- August 20, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,695 views
Better to climb you with, ma
by moneduloides in Moneduloides
I found this little ditty in this month’s issue of the journal Evolution. It’s entitled Ossification heterochrony in the therian postcranial skeleton and the marsupial-placental dichotomy [1], and does a very good job of exploring the differential rates of bone formation in marsupial (the fetus is nourished by a yolk-like sac) v. placental (the fetus is nourished by a placenta) mammals. The reason this is interesting (it’s not obvious, don’t worry), is that marsupials show very little mo........ Read more »
Vera Weisbecker, Anjali Goswami, Stephen Wroe, & Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra. (2008) OSSIFICATION HETEROCHRONY IN THE THERIAN POSTCRANIAL SKELETON AND THE MARSUPIAL-PLACENTAL DICHOTOMY. Evolution, 62(8), 2027-2041. DOI/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2008.00424.x
- August 19, 2008
- 09:30 PM
- 1,119 views
How to help an enzyme crack cocaine
by Michael Clarkson in Conformational Flux
In addition to the adverse consequences of addiction and the inconvenience of serving several years of jail time for possessing it, cocaine can cause a fatal overdose. Although this condition can be treated, no therapy presently exists that attacks the overdose by removing cocaine from the bloodstream. One possible approach to eliminating cocaine from a patient would be to accelerate the process by which it is degraded. Unfortunately, the enzymes that perform this activity in the human body are ........ Read more »
Fang Zheng, Wenchao Yang, Mei-Chuan Ko, Junjun Liu, Hoon Cho, Daquan Gao, Min Tong, Hsin-Hsiung Tai, James H. Woods, & Chang-Guo Zhan. (2008) Most Efficient Cocaine Hydrolase Designed by Virtual Screening of Transition States. Journal of the American Chemical Society. DOI: 10.1021/ja803646t
- August 19, 2008
- 07:37 PM
- 763 views
The Power of a Well Told Life Story
by Stu in Improved Lives
Photo Credit
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot on myths and stories and the power that narratives can have on how we view ourselves and thus how we live our lives. Myths and stories are a huge part of most of the world’s cultures. Native Americans, for example, still hold on to many of the myths [...]... Read more »
Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk, & Walter Mischel. (2005) When Asking "Why" Does Not Hurt. Distinguishing Rumination From Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions. Psychological Science, 16(9), 709-715. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01600.x
- August 19, 2008
- 05:00 PM
- 914 views
Who's a clever boy then?
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Self-recognition was long believed to be unique to humans. However, it was established more than 30 years ago that the great apes are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, and more recently it has been found that dolphins and elephants can too. Now Prior et al provide the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in a non-mammalian species. In this film clip from the supplementary materials which accompany the paper, a magpie (which is actually a female) realizes that it has a mark on........ Read more »
Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz, Onur Güntürkün, & Frans de Waal. (2008) Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition. PLoS Biology, 6(8). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202
- August 19, 2008
- 02:53 PM
- 764 views
Magpie, know thyself
by Jeremy Yoder in Denim and Tweed
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Photo by p_adermark.New in PLoS Biology: European Magpies can recognize their own reflection in a mirror. Self-recognition in a mirror is used as a test of self-awareness in non-human animals, so this suggests that magpies, and maybe... Read more »
Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz, Onur Güntürkün, & Frans de Waal. (2008) Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition. PLoS Biology, 6(8). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202
- August 19, 2008
- 09:30 AM
- 1,099 views
Do God and prayer trump scientific medicine?
by Orac in Respectful Insolence
Late this afternoon, I happened to be sitting in my office perusing the websites for the latest batch of surgical journals, trying desperately to catch up on my reading, something that I, like most academic surgeons, am chronically behind in, when I happened upon the website of the Archives of Surgery. There, the lead article caught my eye, and I downloaded it for later reading. Then, as I perused a few news sites (yes, I was procrastinating; but who doesn't procrastinate from time to time?), an........ Read more »
Lenworth Jacobs, Karyl Burns, & Barbara Bennett Jacobs. (2008) Trauma Death: Views of the Public and Trauma Professionals on Death and Dying From Injuries. Archives of Surgery, 143(8), 730-735. http://archsurg.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/143/8/730
- August 19, 2008
- 09:23 AM
- 1,492 views
Is The World Slowly Dying?
by TomJoe in (It's a ...) Micro World (... after all)
CNN has an article which reports on a peer reviewed manuscript published in Science which discusses the fact that the world's oceans contain over 400 dead zones. That's not a good thing.These dead zones are the result of eutrophication, when massive amounts of nutrients are released into an ecosystem. It is particularly bad when that ecosystem happens to be a coastal watershed, stream, river, pond or lake. These nutrients are typically runoff from agricultural lands, into adjacent waterways, whi........ Read more »
R. J. Diaz, & R. Rosenberg. (2008) Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926-929. DOI: 10.1126/science.1156401
- August 19, 2008
- 12:39 AM
- 2,275 views
Internet Based Treatment of Depressive Symptoms
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
On the Internet psycho education is as effective as cognitive behavior therapy in reducing symptoms of depression. The INTERNET is a useful tool in delivering interventions for depression. Cognitive behavior therapy was predicted to improve symptoms of depression and dysfunctional thoughts more than psycho education but depression literacy was found to be as effective as [...]... Read more »
H Christensen. (2004) Delivering interventions for depression by using the internet: randomised controlled trial. BMJ, 328(7434), 265. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.37945.566632.EE
- August 18, 2008
- 11:42 PM
- 857 views
Cocaine and Glutamate, Part Two
by in Neuroscientifically Challenged
Ten years ago, if you had asked a neuroscientist what neurotransmitter is most important to the development of an addiction, nine out of ten times they would have said “dopamine”. Ask the same question today, however, and you’ll probably be told that it is impossible to pin such a complex process on one neurotransmitter, as clearly (at least) both dopamine and glutamate are integral to the addiction process.In hindsight, it is not surprising that glutamate be involved in addiction. Glutama........ Read more »
D ENGBLOM, A BILBAO, C SANCHISSEGURA, L DAHAN, S PERREAULENZ, B BALLAND, J PARKITNA, R LUJAN, B HALBOUT, & M MAMELI. (2008) Glutamate Receptors on Dopamine Neurons Control the Persistence of Cocaine Seeking. Neuron, 59(3), 497-508. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.07.010
- August 18, 2008
- 10:37 PM
- 934 views
Quality and quantity once again, with vaccination
by iayork in Mystery Rays from Outer Space
It’s rapidly becoming accepted, if not quite dogma, that T cell quality (rather than, or as well as, quantity) is a critical factor in controlling HIV infection. (I’ve talked about T cell quality several times previously. What it means, simplified, is that antiviral cytotoxic T cells can have a range of different functions, [...]... Read more »
Y Sun, S Santra, J Schmitz, M Roederer, & N Letvin. (2008) Magnitude and Quality of Vaccine-Elicited T-Cell Responses in the Control of Immunodeficiency Virus Replication in Rhesus Monkeys. Journal of Virology, 82(17), 8812-8819. DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00204-08
- August 18, 2008
- 01:43 PM
- 1,748 views
Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives
by Dave Munger in Cognitive Daily
One of the first things I did after my 90-mile hike with Nora in the North Cascades was play some music on the car stereo. We'd been in the wilderness for seven days, and other than birdsong, we hadn't heard so much as a note for the entire time.
Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past. This isn't to say that music is the only influence on ........ Read more »
Petr Janata, Stefan Tomic, & Sonja Rakowski. (2007) Characterisation of music-evoked autobiographical memories. Memory, 15(8), 845-860. DOI: 10.1080/09658210701734593
- August 18, 2008
- 09:00 AM
- 2,161 views
High dose vitamin C and cancer: Has Linus Pauling been vindicated?
by SBMBlogger in Science-Based Medicine
THE ZOMBIE RISES AGAIN
Vitamin C as a treatment for cancer is back in the news again.
I’m not surprised. This is one therapy favored by advocates of “alternative” medicine that keeps popping up periodically (seemingly every couple of years or so). This latest bit of news has turned up almost right on time after the last [...]... Read more »
Q Chen, M Espey, A Sun, C Pooput, K Kirk, M Krishna, D Khosh, J Drisko, & M Levine. (2008) From the Cover: Pharmacologic doses of ascorbate act as a prooxidant and decrease growth of aggressive tumor xenografts in mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(32), 11105-11109. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804226105
L Hoffer, M Levine, S Assouline, D Melnychuk, S J Padayatty, K Rosadiuk, C Rousseau, L Robitaille, & W H Miller. (2008) Phase I clinical trial of i.v. ascorbic acid in advanced malignancy. Annals of Oncology. DOI: 10.1093/annonc/mdn377
- August 18, 2008
- 04:01 AM
- 950 views
Volunteer staff are surprisingly committed
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
Despite the obvious value of volunteers, managers often have reservations about hiring unpaid staff because of doubts over their commitment. There's a sense that they can leave at any time and there's no paid contract to keep them in line. But a new study turns these ideas upside down, finding that volunteers are actually more committed than their fully paid up colleagues.Mark van Vuuren and colleagues surveyed hundreds of paid and volunteer workers at a Dutch charity for the blind and partially........ Read more »
Mark van Vuuren, Menno de Jong, & Erwin Seydel. (2008) Commitment with or without a stick of paid work: Comparison of paid and unpaid workers in a nonprofit organization. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 17(3), 315-326. DOI: 10.1080/13594320701693175
- August 18, 2008
- 01:02 AM
- 1,990 views
Electroshock in Mass Media
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
Electroshock or Electro convulsive therapy is often depicted negatively in Hollywood films. It encourages stigmatization and discourages patients from its use. So if your About To Have ECT? Fine, but Don’t Watch It in the Movies: The Sorry Portrayal of ECT in Film. You can read more about electroshock in Hollywood productions in this prior [...]... Read more »
Ulrike Hoffman-Richter, B. Alder, & . (1998) Die Elektrokrampftherapie und die Defibrillation in der Zeitung. Nervenartz, 622-628.
- August 17, 2008
- 11:41 PM
- 780 views
Can You Sequence a Bacteria’s Entire Genome Overnight?
by ScottS-M in Dammit Jim!
Science postings here have been a bit light recently. I got a new job a bit back and it’s been keeping me pretty busy catching up on DNA stuff I haven’t really used since undergrad. Things are finally starting to settle down so I figure I’ll write a few posts about stuff I’ve been learning. [...]... Read more »
Marcel Margulies, Michael Egholm, William Altman, Said Attiya, Joel Bader, Lisa Bemben, Jan Berka, Michael Braverman, Yi-Ju Chen, Zhoutao Chen.... (2005) Genome sequencing in microfabricated high-density picolitre reactors. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature03959
- August 17, 2008
- 02:21 PM
- 580 views
Good News for Fruit Fly Truckers
by in Neuroscientifically Challenged
Science has arrived at credible hypotheses to explain a number of complex waking behaviors. Yet an overtly simpler behavior—one that doesn’t vary much from situation to situation or person to person, and involves a minimal amount of physical and mental activity—baffles us, leaving us with a surfeit of hypotheses that seem to explain some aspect of it, but none that is sufficient to explain it as a whole.That perplexing behavior is sleep. It comprises 1/3 of our lives, yet we do........ Read more »
L SEUGNET, Y SUZUKI, L VINE, L GOTTSCHALK, & P SHAW. (2008) D1 Receptor Activation in the Mushroom Bodies Rescues Sleep-Loss-Induced Learning Impairments in Drosophila. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.07.028
- August 16, 2008
- 07:13 PM
- 975 views
Fewer Clothes = More Prime-Time Olympic Coverage
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Really? Scantily-clad women are featured in NBC's prime-time coverage of the Summer Olympics? It's true!In the Boston Globe's Uncommon Knowledge feature ("Surprising insights from the social sciences"), Kevin Lewis writes:Fewer clothes = more coverage AS YOU WATCH the Olympics this week, try to put yourself inside the minds of the network executives who get to decide what to broadcast. Given that you've spent billions on licensing and production costs - meaning that you need the most people f........ Read more »
A Billings. (2008) Clocking Gender Differences: Televised Olympic Clock Time in the 1996--2006 Summer and Winter Olympics. Television , 9(5), 429-441. DOI: 10.1177/1527476408315502
- August 16, 2008
- 03:00 PM
- 840 views
Two great mechanisms that go great together
by Michael Clarkson in Conformational Flux
The watery interior of a cell is separated from the watery exterior of a cell by a thin double layer of lipids called the plasma membrane. The oily interior of this membrane prevents water and charged molecules from escaping the cell, while allowing hydrophobic (oil-like) molecules through. This system has many significant advantages, but cells frequently need to move charged atoms (ions) across the membrane. This job is primarily performed by two kinds of protiens: channels that create speciali........ Read more »
Jiří Lísal, & Merritt Maduke. (2008) The ClC-0 chloride channel is a 'broken' Cl−/H antiporter. Nature structural , 15(8), 805-810. http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nsmb.1466
H. Jayaram, A. Accardi, F. Wu, C. Williams, & C. Miller. (2008) Ion permeation through a Cl--selective channel designed from a CLC Cl-/H exchanger. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(32), 11194-11199. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0804503105
- August 15, 2008
- 06:29 PM
- 728 views
The Evolution of Schizophrenia
by in Neuroscientifically Challenged
Schizophrenia is one of the more frightening and debilitating mental disorders. It can cause hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal, as well as a variety of other cognitive afflictions. While scientists have yet to decipher the etiology of the disease, its high inheritability rate (60-85%) has led many to look for answers in genetics. Since schizophrenia affects cognitive functions that are distinctly human (like language-related abilities), some have begun to consider ways in which th........ Read more »
Philipp Khaitovich, Helen Lockstone, Matthew Wayland, Tsz Tsang, Samantha Jayatilaka, Arfu Guo, Jie Zhou, Mehmet Somel, Laura Harris, Elaine Holmes.... (2008) Metabolic changes in schizophrenia and human brain evolution. Genome Biology, 9(8). DOI: 10.1186/gb-2008-9-8-r124
- August 15, 2008
- 06:29 PM
- 821 views
Why You Can't Remember Where Your Keys Are
by in Neuroscientifically Challenged
Why do we remember? To some this might seem like a ridiculous question. Memory is so intricately intertwined with our conception of existence that it is difficult to objectively ask questions about why we developed the capacity for it, or to imagine the possibility of a life without it. If one is to assume, however, that like every other facet of the human condition, memory evolved from rudimentary beginnings, then “why do we remember?” becomes not only a reasonable question, but an importan........ Read more »
James Nairne, & Josefa NS Pandeirada. (2008) Adaptive Memory: Remembering With a Stone-Age Brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(4), 239-243. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00582.x
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