Not making this up: A team of researchers has used light to make a mouse’s brain run better and relieve the mouse’s mousy version of depression. (Paper — a pdf download — is here.) This is potentially pretty big. For one thing, it’s what science writer John Pavlus would call awesome. For another, it expands…
Monthly Archives: November 2010
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Your Librarian is Really Huey Lewis
by David Dobbs •
You take an LP album cover and hold it up in front of someone so it looks like your buddy is, say, Huey Lewis. Has to be in a library. Voila: You have a site called Library Sleevefacing, hatched by librarians at Bowling Green State University, god bless ‘em. I know it’s extremely nerdy. But…
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Sneaking into Google Street View … with your sneakers
by David Dobbs •
Richard Grant, an editor at Faculty 1000, has pulled a weird coup of the hyperlinked, meta-mapped, internet age: Not content to try to find a picture of himself or his house on Google Streetview, he put himself in the picture: made it happen. Involved a camera, quick feet, and a low-speed pursuit of a Google…
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TSA felt the junk, missed the footlong razor blades
by David Dobbs •
Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells the tale. Via Ars Technica. See also: SciAm Guest Blog: TSA, body scans, and risk perception
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Why Do Moms Kill Their Kids?
by David Dobbs •
Why do mothers kill their children? Over at Scientific American, guest blogger Eric Michael Johnson, of Primate Diaries fame, has fashioned a nicely turned essay considering one answer to this question— or at least a partial answer — offered by researcher Dario Maestripieri: When mothers kill their children, they are reacting to a particularly…
Brains and Behavior, Culture of Science, Medicine, Psychiatry
Alison Bass, Your Facts on Helen Mayberg Are Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong
by David Dobbs •
31 Aug 2013: The public memo below, asking jouranlist Alison Bass to correct serious errors she published in a November 2010 post at her site, was originally published at my Posterous site in late 2010, soon after her post. I wrote it because a) Bass had failed to correct her original post with the false accusations,…
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The Bright Side of the “Depression-Risk Gene”
by David Dobbs •
The reclamation of the “depression gene” proceeds apace: In a paper titled “Looking on the Bright Side of Serotonin Transporter Gene Variation,” two researchers who helped establish the “depression risk-gene” view of depression assert quite strongly that people with the gene variant in question — the s-allele of the serotonin transporter gene, HTTLPR — possess…
Culture of Science, Uncategorized
Do mummies have a right to privacy?
by David Dobbs •
Do mummies have a right to privacy? Halloween seems a good time to ponder such questions, so last week I had a talk with medical historian and writer Howard Markel, who thinks about such things. The interview ran at the Responsibility Project. In the excerpt below, Markel notes that when we dig up a mummy,…