retrospectacle | December 18, 2007In the movie The Princess Bride, the hero Wesley is attacked by fearsome Rodents Of Unusual Size (ROUS) in the fire swamp. Turns out, ROUS really exist!
Example of a Princess-Bride-era ROUS
Confirmed ROUS!
A new species of rat, the size of a large cat, was confirmed during a scientific expedition earlier this year to the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea, in a remote region where people have rarely explored. The expedition was reported in National Geographic and yielded other new species of flora and fauna (like a tiny possum).
"The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical…
retrospectacle | December 17, 2007Along with Shelley, I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at UM. The last three years my labmates and I have made a trilogy of satirical neuroscience posters poking mild fun at the mystical art of brain science. Shelley has kindly invited me to write on said trilogy. Also in any spare time remaining I punish myself with some rather difficult neural engineering experiments. (Tim Marzullo)
Episode 1: Spurious Correlations
You know the experience. To quote Allen Ginsburg, "everybody's serious but me." You walk around the massive meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, with 30,000…
retrospectacle | December 16, 2007Page 3.14 asks, in a poll which you should all go participate in, which language should ScienceBlogs branch into next?
I voted that the next ScienceBlogs should be in Chinese, due to their up-and-coming science programs as well as the massive amounts of people who could stand to benefit from educational blogs in Mandarin. However, you have the inevitable down-side of censorship in China itself. My parents (who live in Suzhou) cannot read my blog, or any ScienceBlog here, due to censorship. Why? I have no idea. The other angle is that China is seperated by many spoken language barriers, but…
retrospectacle | December 16, 2007People have always lost their hearing with age, but before there were hearing aids and cochlear implants, there were ear trumpets. And ear trumpet is pretty much exactly what it sounds like (a cone whose small end fits in the ear canal) and serves to better collect and amplify sound into the ear. A person hard of hearing would hold it to their ear as someone else would speak (or yell) into the large end of the trumpet. The earliest description of an ear trumpet was in the early 1600s.
Most ear trumpets were custom-made, and they varied greatly in opulence and function. Some were hand carved…
retrospectacle | December 15, 2007Over at Pharyngula, Mark Antimony posted this:
A friend of mine, who's name won't be mentioned, blacked out in class the other day. Since then, he's been on a seizure drug. The drug is giving a very weird side effect. It must be affecting his auditory cortex, because he is hearing all audio roughly a half-octave lower than what it really is. In fact, he's using a sound editing program to raise his entire music library up the ~half-octave to compensate. The name of the drug is Tegretol.
While I am not a medical doctor, my research is in auditory neuroscience so it might be interesting to…
retrospectacle | December 12, 2007Sorry for the paucity of posts this week, folks. Its been a crazy week, with school winding down and lots to get done. Things will be getting back to normal very soon, and I'll get back to writing here.
retrospectacle | December 9, 2007I went to go see the movie the Golden Compass last night with a few friends, and was phenomenally impressed by it at every level. As someone who has not read the books (The Golden Compass was based on the book 'Northern Lights', renamed 'The Golden Compass' in America) I don't have a basis to compare whether it followed the book exactly or not. But the movie did succeed in making me really want to read the book, part of a trilogy. The Golden Compass first came to my attention through Facebook, specifically through a "Boycott the Atheist Movie!!!" Facebook group that a few old friends were…
retrospectacle | December 8, 2007No one could deny that Oktoberfest in Munich would be a roaring good time. However, it seems that a few in attendance occasionally have *too* good of a time and might end up in the emergency room. Now usually, those who do so likely drank too much beer, or fell down and broke an arm, etc. You know, *normal* drunken injuries. However, every now and then you get someone who swallowed a beer-filled condom.
A 31-yr-old man was admitted to the emergency unit in late September with severe abdominal
pain and vomiting for the last 2 h. A physical examination revealed predominantly right-sided…
retrospectacle | December 7, 2007As an admitted Sephora junkie, I've come across a lot of caffeine-laced cremes for sale that I thought were a rather ridiculous waste of money. A few examples are:
- Bliss Fat Girl Slim and LoveHandler
- Lancome High Resolution Eye Creme
- Zirh Aftershave Creme
- Ren Leg Gel
But does infusing caffeine into the skin relay any real beauty benefits? A new study by Brazilian researchers, published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, suggest it might actually slim thighs.
(Continued below the fold....)
99 women were asked to used a 7% caffeine creme twice a day for 30 days, and thigh and hip…
retrospectacle | December 6, 2007Some good news for the Florida manatee:
We just learned today that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) deferred the manatee's status change from Endangered to Threatened. They also directed their staff to undertake a review of the flawed state classification system for ALL imperiled species.
Citing the need for a better method to estimate the manatee population and the record 417 manatee deaths in 2006, Governor Charlie Crist asked the FWC to reject the status change and the Commissioners complied. ''We need to protect these gentle creatures,'' said Governor Crist in…
retrospectacle | December 5, 2007...unless it occurs in Oregon Trail. Then its hilarious.
You too can proclaim your malady to the world via Tshirt, here.
(Hat tip darkman, who has a raging case of dysentery)
retrospectacle | December 5, 2007
Some interesting research is being reported in the mainstream media: that buckwheat honey can reduce coughing and soothe sore throats as well as over-the-counter cough syrup (dextromethorphan), in children. ABC News specifically reported that, in comparison to baseline levels, coughing children who received honey slept better and coughed less that those that received cough syrup or nothing at all. I decided to go to the journal article, published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, and read about the results myself.
The authors' objective was to compare honey, honey-flavored…
retrospectacle | December 3, 2007There's an article in the Washington Post by the chief officer of the AAAS and editor of 'Science' which can be summed up here:
We simply cannot invest all our hopes in a single approach. Federal funding is essential for both adult and embryonic stem cell research, even as promising alternatives are beginning to emerge.
I'm glad to see the editor of the journal which published one of the skin cell-turn-stem cell papers speak out on this issue, and be perfectly clear that this in no way vindicates the Bush administration's policy and vetos.
retrospectacle | December 1, 2007While not as shockingly unusual as the knitted teratoma I reported on a while back, this knitted brain (located at the awesomely-titled 'Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art') is equally amazing. Regions are knitted with varying colors, and the corpus callosum is a zipper!
Here's a view of the brain from above, and "opened-up" (the hemispeheres seperated with yarn spinal cord trailing.)
Artist: Karen Norberg, Location: Boston Museum of Science
"Building a brain with yarn and knitting needles turns out to follow many of the same pathways as actual brain development," says Norberg…
retrospectacle | November 30, 2007Time has a great article about the recent breakthrough in stem cell research (that certain types of skin cells can regain pluripotency)--specifically on whether this so-called resolution to the stem cell debate might help the GOP.
Stem cell research has been the albatross around the neck of Republicans for a while now. Its getting harder and harder to feign outrage over the moral ambiguity over a clump of cells, when thousands of Americans (who, unlike blastocysts, vote) die of varied diseases that may benefit from stem cell therapy. Bush's repeated vetoes of federal funding for embryonic…
retrospectacle | November 29, 2007Worrisome news: A Cairo human rights activist and blogger, Wael Abbas, posted videos of torture by Egyptian police on YouTube. YouTube received some "complaints" about the material and responded by suspending Abbas' account there, citing his material was "inappropriate." One of these videos depicted the sodomy of a restrained political prisoner by police, and resulted in the conviction of the police officers involved.
"It's the first time Egyptian people saw something like that," Abbas said, referring to beatings and torture. "It was a shock to the Egyptian people."
The blogger, who said he'…
retrospectacle | November 29, 2007During the Thanksgiving break, a friend of mine took this great photo of a cuttlefish at the New England Aquarium.
A few days ago, a really cool website called Digital Cuttlefish was brought to my attention by a comment someone left here. This blog epitomizes something I really like and admire--the intersection of art and science. The Digital Cuttlefish likes poetry (more iambic pentameter-type than free verse) and is quite good at it; just check out their poem "An Atheist Gives Thanks" and "A Song for the Season." I like this cuttlefish, and you should too.
retrospectacle | November 28, 2007Gene therapy is the isolation of a gene, which is then packaged into a vector for introduction into the body in hopes that it can correct some aspect of genetic disease. Often this "vector" is a type of virus which had been specifically engineered to be safer than its original version. This usually involves removing the exons responsible for its transmission through all cell types, effectively "disabling" it. The virus will infect target cells and force them to produce the protein of interest, effectively replacing (or overexpressing) the protein in the body--which can be perpetuated.
Gene…
retrospectacle | November 27, 2007In a response to a "What are You Thankful For" request by ABC4.com, a rare and interesting neurological case study was described: penetration of the brain by a deer antler. CNN.com also has a video describing the event and the injury. In a nutshell, 5-year-old Connor Schick found a deer antler during an outdoor vacation in July. He tripped while carrying it, he fell on it, and it penetrated his brain through his eyesocket. (OUCH) Below is the MRI of his injury, with his doctor holding up the offending antler for dramatic effect.
Credit: CNN.com
Connor was quite lucky. Not only did he survive…
retrospectacle | November 27, 2007The Scientist has a fastastic illustrated feature on the workings of cochlear hair cells in their current online issue. In addition to pointing out the different cell types in the inner ear, there are a few informative blurbs about mechanotransduction and how stereocilia are organized and linked. This is part of the larger theme "Focus on Neuroscience" issue, which has lots of short articles about from channel dynamics to Alzheimer's disease.
The hair cells of the inner ear are unique in that they are sensory epithelial cells, and not neural tissue themselves (like olfactory receptors or the…