One of the pleasures of following science is seeing how researchers use old, simple tools to test new questions. In a nice piece of work published in Nature Neuroscience and written up in ScientificAmerican.com and ___, a University Oklahoma researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan used learned-fear association in mice to reveal how the stress of maternal abandonment raised rat pups’ vulnerability to stress and fear.
Monthly Archives: July 2006
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Unambiguously upside: Wellcome Trust’s Biomedical Image Award Winners
by David Dobbs •
From the Department of Fairness and Balance: Marrow stem, by Spike Walker For an elevatory antidote to the grimness of my previous post (about global warming cracking the Eiger), see the lovely collection of images from the Wellcome Trust’s Biomedical Image Awards contest. As the site puts it, the gallery provides “a striking display of…
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Eiger loses face
by David Dobbs •
I enjoy most any mix of science and mountaineering — part of why I so like Mark Bowen’s Thin Ice, his book about climatologist Lonnie Thompson’s remarkable work documenting global warming in high-altitude glaciers. Scientific work done at rarefied altitudes. How can you not like it? The North Face of the Eiger, 2005 — aka…
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Tiny Stroke Ends a Druggie’s Addiction
by David Dobbs •
You don’t see this every day: Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient’s brain cured the patient’s drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable. (It also made the man badly…
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Cutting to the chase on climate change
by David Dobbs •
My interest in global warming grows apace, both because it stands to impose some very grim effects and because it makes an interesting (if dismaying) study in culture’s attitude toward science (see my post on “Climate change as a teset of empiricism and secular democracy“) and how vested interests can affect same. Florida at present…
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Flickering Lights: One-Shot Wonders versus the Network Model
by David Dobbs •
Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom’s Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular…
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