ResearchBlogging.org News

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal and at Child’s Play.

• “Distorted perceptions and an altered state of mind: two reasons why psychedelics have always attracted not only fascination, but also controversy for decades.” Noah Gray at Nature Blogs has curated a mini-carnival of sorts centering around a new paper called “The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders.” Included are posts by Mo at Neurophilosophy, the Neuroskeptic, the Neurocritic, and Vaughan of Mind Hacks. (Note: Only Neuroskeptic’s and Neurocritic’s posts are indexed by Research Blogging, but all are being included for completeness.)
• John M. Grohol at World of Psychology tells us that Narcissistic College Students Spend More Time on Facebook.
• Mike Lisieski of Cephalove concluded a short series about octopodes with The Case for Cephalopod Consciousness.
• At the Mind Matters blog, David Berreby explains Why A Good Friend Has the Same Effect As a Warm Fire.

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing.  Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of nature, but also one of the most difficult to measure precisely; a recent experimental measurement of the gravitational constant has shown significant deviation from the accepted value.  Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles looks at a variety of recent gravitational measurements, and explains the implications of the recent discrepancy.
• Snapshots of magnetic fields.  While we’re talking about things that are hard to measure, let’s talk about magnetic fields!  Magnetic fields are extremely difficult to measure with nanoscale precision and in the time domain, in marked contrast to measurements of other quantities.  Joerg Haber of All That Matters discusses recent techniques for measuring such fields.
• Spices as antiseptics… maybe.  Spices can add lots of “zing” to your food, and make some people suffer while eating it, but do they serve an even more important biological function? Thomas Kluyver at Thomas’ Plant-Related Blog looks at the evidence that the use of spices has served an antiseptic purpose in food preparation, and the limitations of that evidence.
• Tauromaquia Today.  And now for something completely different! Bécquer Medak-Seguín of Hispanic Studies Forum discusses a dispute in the interpretation of artist Goya’s collection of etchings on bullfighting, La Tauromaquia.

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” selections!

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He blogs at virology blog.

• Studies on the microbial ecology of the BP oil spill revealed over 900 species of bacteria, 16 of which were greatly enriched compared to the surrounding water without oil contamination. These psychrophilic microbes are largely novel and contain a large number of genes involved in oil degradation.
• Adenoviruses lytically infect one cell type (epithelial cells), leading to shedding of infectious virus, and another cell type for latent infection. One mechanism of latency involves inhibition of synthesis of the viral cell receptor, CAR – the occupied sign.
• MRSA, the antibiotic resistant form of Staphylococcus aureus is a major problem in hospitals. A novel approach to control of these pathogens involves incorporating bacteriophage lysins into nanofibers to create stable bactericidal paint films.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal and at Child’s Play.

• Livia Blackburne asks what something called “visual noise exclusion” has to do with dyslexia. She classifies the post as “intermediate-advanced,” but it’s a good concise explanation of this complicated research finding.
• People have been studying learning in aplysia, the sea hare, for decades. Bjorn Brembs has studied this critter himself for 10 years, but never saw one in the wild, until a recent trip to San Diego. There may be a reason that aplysia can learn.
• Christian Jarrett of BPS Research Digest is hunting successful psychopaths. What is a successful psychopath? “…Thanks to their superior self-control and conscientiousness, rather than landing in prison, they end up as company chief executives, university chancellors and Queen’s Council barristers. Well, that’s the idea anyway.”

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• Unmasking Eoanthropus dawsoni, The First Englishman. This post was too late for the special “fools, failures and frauds” edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival, but it is a perfect researchblogging post!  Krystal D’Costa of Anthropology in Practice discusses the infamous discovery of “Piltdown man”, and how national pride, among other things, muddled the field of anthropology for decades.
• Cylons and Smelloscopes: False Positives and False Negatives in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. In recent years, the search for extraterrestrial life has heated up with the ability to search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system.  At his eponymous blog, The Astronomist describes the techniques for searching for life on other planets, and the pitfalls of such techniques.
• What’s the point of the semantic web? Anyone who has been around long enough to remember web searching pre-Google knows how far the quality has improved.   But can it be done even better, and how?  David Bradley at Sciencebase explains the limits of current search engines, and describes how the “semantic web” could fix those limitations.
• Friday(ish) Focal Mechanisms: Samoa’s hidden rupture. Though our understanding of earthquakes has increased tremendously in modern times, there is still much to learn and many subtleties in every recorded event.  Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous discusses research that indicates that last year’s Samoan earthquake was much more complicated than previously appreciated.
• Whatever Happened to Seismosaurus? Finally, Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking takes a look at a dinosaur that drew a lot of attention in the 1990s — Seismosaurus — and explains why we don’t hear anything about it any more!

Check back next week for more miscellaneous suggestions!

Jarrett Byrnes focuses on posts in ecology, environmental sciences, and evolution. He blogs at I’m a chordata, urochordata!

• Wright was wrong! A tale of how science works, genetic drift, and why a case is never closed.

• That beautiful marine snowfall you see in deep-sea videos is really kinda gross, and yet it is a essential to ocean health and carbon sequestration.

• Man and cephalopod unite through the new science of Connectomics! (well, through comparative anatomy, anyway)

• What can the Serengeti teach us about the evolution of menopause? Go ask your grandmother.

Each week, Dr. Peter Janiszewski selects several notable posts from Health and Clinical Research. He blogs at Obesity Panacea.

Welcome to my inaugural Editor’s Selections! Over the next year, I will do my best to continue the wonderful work done by past Health/Clinical Research Editor, Travis Saunders.

Here are a number of posts that caught my attention last week:

• Greg Laden of the eponymous blog digs deep to uncover whether peer-reviewed research supports the often-held belief that drinking cranberry juice prevents urinary tract infections.
• Neurosceptic discusses a new study which may have found a novel drug for one of modern society’s most devastating afflictions: “Internet Game Addiction.” (Seriously)
• Irene Gabashvili of Aurametrix ponders whether a simple resting heart rate measurement is a useful indicator of future heart attack risk.
• Have you ever had an “airplane headache”? I certainly have. The Neurocritic discusses a series of case studies of people who develop headaches during take-off and landing in planes.

Check back next week for more interesting discussions!

Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal and at Child’s Play.

• At BPS Research Digest, Christian Jarrett asks what makes for an effective apology?
• Krystal D’Costa of the Urban Ethnographer blog describes an afternoon at a fish market in New York City, and ponders the relationship of smell and memory.
• The Neuroskeptic asks “Are you addicted to Starcraft? Do you want to get off Battle.net and on a psychoactive drug?” Is there really a drug that can curb your addiction to video games?
• Dirk Hanson of Addiction Inbox discusses the chase for the genes implicated in cocaine addiction.

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

Late posting of editor’s selections this week — life’s events, including an emergency vet trip with a sick kitty (she’s fine) — delayed things!

• Some snails prefer doing it anti-chiral. In our bawdiest post of the week, Kevin Zelnio of The Online Laboratory of Kevin Zelnio talk a bit about how snails procreate — it turns out that one species of snail prefers to find mates that have shells that twist opposite to their own! *gasp!*
• Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish? Who doesn’t love a mystery?  In an intriguing post, Greg Laden of his eponymous blog investigates what happened when early human inhabitants of islands were slowly cut off from the mainland by changing sea conditions.  The connection to fish eating is explained!
• Amateur impact hypothesis makes it into major archaeology journal. Does an ancient Greek legend refer to a massive meteor strike in antiquity?  Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology looks at a recent paper making the case, and argues that the evidence isn’t really what it’s cracked up to be.

That’s it for this week!  Next Monday, I’ll hopefully be back on schedule!

Vincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He blogs at virology blog.

• RNA viruses, with their high replication error rates, are most prone to forming quasispecies. DNA viral genomes replicate with much greater fidelity – but whether or not they form quasispecies has not been answered.
• The DNA genome of human herpesvirus six (HHV-6), the etiologic agent of the common childhood illness roseola infantum, integrates into human chromosomal DNA and is passed in the germline. Its maintenance in the genome may be related to the fact that the viral DNA is integrated in the ends of chromosomes – telomeres.
• While much is known about what the lymphatic system does, not much is known about how it forms. By studying transgenic zebrafish in which a red fluorescent protein labelled developing arteries and veins, and a green fluorescent protein labelled developing lymph vessels, it was determined that developing lymph vessels are closely associated with developing arterial vessels.

I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.