The L to the O to the R-E-M

2007-07-03T17:06:00.001-05:00

I just grabbed my PIs to show them the poster-in-progress. I'd love to take a picture of it for you--if I had a decent enough camera, which I don't--just because it currently consists of a drawn outline on the white board marking the dimensions with 20-odd pieces of paper with pictures and graphs on them taped all over the place, surrounded by notes, arrows pointing all over the place, and random scribbles. It looks like the bulletin board in the tinfoil-hat guy's apartment just at the moment. I'm resisting the urge to start including references to the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the breaking of the Seventh Seal just to make the subtext explicit.

But the amusing thing that just happened was that I accidentally introduced them to Lorem ipsum while showing them the poster. See, I had several variations on "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" distributed throughout the poster to simulate the introduction, conclusion, and various captions, just using it as a placeholder for text (as it's usually used for), and apparently neither of them had heard of it before. I'm not sure if I've previously gotten the chance to tell John something novel without having just learned it myself, so I am immensely pleased with myself for the moment.

This Trailer Just BLEW MY MIND

2007-07-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Twitch, I have found out that the D-War site now has a full trailer with full CGI.

IT LOOKS AWESOME. GO CHECK IT OUT.

It's a Korean fantasy/kaiju film involving a giant serpent which eats Los Angeles. The Hollywood pitch session would be "Lord of the Rings meets Godzilla." I would like to take this moment to heartily endorse this product and/or service.

If your experience is anything like mine, the web page will take forever to load and the trailer will load in a super-jumpy manner. I recommend just selecting the download option once you get the trailer up, and just watch it once you're done.

2007-07-02T21:48:00.000-05:00

Above: Trailer for Lust, Caution. Some will tell you this is Ang Lee's new film, others will tell you it is Little Tony Leung's new film; I will tell you it's Lee-Hom Wang's new film. I didn't know it was being made for US release until now; maybe this means Mahiru no hoshizora will get released with english subtitles somewhere? Please?

Below is the trailer for the new Lee-Hom Wang single, Luo Ye Gwe Geng. According to this blog, it's "inspired by" the movie although it will not be in it; it is also being credited to "Kuang Y.M.", Lee-Hom's character in the movie. What does all this mean? I dunno.

All this & more, originally via Twitch

Video comments:
A: The sound quality is poor.

B: After what I've heard off of Heroes of Earth, this seems like a major step back for Lee-Hom. Gotta pay the bills, I guess.

Brain. Gone.

2007-06-29T15:01:00.000-05:00

I can tell I've been working on this project too hard & too much the past week or so when I suddenly have thoughts like this"

"You know, this would really make a great T-Shirt!"

...

In other news, I've now installed Acrobat Professional & Illustrator 10.0 on my lab machine (ooh! a whole integer of upgrade on Illustrator!), and the conversion of Excel charts to pdfs to Illustrator objects works surprisingly... at all. More importantly, it does everything I want it to in about five minutes. So yay.

Phase 1: Poster Presentation: Conquered

2007-06-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

I did my big presentation of the project I've been working on for the last year (aka: since I joined the lab) today. It went pretty well, although I had a surprisingly large number of points where I went, "Why does this slide have this title/chart combination? This chart totally doesn't prove that point!"

Sigh.

Other than that, it seemed to go pretty well. We've already figured out the basics of what charts and pictures are going to get turned into figures for the poster (the poster being phase 2, and phase 3 being the complete destruction of the city, or maybe a paper instead. We'll see how we feel once we get that far. But the current step is figuring out how to convert all of the figures from Excel or R to Illustrator, since apparently I'm the only person in the lab who has ever used Excel or R to create charts.

Seriously. Apparently everyone else uses Matlab or LabView for chart generation.

WTF?

Random Life Updates

2007-06-27T10:11:00.001-05:00

* I'm engaged. Next summer, here in the Twin Cities.

* I'm going to Grad School. University of Washington's Graduate Program in Neurobiology & Behavior. Cris--my fiance--will also be attending, in some sort of Micro- or Immuno- centered Bio program whose specific name & nature--obviously--escapes me at the moment. We'll be moving to Seattle at the end of August.

* I'm presenting the data from my last year of research tomorrow. After that, I need to have the poster done by the 11th at the latest (one of my advisors is moving to DC for a staff position of some sort at NSF, the detail of which continue to elude me); and then I need to be done with the paper by the end of the summer.

You can guess which of these is the reason I'm posting this information now, as opposed to some other time, at your leisure.

Also, I'm hoping to revamp the blog and start using it regularly again soon. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. We'll see how that goes.

Creepy Ads

2007-06-07T10:20:00.000-05:00

From a Google Ads sidebar:

No More Dopamine
Your Depression Cured In 3 Minutes. Enjoy Life Without Dopamine
www.3-minute-depression-cure.com

Maybe it's just me, but I think a life without dopamine sounds pretty depressing in and of itself. Although I've gotta say that the website itself is even more bizarre. I mean, it starts with "WARNING: Do not take any dopamine until you read this!!!" What's not to like?

Okay, this is just awesome.

2007-05-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

I have no idea where this originally came from, but I would like to thank Danger Room for this anatomic simulation of what happens when you get punched in the face.

"FORESHADOWING"

2007-05-10T15:21:00.000-05:00

So the abstract submission deadline for Neuroscience 2007 is coming up next Tuesday. A week ago, I didn't care a whit. But on Monday, my PI mentioned off-hand that he'd been meaning to ask me if I wanted to present a poster at the conference.

Did I? HELL YEAH!

Of course, that means that my entire week at work has been a rush to figure out funding (because I'll no longer be in the lab when Neuroscience runs around) and have results ready (so I actually have something to put in the abstract I have to submit by Tuesday). I've pretty much got the first half vaguely figured out. The second, on the other hand, isn't going as well as it could be.

So we were just in his office, discussing how we're both starting to feel excited about the results and that we were finally getting confident that we'd have an interesting story to tell. But, I explained, although I felt I was on track to have good results, I didn't feel like I was on track to have good results on Tuesday. He replied that it's fine, I should just write up a description of the experiment and in terms of the results I could have a... what's the word?

"Premonition?"

"I think in the sciences we prefer the word 'prediction'," I said.

"No, that's too specific. We need something more vague. You know how to write--what's the word they use in writing? Foreshadowing!"

"Foreshadowing? Actually, that puts me in the perfect frame of reference. Thanks." And oddly enough, that's completely true. Foreshadowing.

A Question About Casshern

2007-03-09T10:26:00.000-06:00

Casshern: Awesomest movie ever made or awesomest movie that will ever be?

The Quotable Asimov

2007-02-27T21:02:00.000-06:00

While reading a recent used bookstore miracle discovery--The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov--I came across this section and laughed out loud. I now realize that this may possibly mark one of the geekiest moments of my life, but I pass it on to you regardless:

The puzzle to which I have referred began in 1794, when a Finnish chemist, Johan Gadolin, examined an odd rock which had been found near the Swedish hamlet Ytterby and decided that it was a new "earth." Gadolin gave this "rare earth" the name "yttria," after Ytterby. Later the German chemist Martin Klaproth (the discoverer of uranium) found that yttria could be divided into two "earths," for one of which he kept the name yttria, while he named the other "ceria" (after the newly discovered planetoid Ceres). But the Swedish chemist Carl Gustav Mosander subsequently broke these down further into a series of different earths. All eventually proved to be oxides of new elements named the "rare-earth metals." By 1907, 14 such elements had been identified. In order of increasing atomic weight they are:
lanthanum (from a Greek word meaning "hidden")

cerium (from Ceres)

praseodymium (from the Greek for "green twin," after a green line in its spectrum)

neodymium ("new twin")

samarium (from "samarskite," the mineral in which it was found)

europium (from Europse)

gadolinium (in honor of Johan Gadolin)

terbium (from Ytterby)

dysprosium (from a Greek word meaning "hard to get at")

holmium (from Stockholm)

erbium (from Ytterby)

thulium (from Thule, an old name for Scandinavia)

ytterbium (from Ytterby)

lutetium (from Lutetia, an old name for Paris)

Notice a trend? Apparently even chemists can get bored with naming new elements after a while... As the author himself puts it in an aside later the same page:

(Yttrium, though found in the same ores as the rare earths and similar to them in properties, is not a rare-earth metal. It is, however, named after Ytterby. Four elements honor that hamlet--which is overdoing it.)

While we are on this most obscure of topics, it should be noted that there are not only two elements named after France--Francium and Gallium--there is also an element named after gay Paris, Lutetium.

There. I have now alienated or just weirded out anyone who might possibly look at this blog.

Le Sigh

2007-02-26T23:38:00.000-06:00

An ambitious lawmaker has successfully found a more successful waste of his time than just sitting around and taking bribes:

A US lawmaker has submitted a bill seeking honorary citizenship for Anne Frank, whose family sought in vain to secure refuge in the United States during World War II, his office said Monday.

Because all famous dead people should be US citizens. Who do you think's next?
A. Jesus
B. Julius Ceasar
C. Adam Smith
D. All of the above

Take your pick.

Good News For Overly Talky, Cerebral Film Fans

2007-02-21T12:09:00.000-06:00

(By which I mean people like me.)

Cahiers du Cinema has simultaneously started publishing bilingually--in English--and online. The interface will quickly become the most annoying thing in the world, but for the moment it still has an old-fashioned charm. For a good sense of what you're getting into, check out the article on pp. 86-88 on the deconstruction of gesture in Jackie Chan's The Young Master. The magazine will clearly be available at http://www.e-cahiersducinema.com/ at some point in the future, but for now you can check it out here. Have fun!

(Thanks to twitch.)

Don't Worry

2007-02-21T09:04:00.000-06:00

Math anxiety saps working memory needed to do math:

"It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person's working memory," said Ashcroft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Ashcroft said while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small fraction of a person's working memory, harder computations require much more.

Worrying about math takes up a large chunk of a person's working memory stores as well, spelling disaster for the anxious student who is taking a high-stakes test.

Easy Jokes

2007-02-17T19:27:00.000-06:00

There are certain things that look inherently stupid. One of them is Carrot Top doing anything.

Links (briefly)

2007-02-07T10:37:00.000-06:00

Damn.

Double Damn.

Charles Krauthammer is a douchebag

2007-02-03T13:57:00.000-06:00

Just so you know, I've given up on pretending that I can sound distinguished and educated so I can now publically admit that "douchebag" is my favorite word:

We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse.

Shorter Krauthammer, taken out of context: "I am now so desperate to save face that my arguments sound more like an apology to Saddam Hussein than a justification for my own goverment."

B-B-Back on the Set (and covering all bets)

2007-01-28T21:01:00.000-06:00

When I don't make any sense, you can probably assume an obscure musical reference is involved.

Anyways, someone at my first graduate school recruitment weekend revealed he'd looked this up before he flew out and I was totally embarassed at my complete abandonment of the endeavour. So I'm back, even if just for the moment. Hopefully you'll get more on the grad school hunt later.

Anyways, I'm alive and all is (more or less) well with the world.

Transmission out.

Excerpted from my SfN itinerary

2006-10-12T12:38:00.000-05:00

366 conflicts found in your Itinerary.

A bit overboard? Nah...

Poster Presentations I Absolutely Have to See At SfN, Part 1

2006-10-11T16:44:00.000-05:00

"Cocaine, dance communication, and responsiveness to reward in honey bees" -- A. B. BARRON, R. MALESZKA, G.E. ROBINSON

Dem Pitchline, Usable For Next Five Years

2006-10-03T01:47:00.000-05:00

"Family Values. They talk the talk, we walk the walk."

Abstracts as Existential Philosophy

2006-10-02T12:12:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading a paper, and I get to the last sentence of the abstract:

This theory defines optimal behaviour in a world characterized by uncertainty, and provides a coherent way of describing sensorimotor processes.

I fully expect no one else to be particularly amused by this, but I was laughing out loud.

Tiny Apocalypses

2006-09-14T18:01:00.000-05:00

Three minor revelations I had today while attending the Presidential Symposium on Neuroscience at the U.

The first came at the end of the day, while touring through the posters being presented by grad students and techs. That was that even though I often tell people who ask what I plan to study in grad school that I'm undecided since everything's just so interesting, that's clearly sort of a lie since out of all the posters people were presenting today, I only really cared about a half dozen or so. And those all related to reward, drug addiction, or plasticity. So pretty clearly I've worked out at least a bit of a niche for myself.

The second was noting a common theme through many of the talks. One thing I should get out of the way now is that many of the presentations today (and tomorrow) are by big names--or big findings--in the field. We saw Masakazu Konishi presenting on the seminal work in sound localization in barn owls and the jamming avoiding response in Eigenmannia; a presentation by Eve Marder, the president-elect of the Society for Neuroscience; and James Hudspeth presenting on the role of the hair bundle in sound amplification. Tomorrow we'll get to see--off the top of my head--Wolfram Schultz and Eric Nestler, amongst many others. So because of that, it was interesting to see how they approached their research and would go about solving problems.

A common theme was that many of the presenters were able to sum up the idea of their work at the beginning of the talk in the form of a question, either about the big picture or just about the area they're looking at. A few of them follow (paraphrased):

David Anderson, from "Molecular Genetic Analysis of Neural Circuits for Innate Behaviors in Flies and Mice":

How are circuits that detect aversive stimuli wired to generate avoidance behaviors?

Is the negative valence associated with aversive stimuli hardwired or is it malleable?

Eve Marder, from "Variability, Compensation, and Homeostasis in Neuronal Networks":

How tightly tuned do the paramaters that govern synaptic strength and intrinsic properties need to be for "good enough" network behavior?

Masakazu Konishi, from "From Instinct to Brain":

Are there single cells responding to the location of a sound source?

There were more, but I forgot to right them down.

Finally, while Masakazu Konishi was talking about barn owls it occurred to me that part of what made his experiments work was his conscious focus on a model animal that exemplified the behavior he was interested in studying. Although this is an obvious enough aspect of experimental design, it's one that I at least often sort of lose in the shuffle. While randomly pondering the idea of a good model animal for reward and addiction (nothing really came to mind), I realized that the limbic system is A: the system which seems to be responsible for addictive behaviors and B: a phylogenetically old system, to the extent that (as I understand it) it's generally found in reptiles. As far as I can tell, no one's ever examined reptiles for addictive behaviors and precious little has been done on examining reward in general in reptiles. This makes me suspect that there is a fallacy in my logic, but it seems worth examining in more detail to figure out what it is.

Because I Hear Christmas is the Most Dangerous Time of Year

2006-09-12T18:44:00.000-05:00

Isn't it odd how there are always rumors of new terrorist attacks whenever a moslem holiday is about to roll around? I mean, thank God we don't have to deal with this every Thursday evening, or I might go insane.

Although I do understand that many on the right that there's no better way to refrain from violence, anger, envy, greed, lust, angry and sarcastic retorts, and gossip than nuking the Great Satan. Unless someone's on the verge of admitting that the al Qaeda in specific--and the Arab and Muslim worlds in general--might have reasons to be pissed off at America other than fanatic fundamentalism?

I didn't think so.

Things I Knew in Fourth Grade

2006-09-10T16:22:00.000-05:00

From the front page of Yahoo: How much is too much?

Find out what salt is actually made of and why it may be bad for you.

Answering the question no one dared to ask, "Why doesn't it work over email?"--it does!

2006-09-06T16:26:00.000-05:00

Rupert Sheldrake--trying to further cement his reputation as the man most capable of balancing respectability with public prounciations of crazy stuff--apparently announced to the British Association for the Advancement of Science today that he has demonstrated the existence of "telephone telepathy". Now, I'm not sure I buy it, and it's certainly crazy, but it sounds pretty cool.

For published results, the best I can find is this 2005 paper from Perceptual & Motor Skills--"TESTING FOR TELEPATHY IN CONNECTION WITH E-MAILS"--republished in full here. I know nothing about the journal, and honestly don't have the slightest clue how to look up its impact factor (I suck, I know), so what you see is what you get.

The Neurophile Enters the Political Fray

2006-09-01T16:42:00.000-05:00

For a long time, your author--the Neurophile--had assumed that insofar as some part of his brain--whichever piece of neuroanatomy is responsible for hoping the Democrats take the Senate (probably the extended amygdala)--cared about the Virginia Senatorial race, he was willing to vaguely offer his support--albeit primarily in the form of good-feeling-warmness-waves--to Jim Webb, if only because he isn't a racist son of a bitch, unlike his opponent George Allen.

(Links not provided--people completely out of touch with the world of American politics will just have to use Google or ask nicely for a brief list).

He held this stance even knowing of his history as a Reagan appointee, longtime Republican, and hater-of-Vietnam-War-haters.

However, it has been brought to his attention by Mr. Webb's wikipedia entry that he played a key role in the writing of Rules of Engagement; one of the worst, tritest, most confusing, poorly assembled and nonsensical films that the Neurophile has had the unique displeasure of viewing. In the theater, no less. As a result, I am forced to rescind our tacit unconscious endorsement of Jim Webb. Lacking a candidate I can viably pretend to support (I mean, you could go third party but why throw your vote away?), I will instead suggest that the honorable state of Virginia respectfully secede from the Union before embarking on the large-scale construction project of digging Panama-Canal-like furrows into the ground and heading out for the high seas. Preferable while taking the utmost care to prevent the wholesale destruction of DC and Maryland. Well... at least Maryland.

Friday Random 10 - 1 September 2006

2006-09-01T15:12:00.000-05:00

1. Pigface - Divebomber
2. Amon Tobin - Deo
3. Charlie Parker - Take Five
4. Ministry - Rio Grande Blood
5. Charlie Parker & Miles Davis - A Night in Tunisia
6. Anjali - Space Lust (In the Space Dust)
7. Morphine - Gone For Good
8. Danger Doom - Old School (feat. Talib Kweli)
9. Zeromancer - Plasmatic
10. Empirion - Quark

Straight Dope

2006-09-01T12:53:00.000-05:00

Shut up, Mitt.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, said on Thursday his administration's new restrictions on stem cell research are aimed at heading off an "Orwellian" future.

Further Entries in the "Uh, Duh?" Department

2006-08-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

Today's candidate for the Least Informative Headline Ever Read By a Neuroscientist award: Chronic Alcohol Exposure Can Affect Brain Protein Expression.

Hurricane As Common Insult

2006-08-30T11:57:00.000-05:00

So I realize this violates our family-friendly policy (wow, we're just tearing up the old rules handbook today, aren't we?), but I was divinely inspired by Wonkette last night, and since I can't post this as a comment due to their hipsters-only commenting policy, I will subject this upon the neuroscience-interested readers of the America instead.

Special thanks to the good Flamingo of Disco, we have 15 Inches Improved: NSFW, if people you work with are both very touchy AND capable of reading very large print.

Creationists Still Stupid

2006-08-30T11:34:00.000-05:00

I know, I know... this is theoretically a creationism-argumentation-free blog. But still.

As you can probably tell, I'm taking a bit of down time today, as my move across town is pretty much done, and my presentation of the summer's research was yesterday, so I'm getting a bit of a breather before I start learning LabVIEW and how to program the robot arm. Reading PZ's dissection of Chapter 3 of the PIG guide to ID (which, when written like that, sounds like a great idea for a book), and I came across this snippet.

…von Baer’s view “was confounded with and then transformed into” the evolutionary doctrine that the embryos of higher organisms pass through the adult forms of lower organisms in the course of their development. It was this evolutionary distortion of von Baer’s work that Darwin considered the strongest evidence for his theory.

In the 1860’s, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (pronounced “heckle”) made some drawings to illustrate this distorted view, and Darwin relied on the drawings in later editions of The Origin of Species and in The Descent of Man (1871).

Now, PZ is tearing Wells apart for pulling out the Haeckel canard. But I'm here on different business entirely: as an American of Germanic descent who took three years of German in high school AND who listens to German industrial music, I can assure you that "Haeckel" is not pronounced "heckle." In fact, the best pronunciation I can think of to recommend to an American audiences... is "Haeckel."

He even lies in his pronunciation suggestions! Truly, Jonathan Wells is a GREAT BIG HACK! Someone inject him with HPV and make him grow horns!

Does this work?

2006-08-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

Paging Plant Master Flash...

Agençe France-Presse: Super-plants from outer space:

China plans to blast seeds into space in a novel way of boosting the nation's food production, reports say.

Scientists hope that exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity will cause genetic mutations in the seeds that will improve crop yield back on Earth...

..."Exposed to special environments such as cosmic radiation and microgravity, some seeds will mutate to such an extent that they may produce much higher yields and improved quality," the paper says.

Nine categories of seeds, including grains, cash crops and forage plants will be aboard the satellite, it says.

China has been experimenting with space-bred seeds for years, with rice and wheat exposed to the universe resulting in increased yields, the paper says.

Space-bred tomato and green pepper seeds have resulted in harvests 10-20% larger than ordinary seeds, while vegetables grown from space-bred seeds have a higher vitamin content, it adds.

Flash, this is totally your area of expertise. So does this actually work the way the say it does, or has the nation of China as a collective whole read that worn-out copy of Fantastic Four #1 too many times?

On Jackalope Manufacturing Processes

2006-08-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

Tara links to an article from yesterday's NYT on the history of the discovery that HPV causes cervical cancer. If you want to read more, read the article or her discussion of it. I just wanted to make sure that everyone who reads this blog understands that Scientists Are Bastards, and We Should Not Be Messed With:

Research that could have led them in the right direction was done in the 1930’s by Dr. Richard Shope of the Rockefeller University, who on a hunting trip heard a friend describe seeing rabbits with “horns,” which were actually large warts.

Dr. Shope asked his friend to send some of the horns. He then ground them up, filtered them through porcelain that let only tiny virus-size particles through, and injected the filtrate into other rabbits, which grew horns in turn.

You understand that, citizens of the world? You mess with our gardens, and WE WILL INJECT YOU WITH VIRUSES THAT GIVE YOU CANCER AND MAKE YOU GROW HORNS.

That guy who advertises natural cures for everything at 2 in the morning? You're next.

Sadly, Civilization Seems Rock-Steady

2006-08-22T15:46:00.000-05:00

In reference to yesterday's link: the world has not yet come to an end. Also of note is that I just spent ten minutes actually tracking down the name of the Muslim holiday in question, which seems to be Laylat ul Isra' wa-l-Miraaj, to cut-&-paste from wiki. Why is this of note? Because the only people on the internet who seem to be talking about it are people who are proposing--so far as I can tell, out of thin air--that the day would be quite opportune for a unified Muslim attack on Israel. Why? No reason... just seems to be an opportune date. The closest I could find to an explanation was Bernard Lewis' claim at the WSJ that it was "indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22." But it's now 1:20 AM in Tehran (no, I have no idea why Iran is an extra half hour off of GMT), so I suppose this must have been the response in question:

Iran said Tuesday it was ready for "serious negotiations" on its nuclear program, but a semiofficial news agency said the government was unwilling to abandon nuclear enrichment — the key U.S. demand.

Top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani delivered a written response to ambassadors of Britain, China, Russia, France, Germany and Switzerland to a package of incentives aimed at persuading Iran to roll back on its nuclear program.

Larijani refused to disclose whether the response included an offer to suspend uranium enrichment, and no details of Iran's response were released. The state-run television quoted Larijani as telling the diplomats Iran "is prepared as of Aug. 23 to enter serious negotiations" with the countries that proposed the incentives package.

Damn those crazed Persians! What fanatical audacity to give us a diplomatic statement that they are prepared for serious negotiations--and on a holiday, too!

By the way, I think it bears noting just how significance this day is in the Muslim calendar by looking at the events it commemorates (thanks to wiki):

Laylat ul Isra' wa-l-Miraaj (The Night of the Journey and Ascension) - is on 27 of Rajab. It is the night when Muhammad was, according to Hadiths, taken to "the furthest mosque" (generally understood to be Jerusalem) on a Buraq (a beast resembling horse with wings; some people consider it a cherub) and ascended to the highest level of the heavens. It is said that he negotiated with God about the number of prayers, which started at fifty a day, but on his way down he met Moses who asked him to ask for a reduction in the number because the requirement was difficult for Muhammad's people. Muhammad returned to God and several times asked for and was granted a reduction of five prayers, until the number was reduced to five in total, with the blessing that if they were properly performed, the performers would be credited with fifty prayers instead of five.

I can clearly see how one could associate a holiday signifying the importance of haggling with launching a nuclear assault on Israel.

Oh, I'm sorry. Was I lying again? I think I may have been.

Your Daily Sign of the Apocalypse

2006-08-21T14:10:00.000-05:00

Wonkette: ABC Reports: Fifth, Possibly Sixth Seal Opened

And in related news, you can now download Jack Van Impe in podcast form. I'm seriously hoping that at some point Jack points out that this is, in and of itself, a sign of the pending apocalypse.

Nerd Alert

2006-08-18T11:56:00.000-05:00

Via TBogg, I have learned that a select few are attempting to redub the liberal blogosphere the "Sinestrosphere". Now as anyone who didn't fail organic chemistry knows, this is probably a reference to the early Latin meaning of sinister, which would be "left". As such, this is probably just a desperate ploy to get left-wingers to refer to the crazy people on the far-conservative end as the "Dextrosphere", because no one remembers that the word dexter exists. Of course, this means they're being anti-southpaw bigots because the negative connotations to the word "sinister" are due to prejudice against the "unnaturalness" of lefties. Which really just goes to demonstrate that in 1000 years, someone will start referring to us as the "Gayosphere" and everyone will laugh at them.

But anyways, TBogg points out an alternate option as to the intended reference: Sinestro, whom the hipsters among us can probably hazily recall from such classics of television as Challenge of the SuperFriends (warning: I only watched the first ten seconds of the video).

Now, Sinestro is the arch-nemesis of Green Lanterns everywhere, but this seems to be a transparent attempt by the Right to claim Hal Jordan as being on their side. Hal Jordan, a man who spent the seventies road tripping across the country in a beat-up old truck learning about racism, misogyny, and other social ills. Now, if it comes to some sort of liberal/conservative throw-down, I've got no interest in fighting to keep Hal Jordan on our side (dude got some issues), but I think it's pretty clear that somebody's observational prowess might be slightly lacking. Anyways, when it comes to Green Lanterns, I think it's pretty clear which one the Right gets to call dibs on.

Friday Random 10 - 18 August 2006

2006-08-18T11:20:00.000-05:00

1. Public Enemy - What You Need is Jesus
2. Zeromancer - Doctor Online
3. Atmosphere - Vampires
4. Natacha Atlas - Soliel d'Egypte
5. Murder Inc. - Mrs. Whiskey Name
6. Prodigy - Wake Up Call
7. Underworld - Juanita/Kiteless
8. Underworld - Push Upstairs
9. Sun Ra - Nuclear War
10. Tom Waits - Lowside of the Road

Okay, okay, folks.

2006-08-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

It's officially dead. So quit already.

via Wonkette

Moving = Not Posting

2006-08-15T10:53:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't had the time to post much lately. All I can say is that I'm moving across time and hardcore data-crunching at work.

I'll try to get some light link-blogging done over the rest of the week, but that's about the most I can offer for the moment.

Jesus!

2006-08-08T13:36:00.000-05:00

Oh my God, Michele Bachmann is running for Congress against Patty Wetterling and I'm just finding out now?

Shudder.

Now I have to decide whether I'm giving my refundable donation to Hatch or Wetterling. I'm leaning Wetterling right now, if only because I'm not worried about Pawlenty trying to nuke other countries. You know, it's the little things.

Further explorations of event and emerging timing

2006-08-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Further explorations of event and emerging timing, by Howard N. Zelaznik, Purdue University

He's aiming this presentation at Grad Students and other people who aren't really familiar with his research. If true, pray Jesus.

Sort of an obvious statement: we know that timing is important; accuracy and precision are important throughout the use of motor skills. But does this mean that we can be certain that time is controlled throughout the system? Not necessarilly.

A motor skill that is frequently tested is tapping: a metronome starts a rhythm, and a subject taps out that rhythm even after the metronome ends. People use this approach because everyone intuitively believes that there is some general purpose clock somewhere in the system. So the question we're looking at today is whether or not this is a good technique to examine timing.

Two tasks:
Tapping timing - 325,400,475,550 and 800 ms
Circle drawing timing - same periods
--pencil and paper, the goal is to draw a circle in rhythm with the metronome so they reach them twelve o'clock when the metronome fires.
They compare the two, testing timing precision for each after the metronome stops. So, "are individual differences in timing correlated across tasks?" NO! Similar timing missteps, but they do not correlate across subjects (if I understood right)

Circle drawing:
Timing to 12 o'clock vs. timing to 9 o'clock vs. tapping
--circle drawing and tapping seem to be using different timing systems; this is probably due to the involvement of multiple motor systems in circle drawing
--circle drawing: their velocity looks pretty much the same no matter what degree you look at
--tapping: maximum upward velocity of finger scales over time(?maybe?)
--tapping is more variable than circle drawing

Intermittent circles: draw a circle, than pause.
--continuous circles correlate (in terms of temporal discrimination) with neither tapping nor intermittent circles
--tapping, however, correlates with intermittent circles (both in terms of total time, time moving, and time paused)
--intermittent circles: only the time paused matters correlates to timing accuracy

Examining patients with unilateral cerebellar lesions perform circle drawing tasks and tapping task:
--tapping and intermittent circles: timing is much more variable in the impaired limb than the unimpaired limb. However, the continuous circle is the same in both. This seems to confirm the behavioral observation that a different system is responsible.
--examined slow vs. fast movements: seems to indicate (I'm not sure how) that smoothness of movement is responsible for accuracy in timing.

Simple framework: "a representation of time is used to time the onset of discrete events--tapping is a classic example--this is known as event timing."
--the other type of timing is "emergent timing," which is smooth rather than discrete and has no timing requirements. Yes, this sounds paradoxical: everyone in the room is having problems with this. His example is that if you're running around a track at a regular rate, you aren't producing time but rather effort: your total amount of muscular effort determines the timing. Trying to prove this, he went into some pilot data. I'm not going to relate anything about it other than that he seems to demonstrate that as little a change as smoothly tapping in the air rather than tapping in the table engages the emergent timing system. Just to make it clear: there is a continuum between the discrete and smooth actions.

And I wasn't able to park next to an outlet this morning, so the battery, it is dying. If I'm not able to post again this morning, that would probably be why.

No, Seriously?

2006-08-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

Is this really necessary?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning consumers not to purchase or to use high-strength hydrogen peroxide products, including a product marketed as "35 Percent Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide," for medicinal purposes because they can cause serious harm or death when ingested. FDA recommends that consumers who are currently using high-strength hydrogen peroxide stop immediately and consult their health care provider.

Did I just miss the collapse of civilization over my lunch break or something?

Questions for the Peanut Gallery

2006-08-07T14:11:00.000-05:00

I guess I really have two questions here.

The first question is fairly concrete: based on this morning's posts, is anyone interested in continuance? Do you find it useful in that format--more-or-less unadultered live note-taking--and did you find the stuff posted at all interesting or followable? Do you want more, or are you confident you'll just end up ignoring such posts in the future?

The second question is a bit more abstract and philosophical. Although I realize there are other blogs better dedicated to such ethical questions than this one, I realized that I felt a bit of a quandary as I was typing the posts up this morning. On the one hand, these are talks that are obviously intended and prepared for somewhat-public consumption. But at the same time, all of these researchers are presenting data that is in progress, unpublished, and often just throwing out ideas about what they're working on. Even today, there were a few instances where I didn't write down some sections where they started discussing their own novel hypotheses, because I didn't want to worry about accidentally scooping them to the outside world.

So I guess ultimately, the question is this: what do you think about posting detailed notes of people's presentations at conferences and summer institutes such as this? My own gut instinct is to lean towards the argument that since this is being prepared for presentation, this is probably information that people are willing to have available to the public. But at the same time, I've never been a PI, and I've certainly never been invited to present anything to anybody outside of my own classrooms, so it's possible that I'm not appropriately understanding of what goes on towards that end of things.

So what do you think: am I being too paranoid, or too inconsiderate? I'd really like to know what y'all think.

Cognitive Representations of Space in Primate Posterior Parietal Cortex

2006-08-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

Cognitive Representations of Space in Primate Posterior Parietal Cortex by Matt Chafee, Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota.

Two types of representations: dependent on sensorimotor information and independen of sensorimotor. "Thinking" requires ability to separate from direct input.

Most basic description of brain: sensorimotor interface. Every area of neocortex; either represents sensory information, outputs motor, or connects between them. How can cognition emerge in such an architecture?

Parietal cortex: important for spatial processing

Posterior parietal: spatial sensorimotor interface
--Key roles:
----Visual attention
----Visual spatial coordinate transformation
----Motor intention

These are "logical attributes" of a sensorimotor interface. Seems to bottleneck where vision is funnelling into motor--may be why parietal plays such a role in attention. "Transformation": visual information has to be tranformed from one reference frame to another (not sure if I got that right).

Direct projections from parietal to primary motor, superior colliculus: access to motor and visual.

Parietal neurons: particularly active when moving attention from one visual field to another. Maps very nicely to hemispheric neglect.

Two basic forms of hemineglect:
--one centered in view-centered spatial coordinates (will only copy right side of scene)
--one object-centered (will copy right side of each object)

Neural correlates of coordinate transform:
--placed object in visual field while monkey looking somewhere else --> parietal neuron most strongly stimulated when attention elsewhere.

How do you build cognition into these circuits?
1. Sensorimotor dependence: "neurons represent the location of a stimulus or the direction of a movement"
--attention == ?; working memory == buffering operation; motor intention attempt to move signal backwards; decision process == ?maximizing response?
--training monkey to remember target location: put visual stimulus in neuron's receptive field, continues firing 3 sec. after stim. disappears.

2. Sensorimotor independence: neurons represent abstract spatial information generated by a cognitive operation.

Constructional apraxia: difficulty in computing spatial relationships
--took test for apraxia, converted it into form monkeys could perform. Monkeys would focus eye on center of display, then configuration of shapes would appear ("model"). Next, "incomplete copy": shape appears but missing a piece. Important: all shapes same when missing piece. Thus, each model is an inverted T composed of squares with an extra square attached somewhere. Then they get choice between squares to add to shape to complete appropriately. Must press key at right time (when correct square is highlighted) to add it to shape. Hope is to look at cognitive functions upstream of motor output.
--some cells: activity is correlated to location of missing element. Will provide same input to retina (inverted T-shape), but will differentially fire based on which square is missing from shape.
--some cells: potentially firing when predicting that inverted T will be presented to them. So looked at them with inverted T with two extra squares, but only one would disappear. Thus confirming that cell's firing is correlating to missing area (I'm not sure if I followed this right).
--controlling to make sure not motor output signal: potentially responsible for saccades. Cells basically have no activity during saccade test; neither during delay interval nor during actual saccade.
--more than 40% of cells measured by array carrying signal involved in this: possibly training for new cognitive functions (monkeys don't do this in the while), maybe even developing new circuits during course of training.

~85% predictive accuracy on determining location of missing square based on firing rates of cells. Error trials: error in square selection correlates to error in firing rates.

Are the cells active whenever you direct attention to a specific location? No. When you just give them dots to look at in same location, little activity in same population.

Neural activity during object construction:
--tried shifting model L & R vs. shifting incomplete object L & R: is cell tied to object-relative activity, or relative to screen or visual fields? Cells consistently fire for square in relation to object, regardless of object location.

Then a bunch of stuff I didn't quite follow. Tired, need more coffee.

Due to moving of object, were able to check activity of cells when attention (missing object) in different parts of retinocentric space: changes, based on where missing square would be. So although they fire in relation to object, not visual field, there is some level at which location in visual field is effecting firing strength.

Time-resolved decoding:
--cells responding to viewer-centered side preceed cells responding to object-centered side

Conclusion: abstract representation
--encodes computed spatial information
--not spatial vision
--not motor planning
--not eye position
--context selective
--predicts spatial choice

Q: monkeys activated both object & viewer-centered reference frames, then acted on one. This implies ability to choose one over the other.
A: Discussion of future work

Q: Monkeys are very over-trained. Is it possible that you can train these monkeys in one direction or another, that you're training these monkeys to adopt one reference frame over another?
A: Totally.

Planning Uncertainty

2006-08-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

"Planning Uncertainty" by Giuseppe Pellizzer, Brain Sciences Center, Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center & Dept. of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota

Most experiments about motor control: implemented with equiprobable targets. However, we also know that some motor responses are more likely to be required than others. But the amount of information available is dependent on the context.

[POSTSCRIPT: Sorry, but I had some major problems following this presentation so halfway through I stopped typing regularly, because what had come before was mostly gibberish.]

Hick-Hyman Law: The reaction time is a function of the number of stimuli/responses:

RT = a + b Log_2 (N)

A good description for conditions where the stimulus and response are not very compatible. But it is poorer for desccribing conditions of higher compatibility.

Topic: Effect of directional uncertainty in reaching tasks (high stimulus-response compatibility)

Instructed-delay task: after delay, moving dot to center of other dots (I really didn't quite follow the intricacies. I was distracted by my brownie).

Hypotheses for motor preparation with discrete spatial cues: the system engaged in processing multiple directional info:
1. has a limited processing capacity;
2. can process multiple alternatives simultaneously
3. spends time to initiate a motor response in relation to the amount of processing capacity attributed to the direction of the target.

Capacity-sharing model: RT = a + b(1-1/N)
--pretty good fit of data from instructed-delay task
--RT not related to spatial dispersion of cues
--but some subject populations seem to fit to Hick-Hyman law

Instructed-delay task: continuous cue
--present a range of direction in which the dot can appear, which will be moved to the center.

Instructed-delay task: MONKEYS!!!
--0 cues, 1 cue, 2 cues (45 deg from each other), 2 cues (135 degs), 4 cues (135 deg), 4 cues (270 deg)

We know: many motor cortex neurons are tuned to direction of movement, mapped in orderly fashion.

Q (his): "What determines the level of neuronal activity when there are multiple directional cues?"

4 hypotheses:
1: ? (Most powerful cue, I think)
2: Averaged direction of cues.
3: Sum of neuron's activity associated with each cue
4: Complicated: activity modulated by the average direction with motivational activity affected by dispersion of cues (no, I can't really parse that either)

#4 has highest R^2 when matching data.

Neuronal activity: not dependent solely on cue # or solely on cue range.
--reaction time is inversely correlated with level of neuronal activity (unsurprising)

Conclusions:
--Humans: results suggests that human subjects processed differently discrete and continuous spatial uncertainty
--Monkeys: spatial distribution of cues was an important determinant of neuronal activity and behavior (i.e., reaction time)
--activity of motor & dorsal premotor neurons reflected the spatial uncertainty of the movement to be selected
--monkeys processed similarly discrete and continuous spatial uncertainty

Specialization and Breakdown of Spatial Representations

2006-08-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

"Specialization and Breakdown of Spatial Representations: Mind, brain, and development" by Barbara Landau, John Hopkins University

Williams Syndrome: unusual cognitive profile, studied by Ursula Bellugi, article published in 1994.

Phenotypic characteristics:
--Unusual facial morphology
--Small stature
--Defects of organs, esp. viscera & heart
--Commonly mild to moderate retardation (ave. IQ ~65)

Brain characteristics:
--Reduced overall volume
--Substantial abnormalities of sulcal folding (van Essen, 2006)
--Structural abnormalities at occipital-parietal juncture and in hippocampus

Genetics of Williams syndrome:
(from Meyer-Lindenberg et al, 20?? review)
Region of deletion: key genes include LimK1 (most strongly implicated in spatial deficits), Elastin, GTF2IRD1 (implicated in retardation), CYLN2.

Cognitive profile: severe impairment in "visuoconstructive" spatial tasks.
--comparison of children copying images. Original pictures are just circles broken up into 2-4 colors. Control children successfully duplicate general gist (although not particularly well), drawings by Williams syndrome children present at most vague similarity to an aspect of the image (realizing that the image requires different colors, for instance, and therefore just drawing a series of lines of different colors).
--assembly of puzzles: simple block puzzle, ~8 blocks (all yellow except for 2 black), subject can't assemble to match original.
----Where are subjects looking when they do the block puzzle? Simple two-block puzzle: Assembling puzzle inverted over and over again: successfully checking vs. real puzzle to realize blocks are wrong, but continually still assemble pieces that way. Even patients with normal IQs have this problem: the puzzle problem is the definitive trait of Williams syndrome.

Puzzle: How do genes influence cognitive structure?

Interactionist view: missing genes -> abnormal brain -> abnormal cognitive structures (almost by definition) -> Behavior.

Dr. Landau's question: do you have normal cognitive structures? If so, how else could behavior be occurring?

General Research Plan:
1. Look for breakdown in spatial functions.

2. Determine whether breakdown reflects abnormal cognitive structures.

3. Something something (uh... Profit?)

Object recognition: show someone varying perspectives on an object, they identify it
--Ventral stream
--multiple viewpoint function.
--four versions of object presented: "canonical" view (orientation) vs. "unusual" view, clear vs. blurred image.
----images all seem very identifiable
--minimal difference with clear canonical view, alternate orientation creates a spread with Williams Syndrome on bottom--roughly matched with mental age matches. But when blurred, Williams Syndrome beat mental age matches and match chronological age matches.
----Compare this to puzzle assemly and drawing copying, where they perform at ~a 4-year-old level.
(Population of Williams Syndrome subjects: 8-16 years old; control: children matched to mental age, sometimes normal adults.)

Question: can they perceive biological motion?
--requires ability to integrate global motion.

Showed us image of assemblage of dots "walking" in dot field. 1:1 Signal to Noise Ratio: still noise, very easy to identify. Random noise, harder but still easily doable. 1:3 Signal to Noise Ratio/Yoked Noise: 3 noise dots for every signal dot, movement of noise dots yoked to movement of signal dots: Really, really hard. Only a couple of us got this last one when presented for ~5 sec.
--WS subjects performed as well as adults on 1:1 tests, beating mental age matches. WS somewhat worse than adults on 1:3, but still slightly outperforming mental age matches.

Other domains of sparing examined: face perception, spatial language, motion coherence.

Next question: So what's wrong?
Return to the block construction task. Components:
"--segment overall design into blocks
--match individual blocks
--place blocks in adjacent copy space"

People with Williams syndrome have problems with all three of these components separately.

Matching individual blocks: problem with selecting mirror images. "Handedness" presents problems. Placing blocks in copy space: given single block, asked to place in space correlating to spot in competing puzzle. Issues with swapping left-right axis.

Realization: areas causing problems may be in dorsal stream and parietal lobe. Examined as series of parietal roles.

Vision for action. First task: take a dollar bill and stick it in a piggy bank. Second task is perceptual match: researcher turns a dial that moves a mannequin hand up to the piggy bank slot, subject has to tell them when to stop. Second task: Williams syndrome subjects do worse (not too horribly bad, but ~equivalent to 3-4 year olds). First task: quite poorly, also on part with 3-4 year olds. Also, once delay is introduced, ability breaks down entirely for both tasks.

Coordination of reference frames: last example, very new so only a little bit fo sample data.
Work by Laura Carlson: looking at activation of reference frames during attention tasks; normal adults activate multiple reference frames at once then either promote one or inhibit the others.
Task: place a dot in the same place relative to a square. Can't use body reference system. When box in same place in both target and test (can use screen reference system), do fairly well. When square in different place--can only use object reference frame--ability starts to deteriorate.
--introduced possibility of rotation by placing profile in square. With 0 rotation, subjects do quite well--some distance scatter, but on right axis. 135 degree rotation: have to dissociate object and screen reference systems. Havok induced, even when dot is near enough to be directly on top of profile's head. Scatters seem to be centered either around object or screen reference system. No consistency at all. When dot is further away, results scattered widely around screen reference, little around object reference point.

Summary:

Domains of breakdown (worse than MA; same as 3-4 yo)
--Vision for action (reaching, eye movements)
--use and coordination of reference frames
--more

Q: Is there any relation between this syndrome and hemispheric neglect?
--A: They do fine on neglect tests. Nonetheless, there is clearly some relationship going on but it isn't clear what yet.

Side note:

2006-08-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

There were a half dozen anti-primate-testing protestors on the street in front of the hotel on the street as I walked in. However, the hotel is recessed so that if you're walking--or even driving--in, you would be approaching the hotel from either side of the block, and thus from behind them. I only saw them because I bussed in this morning, which took me past them. However, I'm assuming they're here for the conference today because A: there's someone presenting primate-based research today, and B: why else would they be in front of the hotel?

So considering that attendees of the conference are unlikely to notice them, and no one else even knows that this thing is going on, whose attention exactly are they attempting to grab?

MC&CN: Opening Remarks

2006-08-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

Opening Remarks by Apostolos Georgopoulos, University of Minnesota

8:50: opening remarks were supposed to start at 8:30 and, uh, they haven't. The first slide for the first speaker's presentation has been up on the screen since I got here at 8:20, though.

8:53: There we go.

This field brings together a lot of disciplines on "both sides of Washington St."--Psychology, Neuroscience, Child Development, Evolution, etc.

The purpose of this meeting is to serve as a somewhat intense survey summer school. Primarily designed for students at all levels; as such, this is the first one (he hopes) in an annual series, with differenct focuses each year.

Motor Control and Cognitive Neuroscience

2006-08-07T08:39:00.000-05:00

Today's the first day of the Motor Control & Cognitive Neuroscience conference. I'm going to attempt to live-blog or pseudo-live-blog it, which really just means I'll be typing instead of writing down my notes and then hitting "Publish Post" when I'm done taking them. If it goes well, I'll try doing it all week. If it doesn't, I'll just switch over to my notebook and give you highlights later on.

2006-08-04T18:10:00.000-05:00

I've gotta say. Right now, I totally wish I lived in Nevada, because those are some perversions of the dignity of the electoral process that I could totally get behind.

Well, I'm Not Surprised

2006-08-04T15:57:00.000-05:00

Reuters: Plan B decision made before data review

Friday Random 10 - 4 August 2006

2006-08-04T15:21:00.000-05:00

1. Atmosphere - Apple
2. Bad Religion - 21st Century Digital Boy
3. Miles Davis - Bags' Groove (Take 1)
4. Thelonious Monk - I Let A Song Go Out of My Head
5. Mylene Pires - Clareou
6. Gorillaz - Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head
7. Analog Brothers - Analog Anilalator vrs. Silver Surfer
8. Amon Tobin - Sultan Drops
9. Tito Puente - Obsession
10. Tom Waits - House Where Nobody Lives

Americans Still Weird. Like, In The Head.

2006-08-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

AFP:

Readers of a US parenting magazine are crying foul over the publication's latest cover depicting a woman breastfeeding, with some calling the photo offensive and disgusting

"I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one woman from Kansas wrote in reaction to the picture in Babytalk, a free magazine that caters to young mothers. "I was offended and it made my husband very uncomfortable when I left the magazine on the coffee table."...

..."Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob," the mother of a four-month-old said...

..."I had to rip off the cover since I didn't want it laying around the house," she said...

...The picture in Babytalk was aimed at illustrating the controversy surrounding breastfeeding in the United States, where a national survey by the American Dietetic Association found that 57 percent of those polled are opposed to women breastfeeding in public and 72 percent think it is inappropriate to show a woman breastfeeding on television programs.

Babytalk executive editor Lisa Moran said though most of those who responded to the poll about the cover photo gave the magazine a thumbs up, she was surprised that some 25 percent expressed outrage.

(emphasis mine)

'nuff said.

Winning the Vietnam War Hollywood Style

2006-08-04T12:46:00.000-05:00

Kudos to Wonkette for providing the most beautiful imagery I've encountered this week... and I've seen both Once Upoon a Time in America and Miami Vice! Commentary on the Vietnam Wall Visitor Center:

And a 3D “battle scene” — that’ll be a blast For a quarter, you can put on “Ride of the Valkyries” and napalm a miniature village — animatronic Robert McNamera will show you how!

Doesn't that sound like the sort of thing YOU wished you could've done on family vacations as a kid?

Paper Watch

2006-08-04T12:30:00.000-05:00

Latest issue of Neuron went up this morning.

Check out #1: Neural Differentiation of Expected Reward and Risk in Human Subcortical Structures by Kerstin Preuschoff, Peter Bossaerts, and Steven R. Quartz. Abstract:

In decision-making under uncertainty, economic studies emphasize the importance of risk in addition to expected reward. Studies in neuroscience focus on expected reward and learning rather than risk. We combined functional imaging with a simple gambling task to vary expected reward and risk simultaneously and in an uncorrelated manner. Drawing on financial decision theory, we modeled expected reward as mathematical expectation of reward, and risk as reward variance. Activations in dopaminoceptive structures correlated with both mathematical parameters. These activations differentiated spatially and temporally. Temporally, the activation related to expected reward was immediate, while the activation related to risk was delayed. Analyses confirmed that our paradigm minimized confounds from learning, motivation, and salience. These results suggest that the primary task of the dopaminergic system is to convey signals of upcoming stochastic rewards, such as expected reward and risk, beyond its role in learning, motivation, and salience.

Check out #2: Absolute Coding of Stimulus Novelty in the Human Substantia Nigra/VTA by Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düze. Abstract:

Novelty exploration can enhance hippocampal plasticity in animals through dopaminergic neuromodulation arising in the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA). This enhancement can outlast the exploration phase by several minutes. Currently, little is known about dopaminergic novelty processing and its relationship to hippocampal function in humans. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, SN/VTA activations in humans were indeed driven by stimulus novelty rather than other forms of stimulus salience such as rareness, negative emotional valence, or targetness of familiar stimuli, whereas hippocampal responses were less selective. SN/VTA novelty responses were scaled according to absolute rather than relative novelty in a given context, unlike adaptive SN/VTA responses recently reported for reward outcome in animal studies. Finally, novelty enhanced learning and perirhinal/parahippocampal processing of familiar items presented in the same context. Thus, the human SN/VTA can code absolute stimulus novelty and might contribute to enhancing learning in the context of novelty.

I'm tempted to follow up with a Metal version

2006-08-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

Michael Berube brings us THE TOP TEN CONSERVATIVE REGGAE SONGS OF ALL TIME.

The technologically advanced leading the blind, part XXVI

2006-08-04T12:25:00.000-05:00

LiveScience: Vision Gear Bypasses the Eye

The Forehead Retina System (FRS) uses a special headband to selectively stimulate different mechanoreceptors in forehead skin to allow visually impaired people to "see" a picture of what lies in front of them.

Read the rest. This looks truly bizarre.

Representin'

2006-08-03T15:43:00.000-05:00

Congrats to Seimone:

The Minnesota Lynx and the USA Basketball Women's Senior National Team Committee today announced that Lynx rookie guard Seimone Augustus has been named to the 2006 USA Basketball Women's World Championship Team. The 15th FIBA World Championship is scheduled to be played Sept. 12-23 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Also named to the team on Tuesday were Yolanda Griffith (Sacramento Monarchs) and Alana Beard (Washington Mystics). The selections were made by the USA Basketball Women's Senior National Team Committee.

Bad Neuroscience Fiction

2006-08-03T12:06:00.000-05:00

Jason Ironheart, from the Babylon 5 episode Mind War

Anyway, the experiments went on for months. Genetic manipulation; mutated strains of serotonin and acetylcholine to increase neural processing. Five, ten, sometimes fifteen injections a day. The pain was...

I was watching this with some friends the other night and started smacking my head in mental agony. B5 is usually a show that either gets the science right or implicitly acknowledges that you can't explain something with real science and ignores it. But here we have a character tryig to explain a series of experiments he was subjected to in order to increase his telepathic abilities, so they're sort of screwed from the moment they decided to write dialogue describing it.

But this is even worse than that. Let's make this simple: a mutation is an alteration of some sort of genetic material. The phrase "mutated strain" implies a genetically altered bacterium or virus. "Strain" can also be used to describe genetic lines of lab animals or of plants; but as far as I know, it's use is limited to describing a subset of a species. So what, you ask, are serotonin and acetylcholine?

They're neurotransmitters: so at least the writers correctly identified them as having something to do with the brain. Let's take a look, shall we?

Serotonin

Acetylcholline

So let's just make this clear: chemicals are not particularly open to mutation. You could mutate genes for the enzymes that produce these transmitters; you could mutate the genes for receptor sub-types, transporters, any other number of proteins involved in serotonergic or cholinergic activities. But talking about mutating the substances themselves is like talking about mutating water or glucose.

"...YOUR MOM'S a hyperbolic curve!"*

2006-08-01T18:40:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder if pop. sci. writers just look at papers and think about how they can best go about overstating and misrepresenting the results?

Reuters: Scientists take step toward obesity vaccine

--
*Stupid in-joke. You don't have a chance, give up now.

Also? Sky still above ground.

2006-08-01T16:05:00.000-05:00

Only 25x?

Eyes Induce Honesty

2006-08-01T13:04:00.000-05:00

So if you want to promote honest social behavior, maybe you don't need to install closed-circuit cameras everywhere, spy on your populace, and generally turn into a police state. Maybe you could just paint eyes on everything:

A team from Newcastle University found people put nearly three times as much money into an 'honesty box' when they were being watched by a pair of eyes on a poster, compared with a poster that featured an image of flowers...

...For this experiment, lead researcher Dr Melissa Bateson and her colleagues Drs Daniel Nettle and Gilbert Roberts, of the Evolution and Behaviour Research Group in the School of Biology and Psychology at Newcastle University, made use of a long-running 'honesty box' arrangement.

This had been operating as a way of paying for hot drinks in a common room used by around 48 staff for many years, so users had no reason to suspect an experiment was taking place.

An A5 poster was placed above the honesty box, listing prices of tea, coffee and milk. The poster also featured an image banner across the top, and this alternated each week between different pictures of flowers and images of eyes.

The eye pictures varied in the sex and head orientation but were all chosen so that the eyes were looking directly at the observer.

Each week the research team recorded the total amount of money collected and the volume of milk consumed as this was considered to be the best index available of total drink consumption.

The team then calculated the ratio of money collected to the volume of milk consumed in each week. On average, people paid 2.76 as much for their drinks on the weeks when the poster featured pictures of eyes.

I think there are clear ways to implement this knowledge, starting by painting giant faces on every wall of the White House & the Capitol building.

Trying to build a creepier society since 1978.

Visualizing Plasticity

2006-07-31T15:30:00.000-05:00

LifeScience News: MIT Researchers Watch Brain In Action

Thanks to a new imaging system, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have gotten an unprecedented look into how genes shape the brain in response to the environment. Their work is reported in the July 28 issue of Cell.

"This work represents a technological breakthrough," said first author Kuan Hong Wang, a research scientist at the Picower Institute who will launch his own laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health in the fall. "This is the first study that demonstrates the ability to directly visualize the molecular activity of individual neurons in the brain of live animals at a single-cell resolution, and to observe the changes in the activity in the same neurons in response to the changes of the environment on a daily basis for a week."

Um... Daaaaaaaaamn. Color me impressed.

I'm really not following the description of how they did it, other than that it involves taking transgenic mice with GFP to tagged to Arc (a protein involved in plasticity) and installing "transparent cranial windows" in them. Now, I would certainly be inclined to argue that more brains should be covered by plastic windshields. Unfortunately, Cell's webpage is failing to load at the moment, so I'll have to patiently wait until later to figure this out.

Can you smell something in the air?

2006-07-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

I think I can safely assume that most everyone has heard of pheromones at one point or another. However, one thing I don't think most people realize is that the evidence for pheromonal activity in humans has been far from conclusive. For one thing, humans not only lack functional genes homologous to most pheromone receptors that have been discovered; we even seem to lack the organ that pheromone receptors are generally found in! Also, there is very little evidence for pheromonal effects: the only article I can recall having heard of before today is Stern & McClintock's Regulation of ovulation by human pheromones.

But all that may be about to change:

On that dream date, something really might be in the air. Results from a mouse study may bolster the evidence for human pheromones, the long-debated chemical signals thought to unconsciously sway our behaviour...

... Finding such receptors in the lining of the nose, rather the vomeronasal organ, is a more direct parallel with humans. Stephen Liberles and Linda Buck report their finding online this week in Nature (S. D. Liberles & L. B. Buck Nature doi:10.1038/nature05066; 2006)1. They isolated a group of receptors that can be triggered by at least one known mouse pheromone.

Genes encoding this family of receptors are also found in humans. "It's probably our best bet yet for functional pheromone genes in humans," says Timothy Holy, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

For their part, Liberles and Buck are cautious about labelling the mouse proteins as pheromone receptors. They have not yet carried out a key test to show that activating or eliminating the receptors alters a mouse's behaviour. But Buck says that her team is "intrigued by the possibility" of their being pheromone receptors, and is embarking on tests to find out.

Olfactory systems are one of the big areas of research in neuroscience right now. I'm honestly not sure why that is. But if Linda Buck--who won a Nobel Prize for her work on cloning and investigating the molecular mechanisms of olfactory receptors--is able to conclusively confirm the existence of pheromone receptors in humans, I think you're going to see an explosion of research in that area. Of course, I could be talking through my hat here.

Remember: Primary Sources!

2006-07-31T11:03:00.000-05:00

I've been encountering short synopses of this article all weekend ("Nicotine Decreases Blood Alcohol Concentrations in Adult Rats"), and have been thoroughly confused. See, I'd been seeing all the chatter about it claiming it keeps you from getting drunk, but that didn't make any sense because nicotine just seems to slow gastric emptying, which means that the alcohol will all hit you eventually. So finally, I gave in and tracked down the article:

Conclusions: These results suggest that the nicotine-induced decrease in BAC may be related to gastric function. One possible explanation was related to nicotine's action in delaying gastric emptying. The longer the alcohol was retained in the stomach, the more likely that the alcohol would be metabolized by gastric alcohol dehydrogenase before its absorption into the bloodstream by the small intestine (the major site of alcohol absorption).

See? Nice and simple. Remember to check your primary sources, kids. It'll keep you off the streets and out of trouble.

Sunday amusement

2006-07-30T15:24:00.000-05:00

Heh.

FRIDAY, July 28 (HealthDay News) -- Starting in late September, Sudafed and similar cold medications will only be available from behind pharmacy counters because their active ingredient can be used to make the street drug methamphetamine.

So, consumers may be tempted to try a new type of drug that will be easier to buy. But two pharmaceutical researchers contend there's a big problem with the new nasal decongestants: They don't work.