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Left work to attend lab meeting that ended right before I go back to work. Later I might work. It sure will be nice to work when work is work.
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There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.
62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the
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A year after the 2009 human H1N1 pandemic began, researchers detected the H1N1 virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast. It is the first report of that flu strain in any marine mammal.H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide as a pandemic. The World Health Organization now considers the H1N1 strain from 2009 to be under control, taking on the behavior of a seasonal virus.
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…and the squeaky rat pup gets all the attention! Sci is at Neurotic Physiology today talking about rat pup squeaking, and what it means for mom’s attention. Head over and check it out.
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Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.
More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like
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The month of May is a violent thingIn the city their hearts start to singWell, some people sing, it sounds like they're screamingI used to doubt it, but now I believe itMonth Of May ------The Arcade FireToday is Mental Health Month Blog Day, sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA). It's designed to:...educate the public about mental health, decrease stigma about mental illness, and discuss strategies for making lasting lifestyle and behavior changes that
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Vaidyanathan, U., Nelson, L. & Patrick, C. (2011). Clarifying domains of internalizing psychopathology using neurophysiology, Psychological Medicine, 42 (03) 447-459. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291711001528
Dichter, G., Damiano, C. & Allen, J. (2012). Reward circuitry dysfunction in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders and genetic syndromes: animal models and clinical findings, Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 4 (1) 19. DOI: 10.1186/1866-1955-4-19
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The Boston Globe has a short but fascinating interview on the history of swearing where author Melissa Mohr describes how the meaning of the act of swearing has changed over time. IDEAS: Are there other old curses that 21st-century people would be surprised to hear about? MOHR: Because [bad words] were mostly religious in the […]
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The public will never tire of the nature versus nurture debate but here’s a hint: the answer in biology is always both. But if you’ve ever known any twins, you know they can have quite different personalities which, you would think, are attributable to differences in nurture of one sort or another. To understand this better, some scientists […]
Freund, J., Brandmaier, A., Lewejohann, L., Kirste, I., Kritzler, M., Kruger, A., Sachser, N., Lindenberger, U. & Kempermann, G. (2013). Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice, Science, 340 (6133) 756-759. DOI: 10.1126/science.1235294
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Some people believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a small, unified body composed of the best scientists who make proclamations on lots of things.That isn't really true. The actual IPCC is a tiny UN group, around a dozen people, but the bulk of the data is compiled by unpaid (well, unpaid by the UN) scientists who participate in working groups that argue over the science - it is not without some flaws. They use geographical and gender parameters for participation so a […]
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For Indiana Jones, there was no villain as menacing and no foe as treacherous as the writhing snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Audiences saw their archaeologist champion paralyzed […]
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Interstate 20 starts on the west side of Texas and runs east to the Atlantic ocean, passing through …
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Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.
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Jeffrey Beall is doing much to draw attention to issues surrounding the validity of new journals. He is in the news today because a publisher is threatening to sue him for one billion (yes, billion with a b) dollars.
But I wanted to comment about a post from April about Hindawi Publishing. Beall ends:
Is this the future of scholarly publishing, dumbed down and offshore?
The “offshore” comment has a slightly snobbish overtone. It implies that, “Of course, some places simply can’t […]
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If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.
This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money.
Michael Bang Petersen, associate
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There is a rich tradition in psychology and neuroscience of using animals as models for understanding humans. Humans, after all, are enormously complicated creatures to begin even from a strictly biological perspective. Tacking on the messiness that comes with culture makes the study of the human mind tricky, at best. So, just as biomedical scientists [...]
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I am thrilled to announce that this month I am joining a new top-notch science blogging team at Scitable, Nature Education’s award-winning science education website! (But don’t worry, friends. I will continue to post here about animal physiology and behavior every Wednesday). Next week, Scitable will be launching eleven new blogs covering topics like neuroscience, genetics, oceanography, physics and more. I will be co-authoring an evolution blog called Accumulating Glitches together with
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Johnson, J., Trubl, P., Blackmore, V. & Miles, L. (2011). Male black widows court well-fed females more than starved females: silken cues indicate sexual cannibalism risk, Animal Behaviour, 82 (2) 383-390. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.018
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Guest post by Patrick Rabbitt
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sciencemuseum/3321607591/
This week, a paper by Woodley et al (2013) was widely quoted in the media (e.g. Daily Mail, Telegraph). The authors dramatically announced that the average intelligence of populations of Western industrialised societies has fallen since the Victorian era. This is provocative because previous analyses of large archived datasets of intelligence tests scores by Flynn and others show the opposite. However, […]
Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis & Raegan Murphy (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence
estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time, Intelligence, Other: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2013.04.006
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Ideals of Student Excellence and Enhancement by Gavin G. Enck has been published in the most recent issue of Nueroethics: Abstract Discussions about the permissibility of students using enhancements in education are often framed by the question, “Is a student...
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Supersymmetry, the extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that was once sold as an almost certain discovery that the LHC experiments would bump into upon starting to collect proton-proton collisions, is not in a very healthy situation these days.
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