Brain and Behavior
pharyngula | November 18, 2015Let me tell you the hard part about writing about epigenetics: most of your audience has no idea what you're talking about, but is pretty sure that they can use it, whatever it is, to justify every bit of folk wisdom/nonsensical assumption that they have. So while you're explaining how it's a very real and important biological process that is essential for development and learning and behavior, half your readers are using the biology to confirm their biases about evolution and inheritance, and the other half already know all the basic stuff and want to get to the Evisceration of the Wrong,…
kkrisberg | October 21, 2015Flame retardants aren’t just found in your furniture. It’s likely you also have detectable amounts of the chemical in your body too, which is pretty worrisome considering the growing amount of research connecting flame retardants to serious health risks. Researchers have linked to the chemicals to reproductive health problems, adverse neurobehavioral development in kids, and endocrine and thyroid disruption. And so the question arises: Do the risks of today’s flame retardants outweigh the benefits?
Chemical engineer Christopher Ellison, an associate professor in the University of Texas-Austin…
pharyngula | October 19, 2015There's an interesting conversation in the New York Times: a neuroscientist, Kenneth D. Miller, argues that brain uploading ain't gonna happen. I agree with him, only in part because of the argument from complexity he gives.
Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or “connectome,” of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First,…
oracknows | September 29, 2015One of the limitations constraining those of us who do human subjects research is that ethical considerations often prevent us from designing our clinical trials in what would be, from a strictly scientific standpoint, in the most methodologically rigorous way. For example, we can't intentionally infect human beings with known inocula of deadly bacteria in order to cause a reproducible severity of disease to be treated with a new antibiotic.
One thing that antivaccinationists seem unable to understand is this very point with respect to vaccine trials. They will call for a "vaxed versus…
oracknows | September 24, 2015Early in the history of this blog, I had a running gag that I'd use every now and then. Basically, it involved humorously extravagant descriptions of how I wanted to hide my face behind a paper bag in sheer embarrassment at the antics of fellow physicians, particularly fellow surgeons. Over time, the gag evolved to my expressing a mock desire to hide my visage behind a metal Doctor Doom-style mask, again, over sheer embarrassment over the idiocy of my colleagues about a scientific issue, again, usually evolution. Sadly, creationist physicians are a very common source of such embarrassment,…
pharyngula | September 5, 2015Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he's an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?
To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it's not racism, it's because…
stoat | August 31, 2015 I previously promised to read Hansen et al., and I finally have - well, at least skimmed. It hasn't really changed my opinions.
global CO2 emissions continue to increase... the threat posed by ice sheet instability and sea level rise
This is in accord with what I've said before, that the most obviously unambiguously bad physical consequence of GW is SLR (see What I think about global warming from 2010 for the rest, which I don't see any great reason to wish to update). So H focussing on it is understandable; but this leads to a regrettable tendency to need lots of SLR earlier than is…
oracknows | August 24, 2015I don't review books that often. The reason is simple. My posts for this blog sometimes take as much as a several hours to write (particularly my more "epic" ones that surpass 5,000 words), and I usually don't have the time to add several more hours to the task by reading an entire book. Also, by the time I've read a book I might want to review, weeks—or even months—have often passed, and a review is no longer of much interest to our readers anyway.
Today, I'm making an exception for a book hot off the presses. The main reason is curiosity, because the book is about a topic that I've blogged…
oracknows | August 6, 2015When I first started writing about the claims made for medical marijuana and the cannabis oil derived from it, it didn't take long for me to characterize medical claims for cannabis as the "new herbalism," as opposed to pharmacognosy, the branch of pharmacology devoted to the study of natural products. The reason is simple. Although I support legalization of marijuana for recreational use, when I look at how medical marijuana has been promoted as a "foot-in-the-door" prelude to legalization, I see testimonials and flimsy evidence ruling over all. I see all the hallmarks of alternative…
pharyngula | August 5, 2015I used a cruel headline, but this is actually a useful list: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. It's not just the popular media that mangle scientific language, but also more technical works sometimes slip into misleading shorthand. For instance, #1 on their list of bad terms:
(1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997).…
jhalper | July 31, 2015It is a mystery no more: A physical model can explain how a bunch of ants are able, with no visible leader (or highly-developed brains, for that matter) to drag that oversized cake crumb or leaf all the way across your floor to their nest. It turns out that there are, indeed, leaders, of a sort. Those ants you see surrounding the prize being hauled are switching places with other ants that have been scouting out the directions to the nest. The new ants then direct the collective movement, at least for a moment or so until they begin to lose their sense of direction and newer ants take over.…
oracknows | July 17, 2015Three weeks ago, I did a post about how prone the antivaccine movement is to conspiracy theories. At that time, one example that I used was the then-very recent death of an autism quack and antivaccinationist (but I repeat myself) who's been big in the "autism biomed" movement for a long time and a regular fixture at autism quackfests like Autism ONE for many years. I'm referring, of course, to Jeff Bradstreet, whose body was found in a river on June 19, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest that appeared to have been self-inflicted. It didn't take long (less than a week) for the antivaccine…
oracknows | June 5, 2015One of the odd things about having been a blogger as long as I have been is that, occasionally, posts that I wrote years ago rise up to bite me long after I've forgotten that I even wrote them. Actually, that's usually not the right way to put it. Blogging is a very short term activity in that most posts are very ephemeral. They're usually (but not always) about something immediate, of the moment. Don't get me wrong. There are quite a few posts that I've written that aren't so ephemeral and could be read now without reference to the events or news that inspired them and be just as good now as…
gregladen | May 13, 2015Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones recently posted an item called "Scores of Scientists Raise Alarm About the Long-Term Health Effects of Cellphones." I like Josh's work, but there are some problems with this article I want to point out, some of which parallel problems in the more general discussion of cell phone safety.
Before looking at the Mother Jones piece, here's the bottom line: There is no known mechanism by which cell phone use can lead to cancer (usually, brain cancer is of concern). There have been many studies on this and related issues. They vary in quality and in what they look…
oracknows | May 11, 2015I've been blogging for over a decade now, a fact that I find really hard to believe looking back on it right now. I've told the story before, but it's worth briefly recounting again because doing so will explain why the story I'm about to discuss caught my attention. My "gateway drug," if you will, into skepticism was discovering Holocaust denial in the late 1990s on Usenet, a vast and sprawling conglomeration of thousands of discussion forums that began to fade away at the turn of the century with the rise of web-based forums and Google providing an interface to it to make it Google Groups.…
oracknows | May 4, 2015Whenever I discuss the concept of being "antivaccine" and how almost nobody wants to have the label "antivaccine" applied ot her, it's not uncommon that I hear the whinging retort from antivaccinationists claiming that "I'm not antivaccine; I'm pro-vaccine safety," or some similar claim. Of course, whenever I see antivaccinationists likening vaccination to the Holocaust (and themselves to Jews wearing the Yellow Star of David), rape, and felonious assault, I realize that denials tend merely to help antivaccinationists convince themselves that they don't stand for something that society…
jdupuis | April 5, 2015Imagine a world where two guys, graduates of the University of Guelph, a mid-sized university in southern Ontario, are able to parlay a series of funny and cool whiteboard-style science explanation YouTube videos into a global science communication empire. Without even "forgetting" to give credit to science illustrators in the process.
Don't imagine too hard, because I think we're almost there.
And what is it about Ontario and humourous science communications anyways? Is it something in the water? At least the most recent incarnation seems to be a little clearer on how things should be done.…
oracknows | March 4, 2015I hadn't planned on discussing the death of Jess Ainscough again, figuring two posts in a row were enough for now, barring new information. Besides, I was getting a little tired of the seemingly unending stream of her fans castigating me for being "insensitive" and saying it was "too soon" to discuss her death and wasn't sure I wanted to reawaken that discussion, which is only now finally dying down. This was a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma at age 22 for which the only known treatment with a reasonable chance of providing her…
esiegel | February 14, 2015“Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.” -Joan Jett
We've reached the end of yet another week here at Starts With A Bang, which means it's time to take a look back at everything we've covered. It also means it's time for you to catch up on any of the (amazing) articles you missed, which includes:
Gravitational waves (for Ask Ethan),
The Moon as no one's seen it (for our Weekend Diversion),
The edge of the Sun (for Mostly Mute Monday),
The tragic fate of physicist Paul…
denialism | February 7, 2015This week's Realtime with Bill Maher was just about the most perfect example I've seen yet that maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Due to the measles outbreak becoming a hot-button issue, and the realization that his smoldering anti-vaccine denialism would not go over well, our weekly debate host decided to instead unleash all of his other incredibly stupid, unscientific beliefs about medicine.
This was astonishing. And because his panel, as usual, is composed largely of political writers and journalists, there was no one to provide a sound scientific counterpoint to the craziness…