Being in Someone Else’s Head is Exhausting

by David DiSalvo in Neuronarrative

More and more research suggests that our brains have difficulty differentiating between observing an action and actually participating in it. Empathy, for example, seems to hinge in part on our ability to “take on” another’s emotions through vicarious experience. I always think of this when watching a comedian fall flat. I can feel the embarrassment as if I’m standing there on stage looking at a room full of blank stares.

A new study in the journal Psychological Scie........ Read more »

Major Huntington's Disease Puzzle Solved

by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic

Huntington's Disease is a genetic neurological disorder. Symptoms most commonly appear around age 40, and they progress gradually from subtle movement abnormalities to complete loss of motor control and dementia. Psychiatric problems, especially depression and irritability, are also common and may be the first signs. Treatment consists of medications to mask some of the symptoms. Singer Woodie Guthrie is perhaps the disease's best known victim: he ended his days in a mental institution.Huntingt........ Read more »

An anomaly in autism intervention research

by Michelle Dawson in The Autism Crisis

Promotion first, science later, if ever. This pattern is near universal when it comes to autism interventions. In the absence of good quality research, autism interventions are loudly claimed to be effective. For those promoting ABA-based autism interventions, claims of effectiveness unfounded in good quality research were only the first step. The real triumph has been widespread agreement that fair tests of ABA-based interventions are unethical and bad for autistics. As a result, any experiment........ Read more »

A Flurry of Red and Green

by Iddo Friedberg in Byte Size Biology

Ancient, extinct endosymbiosis is revealed. The original endosymbionts are no longer hosted, but their genes remain in the host's genome.... Read more »

What to beetles, cuttlefish, and orangutans all have in common?

by zinjanthropus in A Primate of Modern Aspect

Alternative mating strategies!

When we learn about sexual selection theory, we usually learn about it as a binary system:  Females choose males, and males try to be chosen. Female peahens choose male peacocks with the most and prettiest eyespots because it’s an indicator of their health, and she wants healthy offspring.  Female deer choose bucks [...]... Read more »

Fossil Dung Balls

by bug_girl in Bug Girl's Blog

Once again, very busy, but I had to write this, just for the post title.  From a news release:

“A new study of 30-million-year-old-fossil ‘mega-dung’ from extinct giant South American mammals, published in Palaeontology, reveals evidence of complex ecological interactions and theft of dung-beetles’ food stores by other animals….

Some 30 million years ago, the continent was [...]... Read more »

Bird moult allometry

by Roger Jovani in Birds and Science

Take a cable from your computer and measure the perimeter of your fist. This is, more or less, the length of your foot (check it now!). This is useful to buy socks without compromising the hygiene of the country, but it also enhances our understanding of bird moult. The ratio fist perimeter/foot length is constant among people; that is, it follows an isometric law: if you plot for different people fist perimeter on the x-axis and foot length in the y-axis, both in log-scale, you will find a line........ Read more »

What does this anthropologist think about hormonal birth control? Part V

by Kate Clancy in Laboratory for Evolutionary Endocrinology

Last part in five part series on hormonal contraception, population variation, cultural conditioning, and behavior.... Read more »

Optimizing Algorithms for Brain-Machine Interfaces

by Toaster Sunshine in Mad Scientist, Junior

Imagine waking up trapped in a prison of your own flesh, blinking awake in the dull glow of a softly bleached hospital room. Your arms and legs are unresponsive to the will to move them, to the simple desire to reach up and scratch the itchiness of morphine from your eyes. Nothing happens, nothing responds, nothing moves, nothing feels. You are an immobile head trapped on an unresponsive body, and no matter how loudly you scream against the walls of your confinement from inside your head, not........ Read more »

by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles

Very interesting article by Claire Haworth et al. on the genetic influence of high intelligence. Apparently genetic differences explain approximately half the variance according to this study. BPS Research Digest does a nice job summarizing.Haworth, C., Wright, M., Martin, N., Martin, N., Boomsma, D., Bartels, M., Posthuma, D., Davis, O., Brant, A., Corley, R., Hewitt, J., Iacono, W., McGue, M., Thompson, L., Hart, S., Petrill, S., Lubinski, D., & Plomin, R. (2009). A Twin Study of the Genet........ Read more »

Improve Children’s Mental Health – Turn Off the TV

by Shaheen Lakhan in Brain Blogger

Obesity is a global epidemic, in adults and children. The increase in childhood obesity has been linked to behavioral and environmental factors: decreased physical activity and increased television viewing. Now it is clear that these activities are detrimental not only to physical health, but also psychological health. A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics [...]... Read more »

Java Junkie Josh

by Duncan Hull in O'Really?

One of the people I enjoyed seeing at Science Foo Camp this year was Joshua Bloch. Josh is a Java Junkie [1,2,3] and software engineer at Google. When he wasn’t playing harmonica around the foo camp fire (see picture right), he was giving interesting talks about optical illusions, some of which can be found in [...]... Read more »

Science News: Week of July 19, 2009

by Susan Steinhardt in BioData Blogs

Our weekly compilation of science news for the week of July 19, 2009.... Read more »

How did bats get underfoot?

by Zen Faulkes in NeuroDojo

You think snakes on a plane are crazy? Bats! On the ground!

Before humans arrived on New Zealand, the only mammals living there were bat species. One of only two remaining native Kiwi mammals is Mystacina tuberculata, the lesser short-tailed bat.

This bat’s second claim to fame is that it walks. Only one other bat, the vampire bat, does this, and vampire bats don’t spend anywhere near the same amount of time on the ground as M. tuberculata does. That there are no other land mam........ Read more »

The influence of genes on exceptional mental ability

by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest

We know a great deal about the relative genetic and environmental influences on average intelligence and on learning disabilities, but far less about the role of genes in exceptional cognitive ability – in lay terms, what we might call genius or innate talent.A new "mega-analysis" of 11,000 twin pairs, aged between 6 and 71, has helped to plug that gap. The results suggest that genes exert a significant influence on exceptional cognitive ability, similar in magnitude to their influence on the ........ Read more »

If You Had Half a Brain..

by Neural Outlaw in Neural Interface

A great story made its way onto the interwebz lately. The Daily Mail reports:"A 10-year-old girl born with half a brain has both fields of vision in one eye, scientists said today. The youngster, from Germany, has the power of both a right and left eye in the single organ in the only known case of its kind in the world."University of Glasgow researchers used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the r........ Read more »

Keeping your man/woman yours

by eHarmony Labs in eHarmony Labs Blog

There are a number of strategies people use to keep their mates their own. Find out what these behaviors are and how they impact relationships.... Read more »

Tuatara: one species or two?

by hilaryml in Chicken or Egg blog

New Zealand’s most iconic reptile, the tuatara, is currently regarded as two separate species – Sphenodon guntheri, which is found naturally only on North Brother Island in Cook Strait, and Sphenodon punctatus, which are found on other islands in Cook Strait and off the north-east coast of the North Island.  However research just published [...]... Read more »

City of Ottawa Hikes Transit Fees for "Mature Students" - Will Physical Activity Levels Drop as a Result?

by Travis Saunders, MSc in Obesity Panacea

I received a disappointing email yesterday from a colleague at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute pointing me to this article on transit fees in the City of Ottawa (where I currently live, work, and go to school). The article describes a recent change which makes all students 28 and older ineligible for City of Ottawa "student" transit fares. This will mean that many graduate students, medical students, and even "mature" undergraduate students will now have to pay th........ Read more »