February 6, 2007
I had half-written a post drawing attention to a fascinating new paper on consciousness ... when I discovered that Jonah Lehrer had beat me to it. I won't try to improve on his offering about this truly clever and fascinating paper, which covers some Oliver Sacks-like ground gracefully Check it…
February 6, 2007
The Decider
The Decisive
I finally got a chance to write about Patrick O'Brian's splendid Aubrey-Maturin novels. Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of those Dickensically rich novels, provides a model of decision-making relevant to the paper reviewed in this week's Mind Matters,, the weekly blog…
February 2, 2007
Now we know what Harvard's doing with all that money.
Here's an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell's inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don't think I'd try it with dial-up.
But…
February 1, 2007
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. Three researchers (…
February 1, 2007
I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race."
The study in question seems to contradict many…
January 24, 2007
Place fields tied to a single grid cell in a rat's entorhinal cortex.
From Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, and Moser, "Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex," Nature, 11 August 2005. By permission of the authors.
I wanted to give a heads-up and a link to a set of blog posts on…
January 18, 2007
Now comes more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "leak" or "unauthorized publication") of internal company documents that allegedly reveal its attempt to…
January 11, 2007
The wattle bird, one of several Australian species that have been myteriously
dying around the town of Esperance.
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As a former Texan, I took special notice last week when I heard Austin officials temporarily closed the…
January 10, 2007
Capt. Andy MacLean, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, after his unit's first night of serious combat in the Iraq War, Apr 1-2, 2003. Image by David Leeson/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS SYGMA
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The floor…
January 8, 2007
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of…
December 22, 2006
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raised some juicy issues about bringing a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (okay, Media 1.4) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print…
December 21, 2006
from Furious Seasons______________________________
In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia…
December 20, 2006
I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to…
December 17, 2006
my fiddle, trying to get atop a Beethoven Trio__________________________________________________________________The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in…
November 29, 2006
That's my head, scanned by Joy Hirsch and Steven Thomas at Columbia University's and then digitized, burned onto a CD and mailed to me. I mashed it through the lovely, open-source Mac program Osirix, which allows me to imagize my brain, which I'm finding much different than imagining it, though…
October 25, 2006
I'm not speaking of political terrorists but of the terror that spreading "ordinary" violence brings to communities. Amid the rash of school violence over the last few weeks, the town just next to my own placid, lovely Vermont town, Barre, was recently shaken when three teenagers got involved in…
October 24, 2006
Stroke damage in a human brain
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Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of…
October 24, 2006
I've been remiss in not posting several articles I wrote reporting on findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. So, last first:
This story, posted today at sciam.com, is about a nice piece of research done by the University of Milan's Maria Abbracchio, who found that…
October 23, 2006
Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism by Janet Stemwedel, James Hrynyshyn and…
October 20, 2006
Image from the "For Family and Friends" page of Eli Lilly's Xigris website.
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Even among the other scandals the drug industry has produced lately, the behavior described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine stands out as…
October 4, 2006
Boing Boing points out that Fox News has at least thrice identified disgraced Congressman Mark Foley — Republican of Florida, former chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, cyberstalker of adolescent Congressional pages — as a Democrat.
See it to believe it.
Apparently they…
September 25, 2006
Red-cockaded woodpeckers, by Earl Lincoln Poole, from Harold Bailey's Birds of Virginia, 1913; via Wikipedia Commons.
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North Carolina landowners are clearcutting pine forests to make sure those pesky red-cockaded…
September 18, 2006
Avian flu outbreaks in spring 2006, Paris to Georgia. From Declan Butler's new Google Earth time-series maps.
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Nature reporter Declan Butler, who has done some of best reporting on avian flu and (separately) the…
September 15, 2006
W.A. Mozart -- just another hard-working genius
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A few hours ago I received this email:
your article in "new scientist" sept 16-22 06
is pure B S . you should dedicate it to the
extreme liberal intelligensia.
The writer, one Kenneth Rubin (nice meeting…
September 11, 2006
I opened my feature on mirror neurons for Scientific American Mind by telling how my son Nicholas imitated me sticking out my tongue in his first hour. I regret I can offer you no film of that.
Thanks to PLOS Biology, however, I can now offer you videos of a baby macaque monkey essentially doing…
August 29, 2006
Having written the below as a comment on my previous post , I realized it should perhaps be its own post.
My previous post drew notice to Malcolm Gladwell's recent article and blog posts about the competitive disadvantage our employer-based health-insurance system (and retirement system)…
August 28, 2006
In his recent New Yorker article, "The Risk Pool," as well as a blog post, Malcolm Gladwell has drawn attention to yet another reason to move to a single-payer health insurance system: the punishing competitive disadvantage that American companies and industries suffer when they provide health…
August 26, 2006
"Errant Behaviors," a video and sound installation by Shawn Decker and Anne Wilson.
In response to my post on "Music, Mood, and Genius (not) -- or RockNRoll meets neuroscience," one Shawn Decker, a music professor and composer at the Chicago Art Institute (and a former classmate and ultimate-…
August 23, 2006
I've been interested in music and science since taking a physics of music class back in college (20 years later, amazingly, I discovered my violin teacher of 2000, Kevin Bushee, was married to the daughter of the professor who taught that class), so I was intrigued to find this Wired piece in which…
August 17, 2006
It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes:
Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released…
