Tabitha M. Powledge collects samples of skepticism and enthusiasm regarding the administration's new BRAIN initiative in this week's On Science Blogs.
One reason it's hard to know whether to be enthusiastic or skepical is that nobody yet knows exactly...
Tabitha M. Powledge collects samples of skepticism and enthusiasm regarding the administration's new BRAIN initiative in this week's On Science Blogs.
One reason it's hard to know whether to be enthusiastic or skepical is that nobody yet knows exactly what the initiative will do, so one must rely on faith. I'm going to betray myself as an enthusiast, for two reasons. One, I think that more research is better than less research, and I don't buy the claims that big science is damaging to small science, any more that it was with the human genome project.
And the second reason is that I don't buy the now fashionable claim that neuroscience has been hyped and has been disappointing. All kinds of science gets hyped, and research is often disappointing--until it isn't. That is, nobody cares much about a monk...
Listen to an album that you played 1,325,462 times as a 14-year-old, and you'll probably find that when one track ends, you know which one is coming up next.
Simple memorization? Apparently not. Jon Hamilton of NPR...
Listen to an album that you played 1,325,462 times as a 14-year-old, and you'll probably find that when one track ends, you know which one is coming up next.
Simple memorization? Apparently not. Jon Hamilton of NPR reports on a finding by a Georgetown University researcher that the memory comes not from the part of the brain relevant for hearing, but from the motor areas. Apparently, areas involved in hearing can remember small chunks of notes, but the motor system is what stores the sequence.
The researcher, Josef Rauschecker, who presented his findings at the recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, says this experiment occurred to him because he listened obsessively to The Beatles as a kid. And when he puts those old albums on now, he knows which song is coming next when the...
In...
In a thoughtful post Friday, Gary Stix at Scientific American reported on a study of six British newspapers by researchers at University College of London. The study found that “research was being applied out of context to create dramatic headlines, push thinly disguised ideological arguments, or support particular policy agendas.”
We might be hard put to find any area of science coverage that hasn't been subject to those kinds of distortions. Coverage of Lipitor and its ilk was certainly as likely to contain dramatic...
Science News's ...
Science News's Tina Hesman Saey appears to have an exclusive on this. Of course, she's a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and probably one of only a handful of journalists attending the International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal this week.
She writes that Seattle researchers have discovered a mutation--a duplication of a gene that helps brain cells move around--that occurred 2.4 million years ago, long after our separation from the ape lineages. Today every human has that duplicated gene, indicating quite strongly that it confers an evolutionary advantage. Brain cells that can move better might have led...
...
Elizabeth Weise at USA Today put it succinctly in her lede: "Researchers know that sleep deprivation makes people and animals less functional. Now a team of researchers in Wisconsin and Italy has found that in rats kept awake past their bed times, their brains begin to turn themselves off, neuron by neuron, though the rat is still awake."
So, in rats at least, individual neurons (oddly floating in a void in the artist...
One should never put too much credence in...
One should never put too much credence in studies that claim to show a relationship between brain size, even when calculated in proportion to body size, and any specific behaviors. But, with that caveat out of the way, we note a study by researchers in Sweden and Spain who looked at relative brain sizes among 82 species of birds in Europe and concluded that city birds belonged to families with relatively larger brains than birds that have not adapted to life in urban areas. The study was published in Biology Letters.
The photo shows one famous example, the English blue tit, which long ago learned to pull the caps off milk bottles left on front doorsteps. (Note to younger readers: In olden days milk...
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.
