Links
greengabbro | July 5, 2008This month's Scientiae is out! Hear women's voices... in science!
A conversation with Mr. Mister:
Should I blog about this? It's got some gender in it.Yeah, it's got a lot of gender. It's kind of awful.
Attention, Southern California! On November 13 you will have the exciting honor of hosting the world's largest-ever earthquake drill, and there is a blog devoted to the preparations. Readers not in Southern California can play along by working on your own emergency kits.
Could a volcanic eruption under the Arctic Ocean be responsible for melting ice caps? No. Andrew Revkin has a massive pile…
greengabbro | June 28, 2008 Okay, I'm still trying to figure out why my del.icio.us link-posting script is broken, but it's time to get back to quasi-regular link-posting anyway.
Christie at the Cape has a great post on archetypal female geologists - a counterpart to those irritating jokes about geology stereotypes that suggest you can only be a real geologist if you have a beard:
Why are the portraits so important, and why am I obsessed with Grey Braid fashion? Because it asserts so strongly the geologistness of these women, and the womanliness of these geologists. It represents a collective turning-of-the-back to…
neurophilosophy | June 24, 2008The forthcoming issue of The New Yorker contains a fantastic article by surgeon and writer Atul Gawande about the neurobiology of itching.
The article begins with the extraordinary case of a patient known as M., whose itch, which occurred following an episode of shingles, became so unbearable that one morning she awoke to find that she had scratched through her skull and into her brain while she slept.
Gawande continues with a brief history of theories about itching - it was long considered to be a mild form of pain, but came to be recognized as a distinct sensation, following experimental…
neurophilosophy | June 24, 2008Here are some more new members of the ever-growing online neuroscience community:
The Brain and the Sky
Illusion Sciences
N-Cog-Neato!
Neurophilia
Neurotonics
greengabbro | June 19, 2008Greetings, and welcome to this week's Carnival of Space! Before getting to the astro-goodness, Will has a question: How many of you get your astronomy news directly from the press release?
Planets and Plutoids
Everyone likes Mars, which means everyone's attention is on Phoenix and its oven. At the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawilla interviews Phoenix mission manager Barry Goldstein. Turns out, recent data-handling problems actually mean we'll get more data back from Phoenix:
[But] because we were in this anomalous state, we requested, and received, a bunch of contingency passes from MRO…
neurophilosophy | June 12, 2008The bi-monthly American magazine Psychology Today has launched a network of blogs covering a wide variety of topics, including addiction, cognitive science, sports psychology and psychotherapy.
The network contains more than 80 blogs, many of which are written by researchers who are prominent in their respective fields. I haven't had a look at all of them, but here are a few that caught my eye:
Brainstorm, by the editors of the magazine;
In Practice, by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac; and
Quirky Little Things, by Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of Cognition…
neurophilosophy | June 5, 2008Some old, some new:
The Reflection of Light
Psychedelic Research
Brain Stimulant
Brain Mind & Society
NeuroScene
Neurodisorder
Neurotonics
The Neuroprotective Lifestyle
Giovanna Di Sauro
The Cortical Column
Neurology Minutiae
neurophilosophy | April 29, 2008My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
The author of the above article is interviewed by Carl Zimmer on bloggingheadsTV. Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, and the author of a…
greengabbro | April 16, 2008My beautifully kludgy little script that does much of the work of putting together linky-posts for me - pulling everything with a special "to SB" tag off my del.icio.us account and formatting it - has stopped working. I cry tears of sadness. I also have a backlog of links.
Like, f'rinstance, April's Scientiae carnival. And the announcement for next month's Scientiae carnival - I'm excited about the theme!
And a couple of things on the social status of women in relation to geology: A Broadsheet summary of this article (pdf) about how oil and mineral-resource economies are bad for women. The…
omnibrain | March 31, 2008Welcome to the most recent installation of the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephelon, here at Of Two Minds! Steve and I thought we would mix things up a little bit and let a guest blogger summarize the best brain blogging (submitted to us (this week)). That guest is none other that famed socialite Paris Hilton, who wished to take this opportunity to attempt to change her image from fashionista to neuronista. Please welcome Paris!
Hi neurokids, Paris here. While I'm sure that you have already formed an opinion of me due to the massive media coverage of my escapades and foibles, hopefully…
omnibrain | March 7, 2008
The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method | Wired Science from Wired.com
If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it's about time that science does too. In the bellwether journal Science this week, a computer scientist argues that many modern problems are resistant to traditional scien
(tags: web2.0 collaboration science research trends)
Cooperation, punishment and revenge
Research from The University of Nottingham has shed new light on the way in which people co-operate for the common good -- and what happens when they don't.
(tags: science…
greengabbro | March 5, 2008
Avalanches on Mars Caught on Camera! -- You can see the dust cloud. If that's not enough for you, the HiRISE team has just released 75 pages of droolworthy new Mars pix. Whoever is in charge of cropping these things has a good eye for composition. This is your official time-waster for the week.
NOVA Geoblog: Mineralogy of the atmosphere -- Will we eventually see an "urban varnish", like desert varnish but with more coal fumes?
Welcome two new geoblogs: Looking For Detachment and Geology Happens!
Wanted: Gray Literature on Women of Color in Science -- Please pass your hidden gems to Mia Ong…
neurophilosophy | March 3, 2008Here are a number of new neuroscience blogs that I've come across recently:
Neuropathology Blog - by Brian E. Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Southern Illinois University's School of Medicine. This is a welcome addition to the blogosphere, as neuropathology is a dying art (if you'll excuse the pun).
Neuroanthropology Blog - a group blog by students and staff in the anthropology departments of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, USA, which "encourage[s] exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social…
neurophilosophy | February 26, 2008A few days ago, I briefly discussed the article by Oliver Sacks about geometric hallucinations in migraine aura. I thought that it was published in the print edition of the New York Times, but it turns out that this is in fact Sacks's first post on a new NY Times blog called Migraine: Perspectives on a Headache.
Sacks is one of five "migraneur" contributors to the new blog. (His co-bloggers are author Siri Hustvedt, journalist Paula Kamen, neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Podoll and musician Jeff Tweedy.) The post/article about visual migraines generated a lot of discussion, and, in his…
greengabbro | February 20, 2008
The buzz in the geoblogosphere this week has been about an article in Nature Geoscience on the status of women in the academic earth sciences. I meant to review it here, but haven't had the oomph. Instead, you should join the discussion at All My Faults are Stress-Related, Ten Million Years of Solitude, and The Dynamic Earth. One point that hasn't been discussed much yet is that graduate school in the earth sciences is actually freakishly egalitarian - unlike other fields, we do not see large-scale gender fractionation between the master's and Ph.D. As a Ph.D. noncompleter I was tremendously…
greengabbro | February 13, 2008
Nerd Links
Igneous Sounds -- What happens if you feed mineral powder diffraction curves into a synthesizer? You get something that's too harmonic for your computer music composition professor's avant garde sensibilities. More details on the process here.
Help Save Paleontology at Dinosaur National Monument! -- Dinosaur National Monument without the fossil exhibits would be like Glacier National Park without the glac... er, wait, maybe that's not the best analogy. Anyway, please write to the Park Service and ask them to preserve the place of paleontology in the park.
Bunnies Pee Red -- when…
neurophilosophy | February 12, 2008I'm very pleased to announce that Bioephemera has just moved to ScienceBlogs. This fantastic blog is a curiosity box of wonderful things, such as this nineteenth century wax anatomical model by Clemente Susini, of a man's head and neck, which shows the brain's superficial blood vessels and the branches of the trigeminal and hypoglossal nerves. Bioephemera is written by Jessica Palmer, who created four of the five beautiful banners which grace the top of this page.
There are also several other new SBlogs which I haven't gotten round to mentioning yet:
A Good Poop - very amusing papers from the…
greengabbro | February 6, 2008Telling Stories: February's Scientiae Carnival
Hooray, hooray, for Scientiae! This month's theme brings us lots of stories about what sexism looks like in everyday life... and some less depressing entries as well.
Stratigraphic layer-cake T-shirt
I would buy it immediately, but fortunately for my wallet I got stuck nitpicking the weird clastic dikes. Callan Bentley has more about why it is a wholly unrealistic piece of art.
Global warming skeptics claim Patriots win Superbowl
"Common sense demands that a team which makes up less than 0.05% of the population of Hudson County can't possibly be…
neurophilosophy | February 4, 2008
Technology blogger Robert Scoble attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, and made quite a few video recordings of the conversations he had with various people while he was there, which he has uploaded to Qik.
In this film, Scoble talks to the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who discussed his recent experiments in which a monkey with a brain-computer interface implanted into its motor cortex controlled the movements of a robot that was located more than 7,000 miles away.
Nicolelis presented his results during a session called Redefining the limits of the human body,…
greengabbro | February 2, 2008I vaguely knew that the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office runs a series of public lectures, but I didn't realize they were all videotaped and archived online for my blogging convenience. Ace! Now we just need to chop them up into bits and put them on YouTube.
Anyway, Thursday night's lecture was about the ongoing eruption of the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia (which Chris has covered in the past). You can watch it here. It's a little long, but quite suitable to put on as background material for your weekend housecleaning. The good science bits start about 15 minutes in.
Now, I've got…