Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.
Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.
The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.
My previous post drew notice to Malcolm Gladwell's recent article and blog posts about the competitive disadvantage our employer-based health-insurance system (and retirement system) inflicts on many American industries. Only hours passed before a commenter offered the (well-worn) argument that providing the obvious solution to this problem -- a national single-payer system providing universal health care -- "would be disastrous ...[if done] before tackling the cost issue."
This "but what about the costs?" argument against single-payer is a canard, and ignores that our system is already a disaster when it comes to costs
In his recent New Yorker article, "The Risk Pool," as well as a blog post, Malcolm Gladwell has drawn attention to yet another reason to move to a single-payer health insurance system: the punishing competitive disadvantage that American companies and industries suffer when they provide health insurance, especially health insurance for their retirees and pensioners. Gladwell's piece is mainly about retirement benefits, both pensions and health-care; he focuses on the "dependency ratio," which is the ratio, within a company, an industry, or a country, of working wage-earners to nonworking dependents, primarily the young and the retired. The higher the ratio...
"Errant Behaviors," a video and sound installation by Shawn Decker and Anne Wilson. In response to my post on "Music, Mood, and Genius (not) -- or RockNRoll meets neuroscience," one Shawn Decker, a music professor and composer at the Chicago Art Institute (and a former classmate and ultimate-frisbee teammate of mine from college), wrote asking whether I knew of any studies testing the notion -- popular among the Chicago electronic music crowd, says Decker -- that similar talents or brain areas may underlie both musical composition and computer programming. Writes he, [I]n many labs doing electronic media around Chicago,...
I've been interested in music and science since taking a physics of music class back in college (20 years later, amazingly, I discovered my violin teacher of 2000, Kevin Bushee, was married to the daughter of the professor who taught that class), so I was intrigued to find this Wired piece in which neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, formerly a rock producer, talks about the neuroscience of music.
It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes: Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released thousands of tons of oil along the Lebanese coast, perhaps rivaling the Exxon Valdex accident in 1989. By August 8, the spill covered approximately 120 kilometers (75 miles). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture on August 15, 2006. The United Nations, the European...
Among the many wonders of neuroscience -- and central to the discipline -- is the brain's plasticity, its ability to rework synapses and networks to respond to new challenges and experiences. In this dynamic lies the physical explanation of the fluid nature of experience, thought, and consciousness. This is why I find so fascinating the work of those who proposed and discovered the mechanisms underlying this plasticity, such as Ramon y Cajal, Donald Hebb, and Eric Kandel. These and other researchers showed the fundamentals of how changing synapses allow our brains to learn new lessons and behaviors or change old...
My profile of Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg is out now in Scientific American Mind. You can read either a text-only version at my website, or get the full published version, with photos and such, at the Scientific American Mind site (free to subscribers, $5 for the article for non-subscribers). Mayberg made headlines last year when she, psychiatrist Sidney Kennedy, and neurosurgeon Andres Lozano, as the story put it, cured eight of 12 spectacularly depressed individuals ... by inserting pacemaker-like electrodes into a spot deep in the cortext known as Area 25....
No sooner had I noted that mouse pups seem to handle stress better when near their mothers than I found a study of some 9000 British kids showing that breastfeeding seems to make kids more resilient to stress even well after they've stopped breastfeeding. As the press release puts it, Breastfed babies cope better with stress in later life than bottle fed babies, suggests research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood The findings are based on almost 9000 children, who were part of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which regularly monitors a sample of the...
One of the pleasures of following science is seeing how researchers use old, simple tools to test new questions. In a nice piece of work published in Nature Neuroscience, University of Oklahoma researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan used learned-fear association in mice to reveal how the stress of maternal abandonment raised rat pups' sensitivity to threats. As ScientificAmerican.com describes the experiment,. Moriceau and Sullivan tested how baby rats responded to the pairing of an unfamiliar odor--peppermint--and a weak electric shock to their tails. The charge-laced scent attracted the youngest pups without exception while repelling their older siblings of 21...
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Author and journalist 
