purepedantry
Posts by this author
August 8, 2006
That's a lot of Panda:
A giant panda in China has given birth to the heaviest cub born in captivity after the longest period in labor and elsewhere twin pandas each gave birth to twins, Xinhua news agency reported.
Six-year-old Zhang Ka delivered the baby on Monday at the Wolong Giant Panda…
August 8, 2006
It's all the lying that really gets me:
The universe could be 2 billion years older than thought, according to a new report by an international team of astronomers. The scientists have found that a nearby galaxy is 15% farther away than previous results suggested. That could mean the age of the…
August 8, 2006
Look, an Israeli inventor has patented the McDonald's playland as a way to escape fires:
A specialised emergency truck would carry an extendible boom that could be raised to a window in a burning building. Jaws at the top of the boom would then expand to clamp a small platform inside the window…
August 8, 2006
There is a manatee in the Hudson; which is interesting because I had always associated the Hudson with industrial waste, bad smells, the periodic dead person, and kayakers who seem to have no problem floating amongst those things:
Over the past week, boaters and bloggers have been energetically…
August 7, 2006
Yikes. You just can't win with embryos:
Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the…
August 7, 2006
The traditional Darwinian view of evolution holds that evolution occurs through the selection of the most successful members of a group. Each member of the group is stable over its lifetime. This view was later modified to include the idea that DNA is the stable carrier of this information…
August 7, 2006
Bedbugs say "I'm back baby!":
After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton could not sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of insecticide with him in bed.
"We were afraid to even tell people about it at first," Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. "It feels…
August 7, 2006
Wasn't here to mention it yesterday, but the Synapse #4 is available at Neurotopia.
The next Synapse is on August 20th at Retrospectacle. Submission guidelines here.
August 7, 2006
I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition?
OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this with people you don't know well, but I do.
Anyway, it got me thinking…
August 3, 2006
Sorry folks.
Heading to a wedding for the weekend. Blogging light to nonexistent til Monday morning.
Have a good weekend!
August 3, 2006
Neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, were for many years regarded as exclusively diseases of molecular crud. You would look at brains of patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and notice that there were all these aggregates of protein crud forming in specific locations.…
August 3, 2006
The Synapse #4 is being hosted by Neurotopia on Sunday. He asks that you get your submissions in by midnight on Saturday. Information for submitters is available here.
August 3, 2006
It is like sweat and balls hot out, so I have a little personal story -- or rather my Dad's personal story -- to tell about heat waves. My Dad is an Emergency Room doctor, and he has been working in CA this summer for reasons that are not relevant. Anyway, one day about a week ago he had two…
August 2, 2006
Some students at UCSD have too much time on their hands:
A group of grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are in the process of creating what one of the students calls the "most over-designed soda machine in the world."
Right now, the machine has attached to it a barcode…
August 1, 2006
The biggest object in the Universe is glimpsed, and everyone is surprised:
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha…
August 1, 2006
Muahaha. It has now been proven that men should not sleep over:
If you have ever thought you were stupid to sleep with someone, consider this. Sharing your bed could actually make you stupid if you are a man - at least temporarily.
Even without having sex, bed sharing disturbs sleep quality, say…
August 1, 2006
As some of you may have noticed, I have been keeping up with the science of Floyd Landis's failed drug test in a rather long post here.
In the post, I mentioned that there is another test besides the Testosterone to Epitestosterone ratio (the test he already failed) that they can use to check…
August 1, 2006
I have been falling down on the job on my carnivals updating.
Encephalon #3 is up at Thinking Meat.Grand Rounds is up at Inside Surgery.
August 1, 2006
You've taken a Myers-Briggs personality inventory before right? They are usually strings of yes-or-no questions that give you a result like INTJ or ENTP.
These kinds of tests populate the internet, and for what they are worth they are fun time-wasters and moderately gratifying. This one is just…
July 31, 2006
This is huge. Jackson et al. have identified that the adult stem cell in the human brain for both neurons and oligodendrocytes are the PDGFR-alpha expressing cells and that PDGF-AA causes proliferation of these cells and a shift towards the oligodendrocyte lineage.
A little background. There is…
July 31, 2006
Are we dividing drugs into illegal and legal based on a rational classification system based on risk?A British government committee says no:
The committee's report recommends that drugs be ordered on "a more scientific scale, to give the public a better sense of the relative harms involved". But…
July 31, 2006
Gov. Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair are endeavoring to create a California and Great Britain global warming pact, to pool their efforts in lowering CO2 emissions:
Britain and California are preparing to sidestep the Bush administration and fight global warming together by creating a joint market for…
July 30, 2006
This review in Nature Neuroscience is excellent. I have never seen the issue of gene-environment interactions laid out so eloquently. Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, so those of you not affiliated with a University may have to just live with this excerpt:
The recent history of…
July 30, 2006
Them's, as they say, fighting words.
The National Journal has a cover story on the Politicization of Science by Paul Starobin, and there is simply no way in the concievable Universe that this is not going to cause a ruckus.
In part, this is because in his desire to equally indite indict the Right…
July 27, 2006
Floyd Landis, most recent winner of the Tour de France, has tested positive for testosterone use:
Landis denied cheating and said he has no idea what may have caused his positive test for high testosterone following the Tour's 17th stage, where he made his comeback charge last week. But he aims to…
July 27, 2006
A study reveals that an increasingly large number of Americans are too fat to fit in MRIs and have X-rays that lack resolution:
More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to…
July 27, 2006
Apparently I will be spending today documenting differing opinions on the Ben Barres Nature editorial. Here is the man himself doing Q&A for the NYTimes:
Q. What about the idea that men and women differ in ways that give men an advantage in science?
A. People are still arguing over whether…
July 27, 2006
The WHO reports that the Sun kills as many as 60,000:
As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun, mostly from malignant skin cancer, the World Health Organization has reported.
It found that 48,000 deaths every year are caused by malignant melanomas, and 12,000 by other kinds of skin…
July 26, 2006
Eugene Volokh from The Volokh Conspiracy has weighed in on the recent Nature editorial by Ben Barres that I commented about before. The editorial is about whether it was right for Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, to discuss the possibility of innate gender differences in the gender…
July 26, 2006
...depression.
This is related to something they make medical students memorize. When someone comes in with hypertension, it is always good to check whether the person has renal artery stenosis because this is one of the few causes of hypertension we can actually fix. Renal artery stenosis…