omnibrain
Posts by this author
December 18, 2006
This is quite an old piece of news...but still pretty ridiculous.
Mangalore University Applied Botany Professor Annaiah Ramesh is all set to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as he successfully completed a marathon lecture, running to 96 hours and 40 minutes, here on Sunday.
Dr Ramesh who…
December 18, 2006
We had a debate on my old blog as to what is causing this... what do you think?
December 18, 2006
-via mindhacks-
This is Temple Grandin, whose Autism helps her understand the cows she's working with. She helps them feel comfortable as they get taken to the slaughter house.
Temple was profiled by Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist on Mars. I think she might have even made the comment that…
December 18, 2006
Well - this book has everything you ever really wanted to know about orgasms - 338 pages.... that's a lot of orgams? multiple orgasms?
Honestly, I'm a little surprised a book like this hasn't been written before.
"I wrote this book because no one had approached the topic from a holistic view with…
December 18, 2006
In no particular order...1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems thatThe left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right…
December 17, 2006
An interesting History channel segment about Aldous Huxley and his mescaline use.
If you haven't read The Doors of Perception - or really most of his other works - you should!
December 17, 2006
Valentina Sivryukova knew her public service messages were hitting the mark when she heard how one Kazakh schoolboy called another stupid. "What are you," he sneered, "iodine-deficient or something?"
I think I'm going to start using this insult!
I always knew iodine was added to salt at some point…
December 16, 2006
Another classic...So I was watching Mythbusters the other night and they were testing a number of "mind contol" devices - they used EEG, etc. They even decided that a couple methods were "plausible."I decided what I could find out there on the internet...
The first place I looked was EBay - they…
December 16, 2006
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Vote to see the results :) Or if you've already…
December 16, 2006
Since it's just about graduate application time, here are some useful links to help people out during this stressful experience:
Retrospectacle has a post about getting into graduate schools. I think Shelley also has a follow up post to this one - but you'll have to track it down.
Here is another…
December 16, 2006
So while I was looking around for some pictures I ran across some pretty cool replicas of brain horror movie posters. You can find them here under science fiction.
December 16, 2006
A number of people have noticed that after getting transplants their personality changes - and not only that- their personality changes to reflect the donors personality.
...though she was born and raised in Tucson, she never liked Mexican food. She craved Italian and was a pasta junkie. But three…
December 15, 2006
Are you kidding me?
A study of 100,000 drivers finds that the month you were born is far more significant than your age in predicting car crashes.
The study, based on North American driving statistics as gathered by an online insurance quoting service, ranks the likelihood of getting involved in an…
December 15, 2006
Ok ok... so nothing to do with brains, much less science, but here's a great video.
I don't know what this says about my sense of humor but I love these guys.
p.s. I found the video here
December 15, 2006
It seems warning labels might be popping up in a few more places - one of which is on the inside of clothing for larger people? I wonder if they're going to put pictures on the label? I can't see a warning label doing much good there.
Check out their other recommendations:
Clothes made in larger…
December 15, 2006
There is a funny yet interesting article over at Discover magazine about the positioning of the testicles and why they aren't protected a wee bit more.
Here's a little sampler:
The site of human testicles seems a bizarre anomaly from an evolutionary point of view, like positioning the driver of an…
December 14, 2006
The mind is the most amazing, lying, cheating, charlatan televangelist ever imagined. It is so good at its job though that one 'part' of the mind can construct a completely false reality and then convince other parts that what it has just constructed is the absolute truth. Not only do other parts…
December 14, 2006
Very very strange- this was so out of the ordinary I felt the need to post it here :)
The world's tallest man has saved two dolphins by using his long arms to reach into their stomachs and pull out dangerous plastic shards.
Mongolian herdsman Bao Xishun was called in after the dolphins swallowed…
December 13, 2006
Psychology as a science is very new and has had roughly less than 150 years to fill up the shelves of libraries with results. A good number of those shelves have to be filled with wacky ridiculous experiments of all sorts - from Harlow's monkey mother studies to Dan Simons' Inattentional…
December 12, 2006
Everyone deserves equal rights under the law right?!
They take this very seriously in Texas, so seriously in fact that a
Texas lawmaker is aiming to allow the blind to hunt. Texas State Representative Edmund Kuempel has introduced a measure that would allow blind people to hunt any game that…
December 12, 2006
I was reading this great post from Shrink Rap about sex with fish:
Being close to our nation's capitol we also sometimes get folks with politician-related delusions. They get arrested while traveling to Washington to confront the "devil-worshipers" controlling the government, or to get in touch…
December 12, 2006
Lonely at dinner?
Give this new product from a Dutch art company a try, it includes a DVD which "will allow a lonesome dinner to become one full of holiday fun and good cheer with dinner companions eating, drinking, and engaging in conversation.
The DVD will feature actors reading out different…
December 11, 2006
Hmm... I know plenty of funny women.... so don't whine to me ;)
"What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap."
The article also goes on to say…
December 11, 2006
For some reason this research sounds like it was done by that short criminal guy from the Princess Bride (you know... the one who gets poisoned?)
Check out this quote from one of the Authors:
"This required a particularly nasty experiment, in which we inoculated colonies with the most virulent…
December 10, 2006
Ahh... condoms :) It seems like they've gotten much more protective .... and perhaps a little less - scratchy.
1000 BC
Condom use can be traced back several thousand years. It is known that around 1000 BC the ancient Egyptians used a linen sheath for protection against disease.
100 - 200 AD
The…
December 10, 2006
Well since the last ask a science blogger question was something about funny things happening in the lab, I figured I'd post this video off of collegehumor.com (that site where girls write their college name on their breasts for whatever reason)
hmm.. for whatever reason the video doesn't show…
December 8, 2006
You need to get over to eBay and bid on this guy's brain before eBay takes it down ;)
Since I guess it's against their terms of service to sell body parts..haha..
I really want to get a brain in a jar! Where does one go about legally getting one?
Here's the description of the brain for sale:
Near…
December 8, 2006
Meet Bill,
He was born prosopagnosic and he has an online "book" all about his condition.
I haven't had a chance to read much of it but it seems pretty interesting.
I was born with a condition that makes it difficult for me to recognize faces. There is a small part of the brain that is dedicated…
December 7, 2006
What would you talk about with an astronaut at the pub? (assuming you've had a few to many).
Some of us New Scientist staffers were idly wondering about the universe in the pub last night - arguing about the "speed of dark" (as opposed to the speed of light) for reasons I'd rather forget - when…