Scared to death

On Halloween:

Martin A. Samuels, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, says it's possible to die from intense fear.

"Can one be scared to death? Yes," he said. "There is unequivocal evidence that one can be scared to death under certain and very specific circumstances."

Samuels has dedicated his life to exploring sudden death.

After studying hundreds of cases, he says his theory is that catastrophic events — like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; an earthquake; or the loss of a loved one — can cause someone to literally be scared to death.

"I know this because I have cases of children with absolutely no heart disease who died on amusement-park rides," Samuels said.

Read more.

What's scary about that donut? What isn't?

Brains in prison

Necks craned to see as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor pulled the intact brain from a bucket filled with formaldehyde.

Holding the grayish organ in gloved hands, its attached spinal cord dangling freely, Taylor peeled back the outer layer to better show the pattern of nerve endings and the two hemispheres.

Several of the two dozen or so inmates crammed into the Monroe County Jail's multipurpose room let out an exclamation.

"Whoa," one said.

Author of the new book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Journey Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives presentations to inmates to talk about drug abuse and the human brain from a neuroanatomical perspective.

Drawing a representation of a brain on a chalkboard, Taylor explained that producing chemical reactions in the brain with certain drugs eventually will short-circuit certain reactions, meaning it will take longer to get "high."

She also encouraged inmates to recognize the physiological reaction to anger and learn to control it.

"Have a relationship with your brain," Taylor said. "It's the only one you've got."

Adopt a Microbe

This is a pretty funny blog! Adopt a Microbe.

Hola. I'm C. jejuni.
I am a curved Gram Negative rod.

You can find me in lots of domestic animals.
I am part of the normal bacterial flora of poultry and cattle.
I get into people through dirty drinking water or undercooked meat, especialy chicken.
I cause food poisoning, with a self limiting bloody diarrhoea, abdominal cramps and fever.

Omni Brain from the beginning

Ahh... growth.. it makes me happy.

Challenge...

I'll bet you can't guess what's going on here!

Stroke of Insight

From the new book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey:

I was literally thrown off balance when my right
arm dropped completely paralyzed against my side. In that
moment I knew. Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a
stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through
my mind, Wow, this is so cool!

…Feeling cast out of synchrony with the life I had
known, I was concurrently disturbed and fascinated by what
I was witnessing as the systematic breakdown of my
cognitive mind.

Jill Bolte Taylor describes the experience in detail, as well as her well-organized recovery, in a compelling memoir.

As a trained neuroanatomist, I believed in the plasticity of my brain – its ability to repair, replace, and retrain its neural circuitry. In addition, thanks to my academics, I had a “roadmap” to understanding how my brain cells needed to be treated in order for them to recover.

…In my own unique way, I had become severely mentally ill. And I must say, there was both freedom and challenge for me in recognizing that our perception of the external world, and
our relationship to it, is a product of our neurological circuitry. For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my own imagination!

Scott Adams is a (victim of) Spaz (-modic Dysphonia)

For three years, Scott Adams, creator of those wacky Dilbert comics, had been suffering from one of those disabilities that affects a lot of people but you've never really heard of.

Spasmodic Dysphonia is a disease that apparently messes with some of the language areas of the brain, causing its victims to effectively lose their voice. Curiously, however, SD patients apparently retain their ability to talk in other voices (e.g. falsetto or baritone) , or while reciting poetry (but it has to be Chaucer, for some reason).

Recovering from SD is relatively rare, though there are some Botox-related treatments. By all accounts, then, Scott Adams is a very lucky man. As of today, at least, he has regained most of his normal voice, and is able to speak without requiring any treatment.

I'd be interested to learn more about this disease, since it's new to me. It seems to be an adult-onset thing (typically showing up in the 40's or 50's), and according to AP, it affects as many as 30,000 Americans.

Adams isn't the first well-known figure to develop the condition. In 1992, public radio host Diane Rehm developed a scratchy cough, and by 1998 she had to take a four-month leave because her speech had become so tortured. Doctors feared she had throat cancer, Parkinson's disease or Lou Gehrig's disease — until researchers at Johns Hopkins University diagnosed her with SD.

Rehm's voice still sounds distinctly frail and cracked, but she has maintained a radio career. She said other patients should take comfort in the fact that she, Adams and others have recovered much of their speech.

Good to know that there might be something you can do about it... would recovery from what appears to be a primarily cognitive disorder imply some sort of re-mapping, and if so, what does that say about plasticity in adults?

Saccadic suppression in hockey

So as per my usual laziness I'm not even going to read the source article and make wide sweeping generalization about the conclusions presented in this article (which may very well ignore whats in the actual journal article).
I think this stuff is actually pretty cool - there are a number of technical limitations which this group has overcome to 'watch' the eyes of athletes. Short of taking performance enhancing drugs there seem to be fewer and fewer ways of swelling the bodies of athletes - so it has become obvious that scientists of the mind may be playing a larger and larger role in sports performance.

In any case... onto a very obvious conclusion that hopefully the journal authors didn't miss but this story obviously did....actually I'll let you read the snippit of research before I tell you what 'actually' is happening. haha...

Simply put, they found that goalies should keep their eyes on the puck. In an article to be published in the journal Human Movement Science, Panchuk and Vickers discovered that the best goaltenders rest their gaze directly on the puck and shooter's stick almost a full second before the shot is released. When they do that they make the save over 75 per cent of the time.

"Looking at the puck seems fairly obvious," Panchuk said, "until you look at the eye movements of novice goaltenders, who scatter their gaze all over the place and have a much lower save percentage than the elite goalies."
...
"Goalies often focus on physical things like improving technique but they over-look the decision-making -- the cognitive side of things," Panchuk said. "I think this study shows that you also need to focus on your decision-making and your thinking processes. Having optimal focus is just as important as being in optimal physical shape."

Panchuk plans to continue the study by moving from wrist shots to slap-shots and penalty shots, where the goalie has even less time to react and make a save.

So... I admit it has to be really important that goalies or baseball players know what to look at - obviously - but the largest problem here with novice goal tenders is that they are simply moving their eyes around too much. And what happens when we blink or saccade? yes! suppression of vision! So imagine that during the 1 second a puck is coming toward you 1 eye movement is made - you've lost lets say 200ms of vision.
Now imagine you are a new goalie and you're looking everywhere and you make 4 eye-movements in the second a hockey puck is flying at you over a hundred miles an hour. You are now processing its trajectory for not 800ms but closer to 200ms! That hockey puck is gonna sneak up on you real quick - especially considering saccading messes around with your perception of time as well.

If you'd like a good paper that shows something similar in a different paradigm... here ya go :)
Boot, W.R., Kramer, A.F., Becic, E., Wiegmann, D.A., & Kubose, T. (in press). Detecting transient changes in dynamic displays: The more you look, the less you see. Human Factors.

And p.s.... sorry for ranting if this is all in the original article I'm way to lazy (ok...busy) to actually read it now.
ohh... p.p.s... here's some creepy hockey masks for halloween.

Think

This sexy neuroscientist (name withheld to protect the guilty) models a handmade top designed by Smoking Lily. The young British Columbia designer label has featured this neuron drawing printed on a range of clothing and accessories, each individually silkscreened as one of a kind items. So no, you can't buy this top, but visit the web site to see what else might make you think.

Strange Brew does Star Wars

Flash lag

and a flash demo...

Online shrinks effective?

Well.. I guess my clinical psych classmates will be doing even less therapy when they get out and a bit more research - at least they have something new to do research on - online therapy.

As for the counseling psych people...sorry. haha.... I guess this is why the 'psychology' section in the bookstore is all those horrible self-helf books - maybe they actually work.

Does looking at porn online count as sex therapy?

A yet-to-be-published study is making some startling claims about psychological treatment According to researchers at The Australian National University in Canberra, spending time on therapeutic and educational web sites can be just as effective as regular visits to the psychotherapist.

Researchers studied a group of patients who were referred to two web sites: The MoodGYM and education site BluePages. The MoodGYM is therapeutic in nature, a cognitive behavior therapy site dedicated to preventing depression by helping users to "identify and overcome problem emotions," showing them how to "develop good coping skills for the future" in order to enjoy good mental health. BluePages is a depression education site, providing information about the symptoms of and treatments for depression.

After 12 months, users of both web sites reported improvement. Interestingly enough, the educational site BluePages proved to be more effective than the behavior-therapy site. BluePages users "were less likely to use actions that did not have an evidence basis," researcher Helen Christensen said. "We don't know exactly why the Internet interventions are so effective in the longer term, but it may be that there is a reduction in use of ineffective and potentially damaging treatments."

Does the brain tap into the future?

Ohh jeez.

While researching my protopanpsychism article, I came across the work of Dean Radin and Dick Bierman whose research has yielded some very eerie results.

Before I get to this, however, I’d like you to conduct a short experiment. While looking at your feet, stomp on the ground. You will notice that your visual perception of your foot hitting the floor matches your sensation of touching it. This would be fine except for one thing: the speed of light is vastly faster than the conduction times and synaptic delays through the long nerves and spinal cord from your feet. As a result, you should be seeing the event before you feel it – and the delay should be noticeable.

But it’s not.

Benjamin Libet and his associates first documented this phenomenon in 1979, which is now referred to as the ‘delay-and-antedating hypothesis/paradox.’ A number of explanations have been posited to reconcile this strange observation.

Perhaps there is a lag in the visual information. If this is the case, then the visual cortex is set for a time delay such that it can keep up with the slow pulses from the extremities. This would be a rather bizarre revelation if true, meaning that we are constantly viewing the world with a small degree of latency. This is almost certainly not the case, as Darwinian selection would favour those animals that do not experience any kind of visual delay. Living in the past would be grossly disadvantageous out in the wild.

Scientists and Engineers for America

An email I got -

Thank you for tuning in to Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) on The Colbert Report and Talk of the Nation. Both Peter Agre and Susan Wood were great at spreading the word about SEA and putting a human face on our mission. Following these shows, our membership jumped by more than 1,000 and we received more than $6,000 in contributions.

And we have more exciting ways you can help in the works! Beginning next week, we will be running an Internet banner ad campaign raising attention on our issues in tight races where there is a clear distinction between candidates who care about science and those that have an anti-science agenda.

This brings us to our challenge. There are two things you can do to help us reach our goals:

FIRST - Recruit your friends, family, neighbors, everyone you know to join SEA. To get our message out, we need to build our grassroots network and I’m challenging you to recruit like-minded individuals for SEA. Click here to tell your friends:

http://www.sefora.org/tellafriend.php

SECOND - Make a contribution of $500, $250 or $35 to get the internet banner ads up in target congressional districts:

http://www.sefora.org/contribute.php

Any amount you contribute will greatly help us in the weeks before the election. Thank you for all that you’ve already done and for your ongoing support. Together, we are making change happen.

Sincerely,

Mike Brown

Executive Director

PS: If you missed either show, you can catch them on the web. Forward these around to your friends too!

The Colbert Report can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayK26kfHlPY

Talk of the Nation can be found at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6353979

Greatest ad...ever

Whipping therapy

Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins - the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the “production of happiness” and eventually remove depressive feelings...

Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The doctor became one of the authors of the shocking whipping therapy. The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

”The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patients receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course,” Sergei Speransky told the Izvestia newspaper.

The whipping therapy has not become a new discovery in the history of medicine. Tibetan monks widely used it for medical purposes too. Soviet specialists used a special method of torturing therapy at mental hospitals. They made injections of brimstone and peach oil mixture to inspire mentally unbalanced patience with a will to live. A patient would suffer from horrible pain in the body after such an injection, but he or she would change their attitude to life for the better afterwards.

That would change their attitude to life, yeah.

Read more

(I posted a work safe image but here's the one I wanted to use.)

Brain Recipe

Ahh Halloween - when neuroscientists find all sorts of fake brains for sale and recipes to create them.

Here's the recipe for brains....BRAINS!

This recipe was inspired by the one Alton Brown did a few years back. I liked the idea but wasn't thrilled with the recipe, so I came up with my own. By the way, I would suggest getting this mold - it looks a lot more lifelike.

Panna Cotta (brain style) with Pomegranite Sauce

1 cup milk
5 teaspoons unflavored gelatin
4 cups heavy cream
1 cup + 1 Tb sugar, divided
pinch salt
2 Tablespoons vanilla
8 oz. pomegranite juice
1/4 cup cornstarch

Place milk in a small bowl and sprinkle gelatin over the top. Stir and let sit for about five minutes so the gelatin can rehydrate a bit.

Combine cream and sugar in a pan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla and salt. Add the gelatin mixture and stir again until combined. Pour into (brain) mold, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight or until mixture is completely set.

To unmold, gently tilt mold so sides of the panna cotta pull away a bit, then place on platter or plate. You can also dip the bottom of the mold into warm water to help in unmolding.

(For non-brain occasions, pour into small custard cups, ramekins, or a large bowl)

For the pomegranite sauce, I just got a small bottle of Pom Wonderful, added three heaping spoonfuls of sugar so it wasn't so tart, mixed in about 1/4 cup cornstarch, whisked like crazy, then brought it all to a boil in a small saucepan while stirring. The consistancy is rather disgusting, but that's the whole point!

This looks especially creepy set out on a really nice platter. Also quite effective on a carving board with a large chef's knife plunged into the center .

A tree of no trees.

Fabuloso

A large number of accidental poisonings tracked by the Texas Poison Center Network were directly linked with consumption of Fabuloso (TM), an all-purpose cleaning product. [104 in a three month period at one ER.]

Doctors presenting their findings during the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in New Orleans suspect misleading packaging may be to blame.
. . .

"When looking at a bottle of Fabuloso(TM) - especially the yellow Limon, green Fresco Aman, and blue Ocean Fresh varieties - anyone will easily see a resemblance to certain popular beverages," said Dr. Masneri. "Dr. Marc Levsky of our team actually went so far as to taste it himself, and he reported that it smells very fruity but tastes very bland. We believe the combination of misleading packaging and sweet
smell lures people to consume it. Further study, and perhaps packaging modification, is warranted. In the meantime, people should be aware that children especially may be confused and try to drink it."

No reports on what people might be doing with these, which also smell too yummy. Or these:

Sleep-eating

Via Mind Hacks and The New Yorker, some hilarious depictions of the parasomnia Nocturnal Eating Syndrome caused by Ambien (also know to cause sleep-driving):

Tummy Cake

Ingredients:
5 eggs
2 cups flour
1 cup Crisco
1/2 cup milk
5 mg. Ambien

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

Wake up in kitchen, mixing eggs, flour, Crisco, and milk in—for some reason—a mop bucket.

Let batter settle.

Go to living room, turn on TV, search channels for a show that explains the second part of how to make a cake.

Curse the designer of your TV remote for making a device that has the buttons on the wrong side—all facing the floor, where you can’t see them.

Remember batter.

Retrieve bucket from kitchen, drink entire contents in 3-5 gulps.

Remember that the batter was supposed to be cooked.

Draw hot bath, immerse yourself in it, knead bloated stomach in effort to facilitate cooking process.

When mouth fills with now cooled bathwater, wake up and return to bed.

Lie back on pillow, watch cartoon bluebirds orbiting your head.

Grab one cartoon bluebird in midair and devour it raw, feathers and all.

Wake up at 7 A.M., with wife or girlfriend demanding to know what the F happened in the kitchen last night.

While trying to answer, burp up a single cartoon-bluebird feather. Cover mouth guiltily, even though she seems not to have noticed the feather.

When she slams the bedroom door and goes to work, pick cartoon-bluebird feather out of the air and swallow it.

Fall asleep for 36 more hours, interrupted only by periodic—and somehow epic-seeming—trips to the bathroom.

Read more recipes.

Bipolar book launch

"The DSM was never meant to be regarded as cast in stone, though I came away with that impression when I found myself unexpectedly seated at a dinner symposium next to one of its principal architects at the 2003 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting. In fairness, no one ever told Harley Earl, the legendary auto designer, what to do with the shape of his fins." - excerpt from the new book Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder: What Your Doctor Doesn't Tell You...That You Need To Know by John McManamy (pictured here tap dancing). Much more than a patient handbook, John's been keeping one of the best sources of information on bipolar disorder online, McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web, since 1999 and the accumulated knowledge from professionals, patients and his own experience makes him an "expert patient" with unique insight. No joke, check out his book. It's a synthesis of info on bipolar spectrum disorders you won't find elsewhere.

Mechanical Cow Tipping

Check out this machine dedicated to cow tipping. I swear it's for a legit reason!

Psychic Idol - American Con Man? - The Con?

Since you all know how much I love psychics - I thought I'd bring this great new reality show to your attention! hah...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - After four decades of bending spoons, halting clocks, reading minds, and penning metaphysical thrillers, Uri Geller is seeking a paranormal protege.A reality television show being produced in Israel, where Geller grew up, will feature 10 contestants vying for the title of "heir" to the world-famous celebrity psychic. "The format will be something like 'American Idol'. We will keep the performances that are most riveting and amazing," Geller told Reuters Wednesday, adding that viewers with "intuitive powers" will also be invited to call in and compete. Geller, 59, declined to elaborate on what supernatural skills the contestants claim to have, and whether clairvoyants -- who might be assumed to have an edge in predicting judges' votes -- are taking part.

Aww.. and look you can see if you're psychic at this website.

The Ig Nobel show at the Beckman

From the Beckman website... might be worth seeing if you're in central Illinois.

Ig Nobel Improbable Research Show coming to Beckman on Oct. 25

On Wednesday Oct. 25 the Beckman Institute will be playing host to a show that features stories and pictures of the weird and wacky, a professor who had one of his students dress up in a gorilla suit, and opera singers belting out tunes about inertia.

The Improbable Research Show definitely sounds entertaining, but is it science? Most definitely, says Marc Abrahams, father of the Ig Nobel Prize and the man who will be bringing a show that is part carnival sideshow and part serious science to the Beckman Institute auditorium.

Abrahams is editor and co-founder of the Annals for Improbable Research, the science and humor magazine that administers the Ig Nobel Prizes, which are given annually for “scientific achievements that make you laugh and then make you think.” Abrahams will give a presentation that includes deadpan commentary and some startling photos of some of the most entertaining Ig Nobel Prize winners of all time.

Winners from the 2006 ceremony held earlier this month included researchers who studied why woodpeckers don’t get headaches and a pair of inventors who created an electromechanical device that repels teenagers.

“Most things that win Ig Nobel Prizes have this quality: people have a hard time believing that they really happened,” Abrahams said. “When the actual person who did it is standing in front of you, it's at least slightly easier to believe.”

The show at Beckman boasts two local winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, Beckman Institute faculty member Dan Simons and Theodore Gray from Wolfram Research in Champaign.
Simons is the professor who had his student dress up in a gorilla suit for a psychology study that, it turned out, had all the qualities prized in an Ig Nobel winner. Simons, a University of Illinois psychology professor and member of Beckman’s Human Perception and Performance group, won in 2004 for his “Gorillas in Our Midst” study in which half of the subjects watching a video failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through a scene. Simons’ research focuses on change blindness and inattentional blindness, which studies the ways in which humans are often unaware of details in their environments.

Gray won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry for gathering many elements of the periodic table and assembling them into the form of a four-legged wooden periodic table.

Visitors to the Improbable Research Show will also be treated to a mini-opera titled “Inertia Makes the World Go Round.”

Abrahams said his talk features both the funny side of science and highlights the importance of research in the areas of technology, medicine, and science.

“I hope these things first make people laugh and then make them think,” Abrahams said. “What people think – that's up to them.”

Doors open at 2:30 p.m. for the 3 p.m. show and seating is general admission. The Beckman Institute is located at 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL.

Rendered Scenes for Experiments

If you ever need some wacky scenes for experiments - here's some. I rendered these a couple years ago and just found them while cleaning up my HDD.

www.flickr.com

The Coolest Names In Science

When I read a journal article or a book chapter there are always certain names that are really freakin' catchy. One of my favorites is James Intriligator, who is a experimental psychologist at the University of Wales Bangor.

This is the coolest restaurant name, what are some of your favorite scientist names? Make sure you let us know what field they are in as well.

Paris Hilton and Daniel Dennett

Or...What do Papparazzi and Daniel Dennett have in common?

Check out the latest edition of Edge... Here's a really really funny incident involving Paris Hilton, Daniel Dennett, Chancellor of the Vatican and Mike Gazzaniga. Who woulda thunk it?!

Daniel C. Dennett, who took on Cardinal Ratzinger in his book Breaking the Spell, had hoped some day to confront him personally on his own turf, but due to a sudden promotion, Ratzinger was unavailable and sent his deputy, Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Vatican. Dennett, was on his game when he delivered the final talk of the conference on "The Domestication of the Wild Memes of Religion" in front of the packed audience. Later, back at Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal, Dennett, Michael Gazzaniga, the Monsignor, among others, were relaxing around the bar, when a posse of Italian paparazzi suddenly stormed through the bar heading to the dock outside. Two speedboat taxis pulled up and deposited Paris Hilton and her entourage on the dock. In one Fellini moment: end of discussion of natural selection, of Charles Darwin, of the Pope, of Daniel C. Dennett. The Edgies went tabloid for the rest of the evening. Fortunately for Edge readers, Professor Dennett, who bonded with the paparazzi, was there with his digital camera to capture the moment.

By the way... Paris and all of her socialite friends need to start eating whatever the rest of fat america is eating...they're a little starving looking.

Alex the parrot

If you haven't heard about Irene Pepperberg and her parrot Alex you are missing out on a whole lot of cool research on how advanced animals cognition can be.

Here is a short video - but her papers are really where it's at. She has studied numerical understanding, object permanence, and the what's really the most amazing - a very advanced understanding and production of English.

Bayesian questioning.

Very interesting use of Bayesian reasoning...

Now, Drazen Prelec, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, has devised a scoring system, or “Bayesian truth serum” to encourage people to divulge their honest opinions.

The method relies on asking questions in pairs and analysing the relationship between the answers in a so-called Bayesian approach – which assumes that the answers are interlinked. The first question queries the individual.

For example: "Will you vote in the next presidential election?" or "Have you had more than 20 sexual partners in the last year?" While the second question goes on to focus on the person's estimate of how many other respondents would answer the same way.

It is this perception of what other people’s answer might be which gives hints as to whether the person is telling the truth – especially when their answer is the unusual or unpopular option.

Obviously it doesn't really work on a single person but here's an example on how it could be used in survey research:

For example, he describes a situation where two paintings are viewed by a group of 10 people who are then asked, privately, to pick their favourite. Seven people say they prefer painting A, while three vote for painting B. If, on the second question, all 10 people said they thought everyone else would prefer painting A, then those three people expressing a personal preference for painting B might be thought of as a safer bet for having told the truth. That is because, argues Prelec, despite what they thought was more popular, those individuals still chose the other painting.

Discover the Mütter

There's an interesting article in discover magazine (or maybe its just online - who knows) about the Mutter museum in Philadelphia. If you're ever there I highly recommend going - it's some pretty freaky stuff.

Sorry, I'm being arch; not quite sure how else to react, to be honest. The Mütter Museum of medical anomalies at the venerable College of Physicians of Philadelphia is well supplied with helpful staff and airy colonnades, but what it could really use is a little stack of printed leaflets explaining to the modern visitor how he or she is supposed to feel about all this, or at least what to make of it: the uprooted genitalia and beach-ball tumors, the skeleton of the man whose muscle has turned to bone, the woman so fat that after death her body transformed itself into soap, the embryos in jars whose peeling labels break the sad but unsurprising news that not having a skull, or a brain, or a stomach, or any skin, is a state of affairs "incompatible with life."

What to do with dead lab rats.

Surprise surprise... I found this on boingboing.

Disturbing - and a little bit questionable... so take some caution before you follow the link.

This guy has taken a dead rat, stuffed it, and 'installed' some LED eyes. So, if you are looking for something to do with all your dead lab animals... well perhaps this isn't the best idea for them, but an idea certainly.

Awww.. and look you can even install some magnets and attach a dead rat to your refrig.

Nobel Prizes

Curious why American scientists have...

taken or shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 17 of the last 20 years. In chemistry, they have stepped onto the podium every year since 1992. In physics, the string of US success has been broken only once, in 1999, over the past 13 years.

Since 1901, of the 513 individuals who have won science Nobels, 232 have been US citizens, including seven with dual citizenship.

Check out this article and this article for their reasons... If you don't want to read anything - here's the answer: $$$$$$$$$$$ lots and lots of it $$$$$$$$$$$$ boat loads - crap loads -shit loads...of MONEY!!!

Ohh..and yeah, this picture doesn't have anything to do with anything. The tagline said "HVORFOR LYSER DET RØDT NÅR DET ER BLÅTANN?"

Please...no more human looking robots!

I don't know why these humanoid robots creep me out so much but they are getting worse and worse.

Actroid DER2 fembot loves Hello Kitty

Kokoro, a Sanrio Group company specializing in the design and manufacture of robots, unveiled its new Actroid DER2 feminine guide robot at Sanrio headquarters in Tokyo on October 4.

Actroid DER2 is an upgraded version of Kokoro’s previous fembot, Actroid DER, who has made quite a name for herself by providing services at a number of events, including the 2005 World Expo. Compared to the previous model, DER2 has thinner arms and a wider repertoire of expressions. The smoothness of her movement has also been improved, making it now even more likely for the uninitiated to confuse her with an actual human being.

If you want to rent her... it's only 3500$ a week!

Best article title...

Ohh it's sooo good on sooo many levels! And what the hell is up with this picture of Al Franken?!

"Scientists to create 'frankenbunny' in big research leap"

Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.

It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.

The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.

"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Broadcast news sucks...

It seems that, according to a study from IU, The Daily Show has just as much substance as the nightly news on any of the major networks. I'd assumed this for a while, but I'm glad to see some research backing it up. I don't understand nightly news at all! It has useless, biased, and topical crap that only people over 60 years old see anyway. Long live The Daily Show! At least if its topical it could be funny.

The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.

Crawling brain

From the site's catalogue: "Little Animated Crawling Brain moves forward humming merrily, then stops, insane muttering coming from its sharp-toothed mouth."

What would be sane muttering from a crawling brain with fangs?

Open Access? Open Peer-Review?

Journal publishers piss me off sometimes - but I don't particuarly see the problem with traditional peer review. Unless you're the most brilliant person - or can't get it published elsewhere I still think traditional journals are the best.

As for the free access... Does the public really need access to scholarly journals? If people really want something there is always the easy option of emailing the author - who most of the time will be very happy to forward a copy of the manuscript.

Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.

Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of Internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors' peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.

The Web journals are threatening to turn on its head the traditional peer-review system that for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.

Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors to publish.