One form of neuron turned into another in brain. Jan. 20, 2013 — A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head -- demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated neuron into another within the brain. The discovery by Paola Arlotta and Caroline Rouaux "tells you that maybe the brain is not as immutable as we always thought, because at least during an early window of time one can reprogram the identity of one neuronal class into another," said Arlotta, an Associate Professor in Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB). The principle of direct lineage reprogramming of differentiated cells within the body was first proven by SCRB co-chair and Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) co-director Doug Melton and colleagues five years ago, when they reprogrammed exocrine pancreatic cells directly into insulin producing beta cells. Scientists and philosophers discuss morality and meaning.
Revealed: The serious science behind a baby's laugh - Science - News. Mitt Romney In GOP Debate: Shut Down Federal Disaster Agency, Send Responsibility To The States. During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.
"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep? " "Including disaster relief, though? " Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives. Can neuroscience provide evidence for a liberal and conservative thinking style?
Man Who Eats Breakfast At Dunkin' Donuts Every Morning And Enjoys The 'Saw' Films Allowed To Vote. YOUNGSTOWN, OH—According to records obtained from the Mahoning County registrar’s office, local man David Kearney, who eats breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts every day and is a passionate fan of the film franchise, is actually allowed to vote in today’s general election.
Reports confirmed that Kearney, 34, enjoys sitting down in a Dunkin’ Donuts location and eating a sausage, egg, and cheese croissant each morning before work, has seen every movie multiple times, and is freely able to play an active role in the democratic process like every other registered voter in the United States. “I just can’t get going in the morning without a Dunkaccino,” said Kearney, who possesses the right to visit a polling center and help decide, quite literally, the political direction of the entire nation over the next four years.
“They’re so good. Goes great with a Boston Kreme.” The Sad Faces of Fox News on Election Night - Politics. The early election returns and exit polls had little good news for Mitt Romney, and you could see it on the Fox News election team's faces. The reporters and pundits were not uniformly dejected, with Megyn Kelly sounding mostly like a regular reporter -- explaining how some states can be called so early with so few results in -- and Bill O'Reilly mourning the end of "the white establishment. " Let's start with Bill O'Reilly's grappling with a possible Republican loss after four years of Barack Obama. Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate. 1,000,000,000,000 Frames/Second Photography - Ramesh Raskar.
Kanye meme. Is 'reality' unreal? Scientists aim to find out - Technology & science - Science. Kanye meme. Teenage Gamers Better At Simulated Surgery Than Medical Residents. Forget AP Biology and Latin class: get those pre-meds hooked on Call of Duty.
The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that teenage video gamers were better at simulated surgery than medical residents. The study used machines that simulated live surgical techniques, such as needle passing and suturing, and found that high schoolers who played an average of two hours of video games a day did “slightly better than our physicians in training,” said UTMB Dr. Sami Kilic (in a delightfully thick accent). “Our physicians in training have already participated in actual cases. It tells me that this computer games helps a lot to transfer the knowledge and skills gained from the computer games.” The preliminary research corroborates a decade’s worth of evidence that playing recreational video games improves visual intelligence. Watch video of the study below: The Tetris God.
Do white children have to die for lawmakers to give a shit? The trauma being faced by the surviving children of the Newtown school massacre is a daily reality for their mostly poor black and brown counterparts in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. That’s because gun violence is most prevalent in America’s impoverished inner-cities, where researchers say the PTSD rate could be as high as 40 percent , similar to war zones like Afghanistan. That means just under half of the people living in urban poor communities are suffering from “intrusive, upsetting memories; nightmares; chronic anxiety and fear; memory loss; diminished interest in life; emotional numbing and angry outbursts.” Though African American children represent just 15 percent of the nation’s child population, they made up 45 percent of child gun deaths in 2008 and 2009, according to an analysis by the Children’s Defense Fund. In Chicago, nearly 700 children were shot in 2011. Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 2: new forms of the sacred.
The French sociologist anticipated the fall of religion in the west, but understood that the sacred would manifest in different ways Two of the most important founders of modern sociological thought, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim agreed on a key point. To understand modern society, they argued, required careful analysis of the role of religion in shaping social life. For Weber, this influence was to be found primarily in the past. In his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he suggested that the origins of modern capitalism lay in an ethos of Protestant asceticism that encouraged a sense of thrift and duty in one's work as visible moral markers of the otherwise invisible state of personal salvation.
The hard work, careful management of resources, and aversion to conspicuous consumption inspired by this Protestant ethic enabled the development of an economic system built on the reinvestment of capital in increasingly sophisticated systems of production. Thoughts Control Robotic Hand. By implanting an array of electrodes into the motor cortex of a quadriplegic patient’s brain, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have enabled the patient to control a robotic, prosthetic hand. The new treatment, published yesterday (December 16) in The Lancet , is a benchmark in thought-controlled movement that rivals the way an unimpaired brain directs limb movement. “This bioinspired brain-machine interface is a remarkable technological and biomedical achievement,” Professor Grégoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) said in a press release . “Though plenty of challenges lie ahead, these sorts of systems are rapidly approaching the point of clinical fruition.”
Researchers implanted the electrode array into the brain of a 52-year-old, quadriplegic female patient. Everything you ever wanted to know about sensory deprivation chambers. Jake Blumgart and Bhaskar Sunkara: The Next Left. The 50 Worst Columns of 2012 - Politics. "Punditry is fundamentally useless," Nate Silver recently declared .
Now we don't think every hack with an inch count and an opinion is all that bad. But while sifting through opinion fodder every morning to find the day's five best columns , we've come across plenty of arguments that prove Silver's point. Coming to the end of a year when math geeks helped contextualize politics (and a lot of other things) better than talking heads , we wanted to take some time out of The Atlantic Wire's Year in Review to re-read and reflect on the most noxious, wrongheaded, misleading, silly, and downright awful columns to somehow end up in print or online in 2012. IQ scores not accurate marker of intelligence, study shows. Could IQ scores be a false indicator of intelligence?
Researchers have determined in the largest online study on the intelligence quotient (IQ) that results from the test may not exactly show how smart someone is. "When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ -- or of you having a higher IQ than me -- is a myth," Dr. Adrian Owen, the study's senior investigator and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the university's Brain and Mind Institute said to the Toronto Star . "There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence. " More than 100,000 participants joined the study and completed 12 online cognitive tests that examined memory, reasoning, attention and planning abilities. They found that there was not one single test or component that could accurately judge how well a person could perform mental and cognitive tasks. Secret Satans: Neuroscience.
| December 24, 2012 | 4 Comments “Well, you know we only use about 10 per cent of our brain.” I don’t like when people tell me this. Someday, I hope to acquire the guts to issue the following rejoinder: “Which 10 per cent do use?” But because I don’t like confrontation, I usually just make a face of mute disappointment and change the subject. If you read LWON, you already know we use 100 per cent of our brain. Anti-vaccine book tells kids to embrace measles. Measles is responsible for thousands of tragic (and preventable) deaths each year.
Which is perhaps why so many reviewers are panning a new (and apparently self-published ) book by Stephanie Messenger, an Australian author and anti-vaccine activist. According to the author’s page , “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” was written to: Educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully. Often today, we are being bombarded with messages from vested interests to fear all diseases in order for someone to sell some potion or vaccine, when, in fact, history shows that in industrialized countries, these diseases are quite benign and, according to natural health sources, beneficial to the body. CURL: Obama supporters shocked, angry at new tax increases. Sometimes, watching a Democrat learn something is wonderful, like seeing the family dog finally sit and stay at your command. Republicans Consider Welcoming People Who Believe in Math and Science. The Truth About Little Women Carrying Big Wounded Men in Combat - Politics.
One of the recurring arguments against women serving in combat appears on its face to be just good common horse sense: women just don't have the upper body strength to carry a heavy male soldier out of combat. Joy to the World – Empathy and Positive Emotions. Study: Are some people born conservative? A new study in the American Journal of Political Science looked at the relationship between fear and political ideology, and it found that people who experience higher levels of fear tend to be more politically conservative than those who are less predisposed to feeling afraid.
The Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans. Alcohol And Cancer: Just One Drink A Day Can Raise Risk, Study Suggests. By Amir Khan Alcohol-related cancer may seem like something that would affect only heavy drinkers, but according to a new study, having even one drink per day can put you at risk for cancer.
Researchers from the National Cancer Institute found that alcohol-related cancer accounted for 3.5 percent of all cancer deaths in the United States in 2009 — and even light and moderate drinkers were at significant risk. The link between cancer and alcohol consumption has been established by previous studies, but this new study quantifies the risk, death rates, and years of life lost in a way previously unseen. Here's how Obama's brain mapping project will actually work.
Minimum Wage Would Be $21.72 If It Kept Pace With Increases In Productivity: Study. President Obama's call to increase the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour was one of the more significant proposals he laid out in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
But $9 an hour is still a far cry from what workers really deserve, a 2012 study finds. The minimum wage should have reached $21.72 an hour in 2012 if it kept up with increases in worker productivity, according to a March study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire. Oh hell yes: White House announces new US open access policy for scientific papers. Every year, Washington pours tens of billions of dollars into scientific research projects ( like the brain activity mapping project ). Snowstorm In Chicago Delays Hundreds Of Morning Murders. Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible. Obama Inauguration 2013 Speech: The Equality Inaugural.
Mods For Minecraft 1.4.7 , 1.4.6 & 1.4.5 - Maps, Texture Packs & Minecraft Mods. Obama brews controversy with Latte Salute: Editorial cartoon. After the Boston Marathon, we are just like the rest of the world. Cut it out, atheists! Why it’s time to stop behaving like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins. Conservatives declare war on college. Obama Administration Urges Supreme Court To Strike Down DOMA.
What Should Teachers Say to Religious Students Who Doubt Evolution? Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election.
Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics. 'Sunshine Act' is making doctors nervous - Login. Maslow's hierarchy of needs.