retrospectacle | May 29, 2007 If you are in the vicinity of Illinois, I've got a cool event to pass on: a fundraising dinner to help benefit Dr. Irene Pepperberg's work on intelligence and communication in Grey parrots. Go see Dr. Pepperberg talk about her research or participate in a meet-and-greet. Proceeds go to the Alex Foundation, and all details can be found at either this flyer or on the foundation's website.
Dr. Pepperberg gave a symposia talk at the University of Michigan last month and I really enjoyed hearing her speak, I encourage you all to go to the event (hey, its for a good cause!).
retrospectacle | May 26, 2007Ok, so maybe I exaggerated a little bit on the GFP part, but these chairs really do glow! Called AfterGlow, this line of deck chairs from Douglas Homer is made of 100% post-consumer recycled high density polyethylene (HDPE) and glows in the dark.
retrospectacle | May 25, 2007Perhaps the best thing I've ever seen. Remember when I blogged a bit about the effects of psychoactive drugs on the web-building activities of spiders? Well little did I know that the experiment was actually filmed.
retrospectacle | May 25, 2007Lab ducks. What the heck are these two mallard ducks doing outside the entrance to my lab building? Every single day (since it got warm) they sit happily by the door, soft quacking at everyone who walks in and out, like benign and protective duck-buddhas. Why they are there, well, I have no idea. There's no water or ponds around medical campus. But I look forward to seeing them everyday (and sometimes sneak them a peice of bagel. Happy quacking ensues.)
There's a male and a female mallard duck, and the female has begun to build a nest. Right outside the door. This reminded me of the female…
retrospectacle | May 25, 2007Surgeons may have a new tool at their disposal to aid in planning surgeries: an interactive "4-dimensional" model of the human body called CAVEman which describes in live-sized detail over 3000 distinct human parts. CAVEman is really just a huge computer image which can be viewed in a booth (giving the image height, width, and depth) and changes over time to reflect age, disease state, etc. This progression of time is the "fourth dimension."
CAVEman has the potential to help patients better understand their diagnosis and treatment by having it visually represented to them in layman's terms.…
retrospectacle | May 23, 2007 In a really astounding discovery, it was confirmed that a 2001 birth by a female Hammerhead shark was achieved in the complete absence of males, in a process called parthenogenesis. While at first it was believed that the female shark mated before being captured, and stored the sperm for three years (ew), testing on the resulting offspring showed that their DNA only matched the mother and showed no evidence of a father. This phenomenon, while seen in some other vertebrates like birds and amphibians, has never been demonstrated in such a major vertebrate line as sharks. Mammals are now the…
retrospectacle | May 22, 2007What the heck is RSS? Little did I know that I was reading news and blogs the Old Slow Way rather than the New Fast Way. Jeez. I'm almost as embarrassed as when it was pointed out that I still use Friendster, which is, like *so* 2003.
RSS is sweet, and this video created by The Common Craft Show (which is a pretty good example of how to explain something to visually-inclided grad students in under a minute) breaks it down. Word and RSS to your mother, yo.
Click To Play
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could…
retrospectacle | May 22, 2007A friend of mine in the Neuroscience program just got back from Hawaii (nice spot for an academic conference, I'll say) and sent me some entirely amusing parrot pictures. FYI, the title of the email was "You in 40 Years?" Hrm.
"In Hilo, at "Bear's Cafe," I saw a retired lady eating breakfast with her African Grey "Yullie" or "Yummie" or
something like that. Notice he had has own plate and was eating breakfast. The lady knew who Alex was; I told her I had just met Dr. Pepperberg the week before...."
If only I could be so lucky as to be brunching with Pepper in Hawaii one day! Although, I…
retrospectacle | May 21, 2007 Perhaps you've heard about the wayward humpback whales, a mother and calf, who had become disoriented and began swimming inland towards Sacramento, California. They were traveling down the Sacramento River, causing a lot of grief to the Coast Guard and to marine biologists trying to think of a way to get the pair turned rightways.
Luckily, yesterday the two whales started swimming out to sea again after rescue crews lured them away by playing whale songs in the direction they wanted them to swim. This same ruse was successfully used in 1985 to divert another humpback who had swum around the…
retrospectacle | May 18, 2007Everyone's baring their souls.....oh i mean mugs, so thought i'd contribute.
This is the mug I was drinking out of at lab. Not really sure where it came from, except that those are suppost to be hair cells on the mug.
Hair cell for comparison:
More below the fold......
Got this one in Tong Li, China the first time I went there. It has a nifty ceramic tea strainer and lid.
I used to work in the New College admissions office and picked up this in my tenue there. Transparent mugs are rare and its funny how much I love this mug because of that.
retrospectacle | May 17, 2007Neuroscientists truly are rock stars. And, apparently, some are *literally* rockstars, or at least grasping desperately at it. Meet Joseph LeDoux's band, The Amygdaloids:
Joseph LeDoux, Daniela Schiller, and Nina Galbraith Curely are neuroscientists who study emotion and memory functions of the brain, and Tyler Volk is an environmental scientist who has also written about mind and brain. Their original songs are about mental life and mental disorders (Mind-Body Problem, An Emotional Brain, If You Want Your Brain to Last). They also cover other "heavy mental" tunes like Manic Depression, 8…
retrospectacle | May 16, 2007Getting stung by insects hurts, and some hurt (a LOT) more than others. Of course, this necessitates a 'sting pain' index by which to compare the aftereffects of meeting the business end of a stinger. Why, just last weekend when i was on an ill-fated canoe trip (I dumped out twice, in freezing water) and was stung by a particularly unruly bee, I was remarking on how useful it would be to place my excruciation in the context of other nasty bugly-bites.
Lucky for all of us, an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt decided to take one for the team and let a lot of bees, ants, and wasps sting him…
retrospectacle | May 15, 2007It really was only a matter of time until a longitudinal study on a massive scale, such as this one in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, came out to back up what common sense told us was unhealthy. That being, that artificial, gross manipulations of diet aren't great for you. In fact, they may just shorten your life span a bit. This study was published online in advance at the end of 2006, but didn't come to my attention until right this minute (its now free online).
The study, a collaboration between researchers in Greece and at Harvard, attempts to evaluate the effects of a low…
retrospectacle | May 14, 2007
If you are hearing impaired, or if you just like hearing about interesting new sensory gadgets, lend me your ears. Well, actually, lend them to neuroscientists at UNC Chapel Hill who have just opened the first clinical trial to test a new device which combines cochlear implant and hearing aid technology--in the same ear. The device (which hearkens to a small handgun with a droopy trigger worn behind the ear) is shown to the right and is called the Electro-Acoustic System (EAS). This past April, two hearing-impaired North Carolina adults were the first to receive the device, and now the trial…
retrospectacle | May 14, 2007 There's a nifty little radio show broadcast out of Canada called 'IAmAScientist' which focuses on [wait for it] the lives of scientists. The most recent show, cataloged via podcast courtesy of the friendly yet mysterious host, chats up Retrospectacle's favorite birdly scientist, Dr. Irene Pepperberg herself. Check it out here.
I also just noticed that the Canadian host says 'aboot.' Hehe. :)
Irene discusses at length her techniques and experiments with African Grey parrots and her most recent work on Muller-Lyer illusion perception in parrots. Even after spending a weekend with her, I…
retrospectacle | May 10, 2007Human papilloma virus (HPV) just became a bit more disconcerting, especially if you happen to be in a particular *cough* industry. A group at Johns Hopkins just reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that risk of a rare throat cancer (oropharyngeal squamous-cell carcinoma)was 9 times higher for people who reported oral sex with more than six partners.
HPV is becoming well known as the virus which causes the majority of cervical cancer cases, and is also the center of a controversial vaccine which conveys immunity to several of the most dangerous HPV strains. The strain of HPV…
retrospectacle | May 1, 2007I'm taking a few days off blogging, just to depressurize and take a few steps back. The last week has been pretty crazy and exhausting, so, a bit of time off is just what the doctor ordered.
retrospectacle | April 30, 2007Several people have emailed to let me know that some commenting is going on at the Volokh Conspiracy over what qualifies as "fair use." Its cool that some experts in law might chime in. Check it out.
retrospectacle | April 30, 2007So, as I mentioned before, Dr. Irene Pepperberg is in Ann Arbor to deliver a lecture at the annual Neuroscience Spring Symposia today. Also giving talks is Dr. Steven Finkbeiner from UCSF (on neurodegeneration in Huntington's) and Dr. Clifford Saper from Harvard/Deaconess (on hypothalamic regulation of sleep and circadian rhythms). But last night was the 'student dinner' with Dr. Pepperberg, and guess who flew in for the occasion? Why none other that Dr. Steve Steve himself!
Now, before dinner, Dr. Steve Steve needed to catch up on the goings-on in the blogosphere, especially some weird…
retrospectacle | April 29, 2007I just got back from picking up Irene Pepperberg from the Detroit airport and dropping her off at a hotel here in Ann Arbor. A while back I interviewed her for Friday Grey Matters, and afterwards suggested to the UM Neuro peeps on high that she be an invited speaker for the Neuroscience Spring Symposia! Well, they agreed, and Irene agreed, so now she's here to give a talk on some really new fascinating work with Alex (I'll be blogging it, so no spoilers except some of it deals with visual illusions in parrots. Cool!!!).
Tonight is the student dinner with Irene, which is pretty much me, Irene…