purepedantry
Posts by this author
December 6, 2007
Now that is pretty clear. This is from Miller and Silverstein in Nature Clinical Practice. It is in reference to childhood obesity:
There has been much debate about the cause of the current epidemic of obesity. Most experts agree that the increased prevalence of childhood obesity cannot be blamed…
December 6, 2007
I was distressed to wake up this morning to coverage of another shooting, this time in a mall in Omaha. A teenager named Robert Hawkins went into the mall and shot 12 people, killing 8 thus far, and then shot himself. The scene resembled the Virginia Tech shooting in several regards, particularly…
December 5, 2007
The absence of historical education in this country hurts me here. (points to heart)
Exhibit A: The View (see below fold)
Ow. It burns! It burns!
And don't tell me that the majority are better than The View, because you know that half of America was nodding their heads to this conversation.
Hat-…
December 5, 2007
Daniel Drezner in reference to the altered US position towards Iran:
Tomorrow in Bizarro world politics -- Dick Cheney buys Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a flower.
UPDATE: Quote of the Day, Part 2 from Christopher Preble at Cato@Liberty
Were that question to be posed to George Bush, that most incurious of…
December 5, 2007
Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction:
Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics.
Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive…
December 4, 2007
This is just lame. Atheist parents in Palo Alto have set up an atheist Sunday school:
The Palo Alto Sunday family program uses music, art and discussion to encourage personal expression, intellectual curiosity and collaboration. One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several…
December 3, 2007
Spence et al. wanted to test the use of fMRI for lie detection. In order to do so, they found a subject who had been convicted for child molestation because she has Munchausen's syndrome by proxy.
There are two important parts of background to this piece.
First, Munchausen's syndrome by proxy (…
November 29, 2007
I wrote earlier today about mercury and autism, and how I thought a criticism of an earlier paper on statistical grounds was fair. Some of the commentors including Orac took me to task saying that the original analysis was indeed better. After thinking about it for most of the day, I changed my…
November 29, 2007
I was struck by this paper that came out in the Journal of Child Neurology, looking back at previous study of mercury levels in autistic children. DeSoto and Hitlan looked back at Ip et al. 2004, a case control study that compared the blood and hair levels of mercury in children with autism to…
November 28, 2007
Wang et al., publishing in PLoS Genetics, looked at the genetic diversity in Native American populations from Canada all the way down into South America. They wanted to see whether the genetic diversity observed in Native peoples correlated in any way with geography.
If the genetic diversity did…
November 26, 2007
Having a ball pit in your living room may be expensive, but it is still totally awesome.
Comic from xkcd.
November 26, 2007
You look away from a field for two seconds, and they get all crazy on you... I used to do only molecular biology focusing primarily on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Since I moved to a lab that studies behavior, I haven't been keeping up with the literature of Alzheimer's as much…
November 19, 2007
Revere has spoken out in support of Michael Siegel at The Rest of the Story. Dr. Siegel is a public health specialist that focuses on among other things the effects of second-hand smoke.
Siegel took Action for Smoking and Health -- an anti-smoking group -- to task for the following statement:
3…
November 16, 2007
I wrote before about how there has been a bit of a debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in encoding spatial maps or is involved more generally in relational memory. Well, the argument for general relational memory just got a big boost. Johnson and Redish published a paper in the…
November 14, 2007
OK, so I am going to go on a tiny rant. Forgive me.
I would just like to thank President Bush for vetoing the omnibus spending bill that includes the NIH budget. Because it is not like any of us need that money...
For those of you who don't know, NIH funding works like this. You submit a grant,…
November 14, 2007
Yay us?
More than 1 million cases of chlamydia were reported in the United States last year -- the most ever reported for a sexually transmitted disease, federal health officials said Tuesday. "A new U.S. record," said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More…
November 14, 2007
(I am going to try not to go on a big rant here; we'll see how well that goes.) Jonathan Cohn wrote an article in The New Republic looking at one of the critiques of universal health care: that it might stifle innovation. He presents his case as a balanced one where the relative trade off between…
November 13, 2007
In a collaboration with Reason magazine, Drew Carey has released a video defending the free availability of marijuana for medical purposes. Click here to see it.
Money quote: "Smell that smell. That's the smell of freedom."
November 13, 2007
Heidi Ledford at Nature covers a recent presentation at the American Heart Association of data showing that oral contraceptive use increases the amount of plaques in women's arteries over years of use. This is part of several studies that have shown that the use of oral contraceptives may have…
November 13, 2007
Hybrids are sort-of a mystery in evolutionary biology. In the strictest sense, they shouldn't exist because the offspring are often sterile or reproductively impaired. It is to a species evolutionary benefit to limit the number of hybrid offspring in most cases, so biologists often attribute…
November 8, 2007
Working on for scienceblogs.com, I would say that I receive more interesting emails than the average person. Most of these emails are legitimate such as offers to send me books to read, and those are always appreciated. Some of the emails quote scripture and say that I am going to burn in hell.…
November 6, 2007
I don't know if people heard about this, but a participant in the Olympic trials prior to the NY marathon died suddenly:
A triumphant United States Olympic trials marathon turned somber yesterday morning when Ryan Shay, a 28-year-old veteran marathoner, collapsed during the race in Central Park and…
November 5, 2007
Times Online details 10 of the most bizarre experiments ever devised. I rather doubt some of these would have made it past institutional review today:
7) Turkey turn-ons
Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, of Pennsylvania State University, devoted themselves to studying the sexual behaviour of turkeys…
November 5, 2007
Dark matter has worked its way into political cliche:
Rosenbaum's Political Physics: Do you ever sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So…
November 5, 2007
Last week, the Washington Post took Rudy Giuliani to task for an ad where he claims that his chances of surviving prostate cancer -- which he had about 6 years ago -- were much higher in the US than in the UK. The ad is meant to indict those who wish to modify the health care system.
He says:
"I…
November 2, 2007
Every so often, I encounter a technical advance that is simply so crazy-cool that I have to talk about it. Dombeck et al. publishing in Neuron offer such an advance.
They found a way to image the activity of whole fields of neurons using two-photon fluorescent microscopy -- a technique that I…
October 31, 2007
I don't know if you caught it on these two posts, but I have started to add the Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Icon whenever I am analyzing a peer-reviewed paper specifically.
These icons were created by bloggers, including Sciblings Dave Munger, Mike Dunford, and John Wilkins, with the intent…
October 31, 2007
There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche.
Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can see from the picture, these ants are also huge.) These…
October 29, 2007
Writing in the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple criticizes the equivalence of religion with the immoral and atheism with the moral:
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at…
October 29, 2007
One of the mechanisms -- perhaps even the primary mechanism -- by which synapses in the brain are potentiated -- made more sensitive to activation -- is the insertion of more AMPA receptors (AMPA-R) into the synapse. AMPA-R are glutamate-activated, cation (Na and Ca) channels that are really the…