Update: CoDa Therapeutics
The product has a name: Nexagon
Sexsomnia
The new defense for rape. A brief mention in the NY Times today.
CoDa Therapeutics
Based on the work of David Becker and Colin Green, CoDa was recommended by the very fantastic Saba as a keen investment. I’m sold.
Separation of Light from Darkness: an anatomical study
Suk and Tamargo, in May 2010’s Neurosurgery, claim to reveal hidden neuroanatomical features in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a master anatomist as well as an artistic genius. He dissected cadavers numerous times and developed a profound understanding of human anatomy. From 1508 to 1512, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. His Sistine Chapel frescoes are considered one of the monumental achievements of Renaissance art. In the winter of 1511, Michelangelo entered the final stages of the Sistine Chapel project and painted 4 frescoes along the longitudinal apex of the vault, which completed a series of 9 central panels depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis. It is reported that Michelangelo concealed an image of the brain in the first of these last 4 panels, namely, the Creation of Adam. Here we present evidence that he concealed another neuronanatomic structure in the final panel of this series, the Separation of Light From Darkness, specifically a ventral view of the brainstem. The Separation of Light From Darkness is an important panel in the Sistine Chapel iconography because it depicts the beginning of Creation and is located directly above the altar. We propose that Michelangelo, a deeply religious man and an accomplished anatomist, intended to enhance the meaning of this iconographically critical panel and possibly document his anatomic accomplishments by concealing this sophisticated neuroanatomic rendering within the image of God.
The figures they present in the paper are compelling. Indeed, God’s neck does look very much like a brainstem.
Death… by laughter.
In the third century B.C., the Greek stoic philosopher Chrysippus died of laughter after giving his donkey wine, then seeing it attempt to feed on figs.
Classic. We’ve reached the Internet’s apogee.
TED, not always sucky.
That last post was probably unfair to TED, which I think is generally awesome. There are some great talks I’ve looked at recently, and I want to let you know about a few of them here.
The first is by Simon Sinek, who has a really clever concept about how to think about life and meaningfulness in general:
Saul Griffith and his kites:
And Richard Dawkins, always a favorite to listen to amongst men of the book:
See! Not so bad…
Good babies.
Professor of psychology Paul Bloom (Yale) describes his wife’s (Karen Wynn) research in the NY Times magazine.
But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?
Fantastic accompanying video. What’s particularly fascinating, however, is that Wynn’s research seems to point to a genetic basis for morality (some forms of morality, at least). As if to say there may be a genetic marker that might predict preferences for social and anti-social behavior.
Tiger Woods and Calvin Coolidge
Tiger Woods uses this joke as a pick-up line:
“What’s this?” he’d ask, rubbing the tips of his shoes together. “A black guy taking off his condom.”
Which reminded me of the Coolidge Effect, which is where mammalian males and females engage in lots of sex if presented with new, willing partners.
The term comes from an old joke, according to which U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and his wife allegedly visited a poultry farm. During the tour, Mrs. Coolidge inquired of the farmer how his farm managed to produce so many fertile eggs with such a small number of roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters performed their duty dozens of times each day.
“Tell that to Mr. Coolidge,” pointedly replied the First Lady.
The President, overhearing the remark, asked the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”
“No,” replied the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”
“Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” replied the President.
As a side note, let me mention the Bruce Effect for a moment. This is seen in lab mice, where a pregnant female will abort or reabsorb the embryo when exposed to the pheromones of another male. Nitric Oxide (NO), if you didn’t know, will counter this effect if administered before exposing the foreign pheromones — as if to say (mouse) sex can be replaced by an injection.
Predicting visual stimuli on the basis of activity in auditory cortices: Not Quite…
In May 2010’s Nature Neuroscience, Meyer et al. claim that watching videos that imply sound (e.g., coins being dropped in a vase) but are actually silent activates the auditory cortex.
The problem with this study, as I see it, is that we might be looking at a suggestion effect. Simply, watching a car accident without sound, for instance, suggests crashing and gnashing sounds which might lead to an auditory illusion. What you would have to do to preclude this, then, is show silent videos of things which imply sound but you might not know what those sounds are — e.g., someone using a dead snake as a baseball bat.
Intriguing to me is that this might also point to some kind of ‘readiness potential’ in conscious processing, meaning you are prepared to hear the sound ahead of time so your brain doesn’t have to do so much computing when creating a seamless conscious experience.
NOTE: our brains break down incoming data then put it all back together again into a seamless experience involving vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. How it does this, we don’t know, but this points to a possible clue.
Genspera
I just finished reading Kandel’s autobiography, In Search of Memory. It’s a fascinating and fantastic introduction to neural science, mostly because Kandel was there to help create so much of what we know today. His telling of his life story is, essentially, the telling of the story of modern cognitive and molecular neuroscience.
That said, Kandel also describes his involvement in various biotech ventures to some extent. It was convincing enough for me to take a serious look at some biotech start-ups (especially since I now understand the inventions they are peddling), and I like the potential of Genspera (GNSZ). The research looks solid and, if it works out with humans, there’ll be some fantastic licensing deals to be had.
Neuroanatomy (it’s in the brains)
Recently, I watched an AT&T commercial that claimed the Internet makes us smarter. I wasn’t terribly sure about that, Flynn Effect notwithstanding. But things like this make the idea seem promising. It makes good information accessible to nearly everyone with an internet connection — information that wasn’t available just a few short years ago.
And my god, there are dissection labs available online:
Biosynth Engineering
The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) is featured in the Sunday Magazine.
Genetic engineers have looked at nature as a set of finished products to tweak and improve — a tomato that could be made into a slightly better tomato. But synthetic biologists imagine nature as a manufacturing platform: all living things are just crates of genetic cogs; we should be able to spill all those cogs out on the floor and rig them into whatever new machinery we want. It’s a jarring shift, making the ways humankind has changed nature until now seem superficial. If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,” says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.”
Dr. Amy Bishop: Cursed.
The Huntsville Times has identified the likely shooter in the University of Alabama shootings: Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist.
At Harvard, we learned quickly that all female graduates are cursed: too smart to keep good men, too in-their-own-heads to get out of their own way. Assuming Bishop is the shooter, we can surmise that she felt she was doing the University of Alabama a favor by teaching there — “Deny me tenure? You looking to die today?”
Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Vegetables.
There’s a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine that’s causing a stir. 54 patients, all suffering from severe disorders of consciousness (”persistent vegetative state”), were scanned using fMRI while asked questions that generally involve cognition localized to specific areas of the brain. From the LA Times:
Several times when Subject 23 was asked to imagine playing tennis, Monti said, the region of the brain most closely associated with complex motor planning became highly active, and stayed active for 30 seconds after researchers prompted such imagery by saying “tennis.”
Similarly, when researchers asked the patient to imagine walking through the house where he grew up and then said the word “navigate,” Subject No. 23 responded with bursts of activity in the region of the brain involved in constructing and navigating a mental map.
The young, French-speaking man was the only subject who was then trained to answer simple yes or no questions — whether his father’s name was Paul (yes) or Alexander (no), whether he had siblings and how many — using the imagery technique he had already learned.
Checking the patient’s responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still “in there,” but capable of purposeful thought and communication.
Clever… in more ways than one.
Using your hands makes you smarter
Abstract thinking is facilitated with kinesthetic action, the NY Times reports:
As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”
HeLa Cells: a life immortal
Henrietta Lacks, the person from which HeLa cells were born, and family are the subject of a new book.
From an interview at Smithsonian with author Rebecca Skloot:
For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.
Which is as it should be, many scientists say, arguing that Mrs. Lacks’s immortal cells were an accident of biology, not something she created or invented, and were used to benefit countless others. Most of what is removed from people is of no value anyway, and researchers say it would be too complicated and would hinder progress if ownership of such things were assigned to patients and royalties had to be paid.
Joyous boredom
Jennifer Schuessler, an editor at the Book Review, tackles David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, and attempts to explain, most interestingly, the importance of being bored.
A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
I survived Uganda and all I got was this lousy…
Michelle Barnes, survivor of Marburg Fever.
When scientists trying to develop a Marburg vaccine at the National Institutes of Health heard about Ms. Barnes, they were eager to take blood samples from her. She agreed. They invited her and Dr. Fujita to Bethesda, Md., last June, to present her case to a standing-room-only crowd of researchers who had never seen a Marburg survivor.
GluRs come into focus.
Finally, a glimpse of a full-length tetrameric glutamate receptor.
The structure presented by Sobolevsky et al. is of one of the main glutamate-receptor subtypes, an AMPA (α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid) receptor from the rat. It is made up of four GluA2 subunits (GluR2 in older nomenclature) that are identical in terms of amino-acid sequence, and it encompasses three structural/functional domains. Two of these domains are located on the external side of the cell membrane, and we have seen them individually before — the modulatory amino-terminal domain (ATD) and the ligand-binding domain (LBD) with its clam-shell-like arrangement. The third component is the transmembrane domain (TMD), which forms the ion channel, and this is our first view of it. In many ways the structure is comforting, because it consolidates and verifies much previous functional and structural work. But at the same time it is exhilarating, owing to the unexpected way in which these domains are intertwined and linked together.
Article here.
Can you feel me?
In the current issue of Nature, Gick and Derrick propose that we hear using not only auditory and visual cues, but also tactile sensations from our skin.
When we listen to human speech we use a combination of the senses: the ears, obviously, and the eyes to see how a speaker’s face changes the perception of consonant sounds. Experiments seeking to add the sense of touch to the mix have until now been inconclusive. Many languages use an expulsion of air to change vowel or consonant sounds — in English to distinguish a sound like ‘da’ from the microphone-popping ‘pa’. Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick take that ‘puff of air’ as the starting point for a study of whether the sense of touch can contribute to what we ‘hear’. They applied small, inaudible air puffs to the skin of volunteers who were simultaneously listening to a series of consonant sounds. Air puffs aimed at either the hand or neck made it more likely that aspirated sounds would be heard. So ‘b’ was misheard as ‘p’ following an air puff. This work could prove useful in the future development of audio and telecommunication aids for the hearing impaired.
The NY Times summarizes the work nicely.
The Fantastic FOXP2
Daniel H. Geschwind at UCLA just published a paper describing the human-specific transcriptional regulation of central nervous system genes by Forkhead box P2 (FOXP2), a gene implicated in some speech disorders.
Premature Ejaculator
I like Obama. He’s personable and intelligent and writes about himself well. I think his latest decision (as well as his decision to accept the Nobel prize) however, reveals moments of complete and utter stupidity.
Briefly, he wants to lift a 22-year-old ban on HIV+ people traveling to the States. The glaring problem here is that people with HIV tend to be young; and young people have a biological predilection for sex. Lots of it. The argument he’s making is that the US is a world leader in AIDS treatment. Well, you’re wrong. As far as treating AIDS goes, we’re pretty much doing the same things everyone else is doing.
Mr Obama said the ban was imposed 22 years ago when visitors to the United States were treated as a threat.
He said: “We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the Aids pandemic - yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people with HIV from entering our own country.
“If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/Aids, we need to act like it.”
Mr Obama, being the leader of the world when it comes to stemming the spread of AIDS is IN NO WAY TANTAMOUNT to having a liberal immigration policy. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for curing AIDS — I even put in a couple of years looking for one; all I’m saying is that your decision has little to do with fighting AIDS and more to do with stupidity (i.e., your feigning of expertise outside of your field of study): we would obviously quarantine travelers with Swine Flu or SARS or any other pandemic.
Obama, buddy, you’re busting a nut before we’re ready for it. You should wait until AFTER we’ve found a cure before letting people come in for treatment.
Time.
The illusion of time is considered in the latest New Scientist.
Disappointing, actually, since the research used could have been flawed, yet all conclusions presented are drawn from it. (Personally, I would’ve done as Herb Benson and recruit subjects who are supposedly able to slow time at will, i.e., those who can catch arrows and such at birthday parties, and then use fMRI to study differences.)