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Are the Brains of Reckless Teens More Mature Than Those of Their Prudent Peers?: Scientific American
Psychologists have long believed that the brain's judgment-control systems develop more slowly than emotion-governing systems, not maturing until people are in their mid-20s. Hence, teens end up taking far more risks than adults do. Evidence supporting th
The Brain: The Dark Matter of the Human Brain | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine
[this is very good]
Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do.
PCRM >> News and Media Center >> Fish and Fish Oil Linked to Diabetes Risk
Following 195,204 adults for 14 to18 years, researchers found that the more fish or omega-3 fatty acids participants consumed, the higher their risk of developing diabetes. The risk increase was modest for occasional fish eaters, but rose to a 22 percent
Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice
The answer, notwithstanding thousands of positive EOS and, in some cases, small inadequate clinical trials, is there is no rigorous scientific evidence for the utility of dietary supplements
Key paper in depression genetics disputed : Neurotopia
A common problem in studies attempting to relate genetics with a particular behavior is that a particular genotype might only confer a very small risk. Also, behavioral genetics studies are notoriously difficult to replicate. Say you find a significant re
AK's Rambling Thoughts: Nerve Cells and Glial Cells: Redefining the Foundation of Intelligence
collision detection: Incredibly weird, inch-wide single-celled creatures discovered rolling across the sea floor
Remember those tracks the Bahamian Gromia left? They’re found in the pre-Cambrian fossil record. For years scientists assumed that only organisms with complex body plans that are symmetrical down the middle — “bilateria,” as they’re called — could possibl
PLoS ONE: How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
It found that, on average, about 2% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct my any standard [10], [36], [37]– and up to one third admitted a variety of other questionable
Edge 286 - CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE - A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer
We feel like more than just the sum of a trillion neurons. We feel like more than just three pounds of wet flesh, and so simply describing the brain in terms of its neurotransmitters and neurons and all these chemicals and exciting ingredients doesn't ful
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I was talking to a scientist last year who studies 'aha' moments. What happens in your brain when you have an epiphany? He was saying it would be great for him to use LSD in the lab, because when you take a hit of acid, you're a eureka machine. You think you've solved the world. You think you've solved the cosmos. You're just writing down notes on cocktail napkins. Not until you wake up in the morning do you realize you wrote down the most banal things ever — in the moment, you're just having one epiphany after another. Wouldn't it be great for him to give people LSD and study what happens in their brain? It turns out that it's very tough to do. It's very tough to get grant funding. People still remember Tim Leary at Harvard in the early '60s. There's still a stigma attached to it. We joke about it, but it could still be a very, very useful experimental tool.
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the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.
What you're doing as a scientist is doing experiments. Ninety-nine percent of what you do as a neuroscientist is the act of experimentation, and also, thinking with a disciplined thought process, taking very big grandiose ambitious questions — "What is memory?" — and breaking them down into testable questions you can study in a sea slug or in a genetically modified mouse. I realized I didn't have that talent, which is such an important talent, to take a very big question and break it down into these empirical units. So I began thinking about science writing. - 2 more annotations...
Don't cure cancer, stabilize it: Scientific American Blog
use IPM as model
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The paradigm we typically use to fight cancers right now comes from trying to treat bacterial infections.
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We have the wrong analogy when it comes to treating cancer. Instead of the analogy between cancer and bacterial infections, we should be using an analogy between cancer and invasive species. The goal is not to eliminate pests because applied ecologists have learned that’s futile. Instead what they’ve learned to do is to keep the pests at a tolerable level. This is called “integrated pest management,” and it became a policy of the agricultural department when Richard Nixon was president.
Entropy Production: All Medical Science is Wrong within a 95 % Confidence Intervalor: A Review of Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
[must-read, esp points 1-13 - also watch Gary Taubes video
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I believe that stress and the associated cortisol response is a subset of inflammation. However, I now believe that the majority of inflammation is a result of diet. If you look at the substances that cause people the most problems with intolerance/allergy, they are all eliminated on a low-carbohydrate diet: wheat (gluten), milk (casein), and legumes (including peanuts). All of these products can elicit an auto-immune response to reject the small intestine and hence are massive sources of inflammation in a large minority of the population. One topic I didn't discuss is the anti-nutrients found in many vegetables. Anti-nutrients are compounds that inhibit the uptake of micronutrients. Examples would be the lectins in grain, oxolate in spinach, solonane in tomatoes/peppers/potatoes, etc. Most plants evolved defenses against animals eating them.
How to build a bigger brain
What's not known, she said, and will require further study, are what the specific correlates are on a microscopic level — that is, whether it's an increased number of neurons, the larger size of the neurons or a particular "wiring" pattern medit
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What's not known, she said, and will require further study, are what the specific correlates are on a microscopic level — that is, whether it's an increased number of neurons, the larger size of the neurons or a particular "wiring" pattern meditators may develop that other people don't.
Because this was not a longitudinal study — which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward — it's possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said.
Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds - NYTimes.com
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The dogma that the heart cannot generate new muscle cells has been challenged since 1987 by a somewhat lonely skeptic, Dr. Piero Anversa, now of the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Anversa maintains that heart muscle cells are renewed so fast that a person dying at age 80 has replaced the heart four times over. Many other researchers have doubted this assertion.
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The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it has been incorporated into plants and animals or diffused into the oceans.
Freeman Thinking | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
note the discussion in the comments
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Lastly, can we do anything about it? The whole question of whether we’ve reached a “tipping point” seems to be hot right now. The answer lies in the climate models, so let’s keep our skepticism alive here. We don’t understand what causes ice age cold and warm spells. When those are in the models, and we can post-dict the previous glaciations, I’ll start to believe the models. The oceanic thermohaline circulation seems to be key here, but how? What about the Milankovich cycle? Chaotic perturbations in the solar system? Dust lanes in the Milky Way? No one said this would be easy…
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So what? What we do know is that we’ve been smacking the environment with a sledgehammer for a century now, with obviously significant results. And it’s the only environment we have. I don’t see how there can be any prudent response other than “we have to stop doing this as quickly as possible.”
Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD: Scientific American
"Clinicians aren't separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems or who are just taking some time getting over it," Stevens says. He worries that ma
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When PTSD was first added to the DSM-III in 1980, traumatic memories were considered reasonably faithful recordings of actual events. But as research since then has repeatedly shown, memory is spectacularly unreliable and malleable. We routinely add or subtract people, details, settings and actions to and from our memories. We conflate, invent and edit.
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"This has nothing to do with gaming or working the system or consciously looking for sympathy," McNally says. "We all do this: we cast our lives in terms of narratives that help us understand them. A vet who's having a difficult life may remember a trauma, which may or may not have actually traumatized him, and everything makes sense."
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