retrospectacle
Posts by this author
April 19, 2007
(Homer Simpson voice) Mmmmmmm, GABA.........aghahgahgharrrrrhhhhhhh ::drool::
GABA is your friend. Increased GABA in the brain can result in decreased feelings of anxiety and increased relaxation and happiness. So, nobody tell those wacky Japanese candy makers that GABA doesn't cross the blood…
April 19, 2007
Ok, no nobody really *likes* to work. Even if you like your job, there are some days that you'd rather just sleep in or not have to jump through hoops or deal with your boss' same old TPS-report complaints. A recent survey (2006 General Social Survey) of 27,000 random Americans noted that less…
April 17, 2007
Anti-cancer vaccines seem to be a burgeoning field in immunology (for example, the HPV vaccine) and what's more, they seem to hold much promise. A recent clinical trial at UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center has tested a vaccine (vitespan, trademark Oncophage) to glioma, a tumor of glia cells in the…
April 16, 2007
In response to the horrific school shooting in Virginia Tech, a commenter in this post left a link to a fascinating story from the latter part of 2006. Its a Boing Boing article, which quotes Loren Coleman, entitled School shootings: malignant, contagious social meme? and its really worth a read in…
April 16, 2007
I was pretty shocked to see the headline on CNN.com right now: Gunman kills 21 on Virginia Tech campus. As someone who spends the majority of my day on a college campus, this really rattled me. Should I start worrying that this could happen at Univ. of Michigan, too?
The shootings mark the…
April 16, 2007
I got an email from the head of this study, David F. Colvard, MD, of Raleigh, North Carolina. His team has shown that nasal irrigation can help solve a common problem for scuba divers: middle ear squeeze. This refers to the phenomenon divers experience during ascent and descent in the sea, when…
April 13, 2007
Good news! Florida is opening a public comment period from May 1-June 14, and the decision about whether to downgrade their status from endangered will be postponed until after that period.
The final plan will be presented to commissioners in September. If approved, the state will upgrade the…
April 13, 2007
Don't have any groundbreaking parrot research to report on today, so content your self with fun parrot news this Friday. Just take this adorable cockatoo which has spent the last two weeks trying to hatch a bunch of chocolate Easter eggs!
The cockatoo has been protecting the chocolates since she…
April 13, 2007
Just came across this interesting blog, CityParrots, which catalogs and reports on feral parrot populations in cities. Quite a lot of breadth, from parrot conservation, to stories on illegal trade, to Kakapos, to wild parakeets in Connecticut! Check it out!
April 12, 2007
What happens after a person receives a traumatic brain injury? Tissue damage and swelling often results in neural tissue being unable to receiving adequate levels of glucose which are required to "feed" the brain. This deprivation of energy can cause further injury to tissue, so often times an…
April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut, long-time smoker author of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cats Cradle," died last night of brain injuries he suffered weeks ago during a fall. He was 84.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair…
April 11, 2007
Well ear plugs seem to be the answer to all our hearing-loss woes, according to this short new piece I came across on CNN. The author suggests wearing earplugs during incredibly noisy tasks as well as everyday ones, which is ok, but rather unrealistic. Who's really going to drop hundreds on custom…
April 11, 2007
I grew up in Florida, in central Florida to be exact. As a kid we went to Blue Springs and other manatee havens on field trips, to observe these gentle and curious animals. They are huge, and as they tend to inhabit shallow areas of the Florida coastal waterways its easy to see them in the clear…
April 10, 2007
I was just chuckling at PZ's lament about the sub-par potential of octopi to open a beer for you:
I was thinking it would be so cool to have an octopus on your shoulder, and you hold up your beer bottle, and he reaches out an arm and twists the top off for you. And then you read a little further…
April 10, 2007
Not a huge deal, but hey, its exciting to me to get a facade of legitimacy. ;)
April 10, 2007
Wanna know the deep dark history of creationism, the intelligent design movement, and the Dover trial? Well Ed Brayton who blogs at Dispatches From the Culture Wars gave a talk a few weeks back at the Freethought Association in Grand Rapids, MI. Check it out here.
April 10, 2007
Wow, why is this so relaxing? I think this slow-moving up-close-and-personal whale thingamajig could supplant bubble baths and candles as most relaxing thing ever. If they had added whale-song in the background I think we'd have the cure for insomnia and hypertension.
And while you're feelin' so…
April 9, 2007
This is really upsetting, especially to someone who used to study manatees: Florida has been toying with the idea of down-grading manatees' "endangered" status and relaxing the amount of protection they receive. Protective laws include (and consist mostly of) laws which force boaters to slow down…
April 9, 2007
The Matrix movies have a lot of religious undertones, from 'Neo' as a Christ-figure, the Nebuchadnezzar as their ship, Trinity as his side-kick, the name of the rebel city (Zion), and much more.
Then, I suppose it was only a matter of time until a "real religion" emerged based on the tenets of the…
April 9, 2007
Some guy was arrested this past Wednesday for trying to smuggle pot in an Easter Bunny. The stuffed bunny wabbit was stuffed with more than plush, it was also packing 16.6 grams of weed. The owner of said bunny was pulled over after running a red light, then searched the car
because an "…
April 7, 2007
I've become a bit more interested in cooking lately, I suppose because of its similarity to performing an experiment. You have reagents (ingredients), follow a protocol (recipe), and have have both positive and negative outcomes (hopefully delicious!). The recent discovery of Cooking for Engineers…
April 6, 2007
.....that they are delicious as well as interesting!
Experiments performed:
Reaction to cold and heat.
Soluability testing.
Low pressure environments.
Effects of smoking on Peeps' health.
Seperation of conjoined Peep quintuplets.
Peep fear response.
April 6, 2007
Busy week this week, I submitted a paper day before yesterday which is the first time I did it myself. The online submission system is really convienent! Anyway, for Friday Grey Matters, check out this amazing video of Alex the grey parrot in action with Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Its the third video…
April 5, 2007
SETI used to do it, too. That is, have a volunteer program to chip in your CPU's processing power to help solve some problem (in SETI's case, look for ET). Now your idle Sony PS3 can be put to a similar use, but a bit more earthly.
The recent launch of a software update for Sony's Internet-enabled…
April 5, 2007
A parasite called Toxoplasma gondii has a unique mechanism to help it spread: "tricking" rats into delighting in the smell of its predator, cats. This is an important adaptation since this parasite can only sexually reproduce in the gut of cats, so the parasite needs to get the infected rats into…
April 4, 2007
Courtesy of CNN, an empty-headed opinion piece that adds no real dimension to the topic.
As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the…
April 4, 2007
A recent New Scientist article (March 2007) does a pretty decent job summarizing the current state of hair cell regeneration in mammals, including the work coming out of my lab. May require a subscription or institutional access.
Here's a few of the figures from the article that I thought weren't…
April 4, 2007
My oh my. Browsing through ThinkGeek never ceases to astonish and delight. Just take a gander at the nerdelicious D20 Fuzzy Dice. Yes, thats right, big honkin' plushy nerd-dice.
Now, back in the day (Shelley circa 1996), I had some tres tacky turquiose fuzzy dice hanging in my 1965 Mustang. Hey,…
April 3, 2007
This vaccine wasn't meant to prevent ear infections per se, but has had the welcome side effect of doing just that (for more on ear infections, go here). Pharmaceutical company Wyeth developed the vaccine PCV7 (marketed in the US under Prevnar) to ward off common bacterial infections, and has been…
April 3, 2007
Who ever said there's no fortune and glory in science? I just got wind of several multi-million dollar prizes for scientists who tackle some tough questions: called X-Prizes.
What is an X PRIZE?
An X PRIZE is a multi-million dollar award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by…