Category: Culture of science
From the Department of Fairness and Balance: Marrow stem, by Spike Walker For an elevatory antidote to the grimness of my previous post (about global warming cracking the Eiger), see the lovely collection of images from the Wellcome Trust's Biomedical Image Awards contest. As the site puts it, the gallery provides "a striking display of shapes and patterns [that] show a wide variety of subjects, most invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity.... The winners of the Awards challenge the public perspective that scientists don't have an artistic side. " Another example: Some really lovely eye candy....
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:09 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Environment/nature
I enjoy most any mix of science and mountaineering — part of why I so like Mark Bowen's Thin Ice, his book about climatologist Lonnie Thompson's remarkable work documenting global warming in high-altitude glaciers. Scientific work done at rarefied altitudes. How can you not like it? The North Face of the Eiger, 2005 — aka the Eigerwand of climbing fame. The east face, photos of which I couldn't find, is out of sight around the corner. Photo by Dirk Beyer via Wikipedia Commons. I'm less thrilled to see global warming meet alpinism on the Eiger, where last Thursday about 400,000...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:54 PM • •
Category: Medicine
You don't see this every day: Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient's brain cured the patient's drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable. (It also made the man badly depressed.) A stroke that destroyed parts of a drug addict's globus pallidus (pale areas) left him depressed but ended his addiction. Neither drugs nor (alas) wine gave him pleasure any longer. The article, unfortunately, is pay-per-view, but Jake's summary is compelling on its own. To...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:52 PM • •
Category: Environment/nature
My interest in global warming grows apace, both because it stands to impose some very grim effects and because it makes an interesting (if dismaying) study in culture's attitude toward science (see my post on "Climate change as a teset of empiricism and secular democracy") and how vested interests can affect same. Florida at present (left) and what it will look like if seas rise 20 feet. from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth The puzzle at this point is why so many people, including intelligent people with decent scientific literacy, still doubt humans are causing the earth to warm dangerously....
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:44 PM • •
Category: Brains and minds
Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom's Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular and science media show an outsized fondness for brain imaging studies, inspiring much work more diverting than informative. The most overhyped of these studies and stories suggest that in some busy brain area lies the locus of love, the center of empathy, or the key...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:29 PM • •
Author and journalist 
