Ortholog

Where are they?

2008-05-10T07:43:42Z

Fermi's so-called paradox also applies to time-travellers as much as it does to aliens.

Post-migratory brain misorientation disease

2008-05-04T23:24:24Z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06834 reception"), that the reactions are ubiquitous even if only the birds and the bees and the rest have figured out how to use them. Carrubba et al. (2006; doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2006.08.068) suggest humans may have it. Not sure that's compelling but, leaving science for anecdote, I remember feeling profoundly disjointed and geographically bamboozled for several months after migrating from the northern hemisphere to the southern. It happened only on sunny days and I have to wonder whether some unconscious process was struggling to come to terms with apparently mismatched sensory data from the eyes (sun on my left as I commuted south for work in the mornings) with a magnetosense telling me I was heading polewards (which all my life until then had meant northwards). At the time I put it down to the coriolis effect affecting the regular tides of pre-aggregated prions swirling around in the wide open spaces of my brain but this magnetoception idea is (infinitesimally) more scientific (yeah right). Discomfort caused by inability to process conflicting visual and magnetoceptive information would be analogous to the unmanageable mismatch between sight and equilibrioception that results in seasickness. Wow, did I just invent a new syndrome? Hope it gets named after me. Just got to wait for science to catch up now…]]>

The taste of the brain

2008-04-22T03:35:53Z

http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/the-sugar-made-me-do-it/

Use at own risk

2008-04-14T00:44:55Z

"The brain is not a Reality-Recorder. There is no perfect replica of reality inside our brains. The brain elides, confabulates, conflates, denies, suppresses, evades, confuses and distorts. It has its own agenda and can even work at cross-purposes with our conscious selves. Consciously, we may think that we see all and know all, but our brains may be "blind" to much of what is going on around us."

Errol Morris, blogging on perception

Tune in, turn on, publish or perish

2008-04-13T23:20:45Z

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/005132.html Nature story on the surprisingly prevalent use by scientists' of cognitive enhancers i.e. brainbooster drugs)
This is a big ugly beast slowly stirring in its cage, it seems to me. Consider this: it seems possible that we will discover that cunning use of cognitive enhancement via drugs such as beta blockers is positively correlated to some degree with science quality or pace of innovative output or somesuch. In fact we may know that already - this future is probably just another imperfectly distributed one! Given that, what incentives do you create when you set up a competitive funding process, or require researchers to attain a certain standard before tenure-track, or tie promotion to patents and impact factors? The old academic fallback for creative burnout or impossible success criteria (plagiarism) has been swept away by Google - Plan B is recourse to Ritalin. Far-fetched? I'm not too sure. Nobody's doing the experiment (e.g. monitoring stimulant intake by pre-laureates). The tragedy is that it's the top-tier performers and the up-and-coming who end up fighting to stay clean and stay competitive, morally pushed to take the sucker's payoff and professionally pulled to get jazzed to get successful; witness competitive cycling over the last fifteen years. It also brings to mind the communist bloc countries in the 70s and 80s seeking prestige from the Olympics by whatever pharmaceutical means; in this century, cognitive boosters can give your country--yes, yours!--a more direct and sustained advantage measurable in prestige, dollars, Nobels and economic transformation. And the ethics are less clear. I'm so upset by this I'm going for a coffee!]]>

Forgive me Father for I have genetically modified

2008-03-10T22:51:59Z

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/03/genetic_modification_joins_lus.html Nature clarifies some Vatican comments. For a few hours today many news sites reported that the Catholic Church had added another 7 deadly sins to the time-tested first batch. These included "carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos" [my emphasis]. However, it seems as though the process was something like this:

1. Senior Catholic agrees to interview
2. Interviewer asks Senior Catholic about his personal opinions on sin
…several steps here…
99. Newspaper front pages around the world proclaim new Catholic doctrine

It's usual for the Pope to set the policy in this area, allegedly after full consultation with his boss, but there's not much sign of that here. Not only would this have brought the scriptwriters of Se7en a very difficult challenge vis-a-vis the necessary sequel but one has to worry about the immortal souls of any genetic engineers who died without confession this morning, perhaps zapped by the electrophoresis powerpack while the stain of this morning's plasmid ligation was still on them (statistically likely, given the numbers). Anyway, the panic is now over and you can go back to your money-making, poverty-induced, genetically-modifying lives, people.

But why pick on sloths?]]>

Snowmen with bug eyes

2008-02-29T07:08:13Z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1149757 Extended Atmo-biosphere Theory. It's interesting to speculate (unscientifically) on how important to the weather microbes might be. Bugs dig caves; could they drive the climate?]]>

Air quotes

2008-02-12T19:23:47Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes

Genes with silly names should stay

2008-02-11T19:12:37Z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2008-9-1-401 I think the whimsy should stay, and so do these authors. After all, pioneers in any given namespace have always done this: look at the names of towns in North America, for example (New York, Truth Or Consequences, etc), or the colours of Crayola crayons.
Arresting fact: "North American cities, for instance, often share a corpus of conserved street names". What kind of Land Of The Free is that?! You've got the right to bear arms but not to name streets - how bizarre. Reminds me of the now-abolished strictures on children's names in France.]]>

Upgrade to MT4

2008-02-07T11:04:54Z

Okay, this has taken all night and I'm narked. Essential help was to be found at http://www.mapability.com/blogs/web/2007/10/installing-movable-type-4.html

Six million dollar cockroach

2008-01-22T03:15:50Z

http://en.rian.ru/science/20080117/97179313.html Virgin Galactic?]]>

It's okay to swing

2008-01-02T22:53:25Z

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html perceived upsides, in 2006 it was the quest for formulae, 2005 soughtunprovably true things, and someone copied the idea to find the best scientific nutshell. This year's Edge question is "What have you changed your mind about?". Standouts this time round for me include:

Joseph Ledoux on the arresting fact that memories are one-time-access only, yes they are
Donald Hoffman on how being fundamentally mistaken about many things is baked into our psychology, has been for thousands of generations
Timothy Taylor on the correct dosage of relativism: you can have not enough, of course, but also too much
Robert Provine on the benefits of the random walk through science, sans hypothesis. Go fish!
Helen Fisher on her idea that serial monogamy with four-yearly itches was the human ancestral mating strategy
Scott Sampson on his early doubts about the extinction of the dinosaurs: 27 years on from the Alvarezes paper the data just keeps backing it up
Daniel Gilbert on the previously unrealised benefits of not being able to change your mind
Stewart Brand claims that old is crap, mostly, while new is mostly not as crap so embrace it
Jonathan Haidt on his baffled acceptance of the benefits of joining clubs and talking sports statistics with your mates
Richard Wrangham on his Road to Damascus moment that, while meat protein might be the power-diet that got our ancestors from Australopithecus to Homo habilis, it must be cooking that gets us from habilis to erectus
Nicholas Christakis on how genes are not the background on which culture is painted but that there is a dialogue or two-way influence going on
Phillip Campbell on how he would now be happy to use cognitive enhancement drugs under certain conditions
Daniel Goleman is now questioning the correlation between mental effort and achievement
Gerd Gigerenzer now thinks that statistical illiteracy in the medical profession, contributing many deaths and even more misunderstandings, is at last on the decline
Esther Dyson now thinks that online privacy is not what people really want
Paul Saffo forecasts that the only valid forecasts will soon come from computers
Alison Gopnik now thinks that science and fiction are facets our outcomes of the same thing
Jesse Bering now rejects all superstition yet, for well-explained psychological reasons, outlines how superstitious he and others can be
Roger Bingham had a crisis of faith in his chosen religion (evolutionary psychology) and so went off and founded his own (which is technically different but looks similar from a distance)
Clay Shirky on his realisation that non-overlapping magisteria are bogus, that one cannot be a religious scientist in all non-dissonant honesty

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Public domain day

2007-12-31T21:02:40Z

http://everybodyslibraries.com/2008/01/01/public-domain-day-gifts/ life+50 countries, we may now mess around freely with the formerly-copyrighted works of Dorothy L.Sayers, Sibelius, Laura Ingolls Wilder, Lord Dunsany, Oliver Hardy and others. In the science world, the works of two Nazi-sympathizing Nobel laureates (Bothe and Stark), two more laureates (Langmuir, who also coined the phrase "pathological science", and Cori) ,and Russell (of diagrammatic fame) and entered the public domain. 2005 had a more interesting crop sciencewise. 2006 was sparser but gave us A.A.Milne and Alfred Kinsey, otherwise so rarely shelved together.
Next year we get Franklin and Pauli, amongst others.]]>

BMJ debunks medical myths

2007-12-23T05:20:19Z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39420.420370.25

People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day

No, this is from failing to read the next bit: people get 8 glasses of water a day equivalent, from the food they eat

We use only 10% of our brains

Nope, not even at any given time.

Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death

Nah, but cuticles can pull back and follicles open as flesh dries out after death

Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser

Nyet, but blunt-ended, recently-cut, as-yet-unbleached-by-sun hair can look darker

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight

Nein, never been shown except perhaps in one association study that may be faintly concluded as suggestive

Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy

Nada, but turkey + stuffing + wine + potatoes + pudding + extra pudding can

Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals

Bah! Tested rigorously, nothing found, suspicions and paranoia remain but only some old equipment in some situations very very near (<1m) some old phones (NB: the life-saving effects of giving hospital doctors mobile phones instead of pagers, so their response times are quicker, are well-documented)

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Dynamic URI-based chart-drawing API from Google

2007-12-06T18:55:06Z

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ (original)(guru)
merely by doing this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=v &chs=400x200 &chtt=Speculation+leads+to+accumulation &chd=t:20,100,0,100,0,0,0 &chdl=Doing stuff|Making progress &chco=efefef,e3e3e3 " />

I have others!]]>