Now on ScienceBlogs: A Letter to a Grad Student
David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.
I write articles 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, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. My previous books include 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.
You're encouraged to subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my workat my main website; or check out my catch-all-streams Tumblr log.
This isn't something we'll figure out in a couple workshops; it's something the industry and the broader genomics community will need to consider carefully over the next few years, even as it rapidly grows.
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:03 AM • 1 Comments •
from "Would dew believe it: The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in water droplets," at the Daily Mail...
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:59 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Art
Evolution, healthcare reform, baboons, and Cheever in his underwear
Posted by David Dobbs at 11:01 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Culture of science
Posted by David Dobbs at 1:13 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Art
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things) While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book, I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on depression , some of it drawing on resources at BMJ (the journal formerly known as the British Medical Journal). ... The backchannel is the twitter stream that audience members now rather routinely produce while a conference speaker or panel holds forth at the front of the room; it carries hideous dangers for the unwary, unprepared, or just plain unlikeable speaker.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:42 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Culture of science
How "This is Nifty" science stories are (part of) the foundation of democracy.
Posted by David Dobbs at 9:36 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust. Genetic material Willful...
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:34 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Brains and minds
Despite all the complexity, it's that simple: Sometimes, for some people, depression ramps up constructive thinking; for other people (or at other times for the same people for whom depression sometimes brings insight), it smothers it. Did Virginia Woolf's bipolar depression bring her insight and creativity? Quite possibly. Yet in the end it drowned her.
Posted by David Dobbs at 2:16 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
First, Kandel's work makes a wonderful foundation for an understanding of neuroscience, as his mid-20th-century insights into the dynamics of memory underlie much of the discipline. Second, Kandel is a gas.
Posted by David Dobbs at 7:03 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. His critique could be applied equally well to pharma.
Posted by David Dobbs at 10:45 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
