cortex | July 17, 2006Well, not really. But there has definitely been a shift in public perception since last summer. As I was watching my local news this morning, the anchor alluded to global warming as a way of "explaining" the record setting heat wave currently stifling most of the country. Of course, the science linking greenhouse gases to a hot week of weather is tenuous at best. Nevertheless, people are now using the scientific consensus on climate change as a means of understanding their local forecast.
This is both good and bad news. On the one hand, it demonstrates that global warming has hit the big time…
cortex | July 15, 2006First of all, anyone who argues that homosexuality isn't "natural," and that being gay is just a strange human perversion, is clearly wrong. As I wrote in my article on Joan Roughgarden:
Having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it.
But a crucial distinction has to be made, at least from a biological perspective, between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity. There is very little evidence of gay animals…
cortex | July 14, 2006The WSJ editorial page - a very suspect source - opines on a new statistical study which seems to cast doubt on the hockey stick model of global warming. This model began with Michael Mann's 1999 paper, and is the star of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
The three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University -- are not climatologists; they're statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann's methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann's papers…
cortex | July 14, 2006A new paper in The International Journal of Obesity explores several of the ignored factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic. Sure, corn syrup and lethargy are bad, but other suspects include:
1) The decrease in smoking. Apparently, the Virginia Slims advertisements are accurate. Smoking really does make you skinnier by suppressing your appetite.
2) The rise of Prozac. Most anti-depressants have weight gain has a possible side-effect, and when 33 million doses of Prozac are being dispensed every year, those side-effects are bound to have an effect on our collective waistline.
3)…
cortex | July 13, 2006If the hype is accurate, then I'm skipping the hybrid and going straight for the Tesla...Imagine an electric car that accelerates like a Corvette and can get 250 miles per charge.
cortex | July 13, 2006I'm not so sure, but two prominent scientists, both of whom are transgendered, allege that scientists regularly discriminate and "ostracize" ambitious female scientists. This is the latest twist of the Larry Summers Debate, which has grown a wee bit tiresome. I alluded to Joan Roughgarden's allegations in Seed last month, but the WSJ has an article on Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres), who is also convinced that women and men are treated differently by the scientific establishment. Here is Sharon Begley's great lead:
Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious…
cortex | July 12, 2006Not if you read the fine print. According to an analysis by the Treasury Department, Bush's tax cuts may raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%.
But is that enough to pay for the tax cuts? Not even close. An 0.7 percent increase in economic output would lead to increased tax payments of $29 billion.
Sounds impressive, right? Wrong. Making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate in increased tax revenue. While trickle-down economics might make for good…
cortex | July 12, 2006Jake over at Pure Pedantry links to a recently published article which shows that the adult neocortex has roughly the same number of neurons (but more glial cells) than the neocortex of a newborn. This is an interesting study and deserves a brief comment. As I wrote in Seed earlier this year, neurogenesis - the idea that neurons in our brain are constantly dividing - is no longer controversial. Thanks to the persistence of Elizabeth Gould, Fernando Nottebohm and others, the paradigm has finally shifted.
But the details of neurogenesis remain hotly debated, especially when it comes to the…
cortex | July 11, 2006Sometimes science experiments smack of the obvious. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave 36 people with deep religious convictions hallucingenic mushrooms (active ingredient psilocybin) they experienced a deep, and lingering, sense of spirituality.Furthermore, as every day tripper knows, about a third of users were pummelled by feelings of fear and anxiety. Apparently, transcendence and nervousness are separated by a very thin line.
Despite the dangers, researchers concluded that psilocybin, the compound in the mushrooms, might have therapeutic value in improving the outlook of addicts and…
cortex | July 10, 2006There's currently a glut of good books on happiness. If you don't have the time to wade through them all, Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine has a helpful summary of the latest developments in positive psychology.
cortex | July 10, 2006I've always wondered why evangelicals obsess over evolution and not quantum physics. If their intent is to undermine materialist science, the surreal conclusions of modern physicists - multiple universes, 11 stringy dimensions, the invisible weight of dark matter - strike me as far more vulnerable to religious interpretation than natural selection. After all, physicists cheerfully admit that their theories have a big gaping hole in the center.
Well, it seems that evangelicals have finally started to read Stephen Hawking:
"When you get to the subatomic level, everything we know about the…
cortex | July 8, 2006These bonobos can even invent metaphors...The secret, at least according to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, head scientist at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, is to expose primates to language when they are still infants. Of course, this isn't the first time talking chimps have threatened to dethrown Chomsky and his Innate Grammar Machine, but these poetic bonobos are pretty persuasive.
cortex | July 7, 2006It's pretty damn funny. I especially like the part where Ali G connects being bilingual with bisexuality. Chomsky doesn't even flinch.
[Courtesy Andrew Sullivan]
cortex | July 7, 2006Sharon Begley has another wonderful column today in the WSJ. She focuses on the so called "violence gene" as an example of the hopelessly complicated relationship between genetics and real life.
In the late 1980s, a number of men in several generations of a large Dutch family were found to carry a mutation in the MAOA gene that made it inactive. They all had a long rap sheet of rape, attempted murder and arson. MAOA became known as the "violence gene," headlines warned of "a violence in the blood," and there was talk of screening everyone to identify carriers.
The link between MAOA and…
cortex | July 7, 2006Money also can't buy you happiness. It's been reported before, but it's always worth repeating: the rich aren't happier than the rest of us. In the last issue of Science, a team of researchers (including Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman), reported that"The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory...People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities."
Of course, this isn't…
cortex | July 6, 2006Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg alleges that if global warming were an entirely natural phenomenon - as opposed to a man-made problem caused by greenhouse gases - then "the reluctance on the part of some on the right to fix the problem would evaporate." This is a grand claim, and it's worth noting that Goldberg doesn't explain his position. I can only guess that conservatives would be more willing to confront the inconvenient truth of global warming if it didn't involve curtailing economic growth or becoming less reliant on fossil fuels.
That said, I do find the second part of Goldberg's…
cortex | July 6, 2006Much ink has been spilled about the recent paper in Science documenting empathy in mice. The experiment was rather simple. The scientists noticed that mice given a painful injection displayed increased writhing behavior (a reflexive response to pain) in the presence of cagemates who had also been injected. Furthermore, the writhing increased the longer the paired rats had previously been caged together. If the mouse saw their friend get poked with a needle then their own injection seemed to hurt even more.
I tend to agree with Jake over at Pure Pedantry, who argued that "The question of…
cortex | July 5, 2006This charming article, on Shamu, positive reinforcement, and the malleability of men, has been one of the NY Times' most emailed articles for the last 10 days. (Is that some kind of record?) The basic message is very straightforward:
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
The article goes on to detail how the author used "approximations" - rewarding small steps toward a whole…