Why the Mona Lisa's smile vanishes
Category: Nota Bene
Stumbled across this early this morning: Why the Mona Lisa's smile is so strangely alluring, and seems to come and...
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:12 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neuron Culture
David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
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I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) Right now I'm writing my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the hypothesis that the genetic roots some of our worst problems and traits — depresison, hyperaggression, violence, antisocial behavior — can also give rise to resilience, cooperation, empathy, and contentment. The book expands on my December 2009 Atlantic article exploring these ideas.
I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years.
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January 31, 2008
January 25, 2008
A Debate over Hopeless Monsters (and Sloppy Narratives)
Category: Culture of science
A bit o' squabble has broken out about hopeful monsters. As paleontologist evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne notes in a guest...
Posted by David Dobbs at 6:43 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2008
What's Under the Rock: Full Data Shows SSRIs Barely Best Placebo
Category: Science policy
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of Medicine report shows how things change when you include the results from the drawer: The effectiveness of many SSRIs dives to near placebo-level. This despite that the companies design and conduct most of these trials in a way calculated to produce positive results.
Benedict Carey has a good story on it at the Times. And here's the meat of the abstract from the NEJM:Posted by David Dobbs at 5:31 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 16, 2008
You paid for this research, now you get to read it
Category: Culture of science
Many open access advocates will already have heard that NIH's Public Access Policy, until now voluntary, is set to become mandatory following President Bush's approval on Dec 26th 2007 of the latest NIH appropriations bill, which includes the following wording: "The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." ...Peter Suber's January SPARC Open Access Newsletter contains a detailed analysis of what the change means, and identifies some of the key issues that remain to be resolved.
Posted by David Dobbs at 8:04 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 15, 2008
Cod, climate, and Nature's new Climate Change journal
Category: Culture of science
A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience , and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature
...Bigg of the University of Sheffield and a team of international colleagues tested two ecological-niche models against current distributions of cod and then used the models to map geographic ranges where cod should have lived during the last glacial maximum (LGM), about 21,000 years ago. ... By measuring the likely rate of genetic change and the extent of sequence differences between present-day North American and European cod, they confirmed that the two groups diverged before the LGM and endured the ice age as separate populations.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 10, 2008
Left-Hand-Turn Elimination - New York Times
Category: Environment/nature
There were a mess of interesting items in the New York Times Magazine annual "Ideas" issue last December 9,...
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:53 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 6, 2008
The Garden Waits
Category: Nota Bene
You're supposed to bring Adirondack chairs in for the winter, to make them last longer. But I like to leave them in the garden, sitting in their comfortable circle. ... And they remind me the garden, and spring and summer, await.
Posted by David Dobbs at 4:47 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 4, 2008
Gay Men and Women Navigate Differently ..
Category: Brains and minds
It has been shown that men consistently outperform women on tasks requiring navigation and discovering hidden objects; whereas women are more successful at tests which require them to remember where those objects lie in a particular space.
...In the Morris Water Maze test (MWM), participants found themselves in a virtual pool and had to escape as quickly as possible using spatial clues in the virtual room to find a hidden platform.
... Dr Rahman and his research assistant, Johanna Koerting, found that during the MWM test gay men and straight women took longer to find the hidden platform than did straight men.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Simple checklist saves 1500 lives; feds axe it
Category: Medicine
A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections.
...The agency issued notice to the researchers and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association that, by introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations.
...Indeed, a checklist may require even more stringent oversight, the administration ruled, because the data gathered in testing it could put not only the patients but also the doctors at risk -- by exposing how poorly some of them follow basic infection-prevention procedures.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:16 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 1, 2008
Mirror Neuron Backlash
Category: Culture of science
Last week, I convinced Greg Hickok, a cogsci/language researcher at UC Irvine, to make his case in Scientific American's Mind Matters for checking mirror-neuron-theory overreach. An excerpt is below, and you can check out the whole thing at Mirror Neurons -- Rock Stars or Backup Singers?
...Discovered in the mid-1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma, these brain cells have been claimed to be the neural basis for a host of complex human behaviors including imitation, action understanding , language, empathy , and mind-reading - not psychic mind-reading, but our capacity to "get inside someone else's head" and imagine how they feel or what they might do.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
