Posts
May 09, 2013
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10:04 PM | Flying Pigs on National Public Radio: Promoting the wrong theory of language and understanding
NPR aired an interview recently with Benjamin Bergen, UCSD cognitive scientist, discussing an embodied view of word meaning. The basic idea is nothing new by now: we understand words by "simulating" our physical experiences that have become associated with those words. Here's a quote taken from the NPR transcript of the interview:
If someone read a sentence like, "the shortstop threw the ball to first base," parts of the brain dedicated to vision and movement would light up,
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Cirrus clouds, the thin wisps of vapor that coalesce in the upper layers of the troposphere and trail across the sky, often more than 10 miles above the Earth's surface, influence our global climate, cooling the planet by reflecting incoming solar radiation and warming it by trapping outgoing heat.
Understanding the mechanisms by which these clouds form would help scientists make accurate predictions about future climate patterns.
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Water found on the moon and Earth came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, according to researchers who found evidence in samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17.
Comets did not deliver the molecules, they conclude in their Science Express article.
The discovery's telltale sign is found in the ratio of an isotopic form of hydrogen, deuterium, to standard hydrogen. The ratio in the
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9:15 PM | Surpassing Expectations
Seeing as I don’t have a certain article or anything specific to post about I figured I would reflect generally on the Psychology and Neuroscience Seminar! Before taking this class, I never took anything neuroscience related because for some reason I assumed I wouldn’t like it. I can now confidently say that I have been living a lie! I am …
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8:07 PM | Scientific writing seminar
This is a talk I gave to undergraduate research students at the STEM Center earlier today. Come for the tips, stay for the bad jokes!
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7:01 PM | Hair, Stress, and the Law
A new study has found a relationship between cortisol levels in our hair and prevalence of metabolic syndrome (a cluster of abnormalities that increase the likelihood of developing diabetes and heart disease). Here’s how the New York Times describes the...
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6:40 PM | DIY USB Magnifying Lamp
In a previous article, I demonstrate how to build an alcohol burner for a home chemistry set. In my article, I mention that "second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom & pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose." I would like to mention too that close-out stores like Dollar General are also fertile ground for modding.
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The idea of including dance and movement in interventions for eating disorders may seem somewhat controversial; generally, exercise and physical activity are discouraged for individuals recovering from eating disorders. Including dance in therapeutic interventions might raise a few eyebrows given the links between appearance-oriented athletic endeavors such as ballet and gymnastics and the development of eating disorders.
However, some therapists and scholars interested in alternative therapies
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6:02 PM | What You Do Is Who You Are
We’re living in an age of genetic explanations. Consider a few headlines from the past week alone: Single …
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4:34 PM | Recent Paper from the Ricci Lab
Below, Dr. Anthony Ricci describes a recent paper by the Ricci Lab, which discusses, “how the synapse in the turtle hearing organ compares to that in the mammal.” _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Communication between the inner ear sensory cells and the brain is …
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While school-age models of atomic nuclei show them as being spherical, like a basketball, they are more like the shape of a football.
Yet for some particular combinations of protons and neutrons, nuclei can also assume very asymmetric shapes, like a pear, where there is more mass at one end of the nucleus than the other.
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Men who experience sexual harassment are far more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics - purging - in an attempt to control their weight, according to a new psychology paper.
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Prefrontal Cortex Highlighted in RedIdentifying valid biomarkers for psychosis and schizophrenia is an active focus in brain research.Tyronne Cannon, Ph.D. from Yale University recently presented a summary of research on this topic at the William K. Warren Neuroscience Symposium in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here are my notes from his presentation along with related free full-text research references.Biomarker research in psychosis is important because current treatment for psychosis with the
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Sun D, van Erp TG, Thompson PM, Bearden CE, Daley M, Kushan L, Hardt ME, Nuechterlein KH, Toga AW & Cannon TD & (2009). Elucidating a magnetic resonance imaging-based neuroanatomic biomarker for psychosis: classification analysis using probabilistic brain atlas and machine learning algorithms., Biological psychiatry, 66 (11) 1055-60. PMID: 19729150
Seidman LJ, Giuliano AJ, Meyer EC, Addington J, Cadenhead KS, Cannon TD, McGlashan TH, Perkins DO, Tsuang MT, Walker EF & Woods SW (2010). Neuropsychology of the prodrome to psychosis in the NAPLS consortium: relationship to family history and conversion to psychosis., Archives of general psychiatry, 67 (6) 578-88. PMID: 20530007
Gee DG, Karlsgodt KH, van Erp TG, Bearden CE, Lieberman MD, Belger A, Perkins DO, Olvet DM, Cornblatt BA, Constable T & Woods SW (2012). Altered age-related trajectories of amygdala-prefrontal circuitry in adolescents at clinical high risk for psychosis: a preliminary study., Schizophrenia research, 134 (1) 1-9. PMID: 22056201
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‘Which books did you find helpful for thinking about science?’ Here’s my answer, off the top of my head: ten thought-provoking, intriguing, sometimes obstreperous works. Note that they’re deliberately not science books, and some are only tangentially ‘about’ science. (Maybe I’ll try science books the next time I feel the need for a ‘top ten’ [...]
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11:58 AM | Nocebo Mass Delusion
Expectation bias cuts both ways, for positive and negative expectations. Expectation bias, the tendency to perceive and accept data that reinforces your expectation, is one of the m any contributors to placebo effects (the illusion of a positive benefit that derive from something other than an active treatment). It is also, however, part of nocebo [...]
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The Need for Further Studies on the Safety of Prenatal Ultrasound.
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11:35 AM | Modeling A Queue
Two days ago I wrote a quick post to stimulate non-flat-EEG readers to consider an apparently trivial question, which in fact hid many subtleties. The general question I wanted to address was whether an estimate missing an uncertainty was more or less useful than a quoted uncertainty on the same parameter when the estimate itself was missing.
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10:13 AM | The academic backlog
Photo from http://www.pa-legion.com
Here’s an interesting
question to ask any scientist: If you were to receive no more research funding,
and just focus on writing up the data you have, how long would it take? The
answer tends to go up with seniority, but a typical answer is 3 to 5 years.
I don’t have any hard
data on this – just my own experience and that of colleagues – and I suspect it
varies from discipline to discipline. But my impression is that people generally
agree that
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9:37 AM | Step inside the age of ideas
It starts with a bit of chaos. Makeup artists slap thick pale, foundation onto women’s faces as the stylists produce a cloud of hair spray. Everybody is wriggled out of their ordinary jeans and t-shirts and into finery; long ball gowns or tight fitting suit jackets. This is how The Salon Project begins. It’s an [...]
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The Greek Stoic Epictetus wrote that "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them." A new study involving 185 children and teenagers, 88 fathers and 97 mothers shows how this same principle applies to children's fear of the dentist. This is an important topic because many children avoid the dentist out of fear, and around half of dentally anxious adults trace their fears to childhood.
Antonio Crego and his colleagues assessed the children's fear of the dentist, […]
Crego, A., Carrillo-Diaz, M., Armfield, J. & Romero, M. (2013). Applying the Cognitive Vulnerability Model to the analysis of cognitive and family influences on children's dental fear, European Journal of Oral Sciences, DOI: 10.1111/eos.12041
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¿Alguna vez te ha llamado la atención conocer un poco más acerca del "comportamiento", o sea la respuesta, de las neuronas? Si así es, este artículo te puede interesar, pues trata acerca de los ritmos "mu" que se generan en la corteza cerebral sensoriomotora. Como veremos, las neuronas de dicha corteza, en realidad "se mueven" a ese ritmo. Por qué o qué significa dicho "movimiento" son preguntas
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Interpret any significant triple interaction by examining the change in the strongest two-way interaction as it changes over levels of the third overall main effect. Then scotch.
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12:16 AM | Side Effects: What are they really?
Our class viewing of the film Side Effects left me disturbed and confused. The tremendously confusing plot twist at the end aside, it left me wondering about the side-effects of commonly prescribed drugs such as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors’ (SSRI) and the impact these side effects could have on society. Horrified that SSRI’s could actually …
May 08, 2013
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“As it drew closer to 1:30 p.m. and the verdict, people in the crowd urged others to...
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The African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) and Budgett's frog (Lepidobatrachus laevis) differ in diet and last shared a common ancestor about 110 million years ago but what they were found to have in common could help researchers on the path to prevention of intestinal birth defects.
Like most tadpoles, Xenopus exist primarily on a diet of algae, and their long, simple digestive tracts are not able to process insects or proteins until they become adult frogs. Budgett's is an
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10:11 PM | Welcome To The New SICHL Website!
Welcome to the new Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss (SICHL) website. If you are new to the site, please watch the video on the homepage to hear Dr. Jackler, Sewall Professor and Chair Otolaryngology (Head & Neck Surgery), discuss SICHL and his vision of a world in which hearing loss is a thing …
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9:40 PM | AHHH! Real Cannibals!
Today in my genetics class we started to discuss an extremely interesting and unique example of neurodegenerative disease that gave rise to the identification of a novel infectious agent. The disease is called kuru, previously called the “laughing death”, and was seen only in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, particularly among the women …
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During the late Pleistocene, which ended about 12,000 years ago, a remarkably diverse assemblage of large-bodied mammals inhabited the "mammoth steppe," a cold and dry environment that extended from western Europe through northern Asia and across the Bering land bridge to the Yukon.
Of the large predators - wolves, bears, and big cats - only the wolves and bears were able to maintain their ranges well after the end of the last ice age and a new study suggests that dietary flexibility may have
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7:57 PM | Getaway
A CBS station in Dallas reports of a new invasive species in my state. Now, I work with potentially invasive species, so I don’t want to make light of the biological damage that could be done here, but... this is the invasive species:
The report calls it a giant African land snail, which could be any several species.
The story concludes:
Unfortunately the snail discovered in the Houston homeowner’s backyard woman’s backyard got away before it could be caught.
Got away? A snail got […]
