The NYT has a loving and heart-warming replica of Watson’s letter describing the discovery of DNA to his 12 year old son in 1953. To say something nice about it, it’s amazing to see what a good teacher Watson was – he describes the double-helix, first-time out, from a standing start, better than it is usually described by professional educators in high school and college. What’s even more amazing and heart-warming is that Watson completely forgets to mention Rosalind Franklin to his son. You know, Rosalind Franklin…the Jewish woman chemist who took the x-ray diffraction picture of DNA that led directly to Watson’s theory? Never heard of her? Riiiiiiiiiight.

As I brought up last week, we should watch the merging of DOD and NIH monies in the pursuit of neuroscience research. Here’s an article on one use the Pentagon may want to put all this research to: “Pentagon to build robots with real brains.” As a side note, this seems far-fetched.

DARPA’s got skin in this game for a reason. Visions of neuroweaponry are dancing through at least some of their heads. It’s time to ask some questions. America’s just flubbed two wars, at incredible expense, in which overconfidence in DARPA weaponry played a huge role. Let’s find out exactly what their thinking about the BRAIN initiative is, and how this military-scientific collaboration is supposed to play out. And let’s hope that we don’t have a new challenge on our hands – to keep not only weapons out of the wrong hands, but the wrong heads.

Yesterday I posted that the White House’s upcoming BRAIN initiative was conceptually incoherent, and I snarkily implied the NYT needed some science-fiction checkers for its overly credulous reporting of what we could expect out of the initiative.

What a difference a day makes! In an article today they write: “the new initiative… has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than year.”

For anyone reading today’s NYT article on the ADHD “epidemic” (sidenote: the only epidemic is in the eyes of the diagnosticians and, worse, the school administrators who ensure that normal boys look hyperactive by sticking them in classrooms at 8am every morning), it wasn’t hard to notice someone conspicuously absent: Jaak Panksepp. If you haven’t read Panksepp’s most recent article on the normal evolutionary function of attentional shifting, and on the necessity of reorganizing our grade schools to make recess the first class of the day, read it now (link here…)

As a rather precise analogy, knowing the distribution of cell phones in the United States might tell you this much (pinchy fingers) about what Americans are saying to one another. A complete list of every phone’s contact history (eg, who is calling who, and when, and for how long) would tell you this much (hands a foot apart) about what Americans are saying. But actually recording all of the conversations would tell you this much (arms stretched as wide as possible) about what Americans are saying.

Everything you ever wanted from a nervous system and more. Perception, analysis, intentionality, persistence, problem solving, and motor behavior up the wazoo.

Einstein famously hated this idea, wanting all cause-effect relationships to be “local” (meaning limited in speed to c). He petulantly referred to it as spooky action at a distance. Bell’s theorem gave it credibility, and now a series of experiments are proving it empirically.

Time was when the cell body was the telephone mouthpiece and the axon was the telephone cord. Axons just passively conducted the information fed into them like so many cables. But this new article Neurosci. Res. 2013 Sasaki sets forward a summary of recent evidence that astrocytes camped out along the axon modify the signals that cell […]

A nice 6-minute film in which the viewer looks back, from a rocketship, as she moves from the surface of the planet through the universe. Various scientific landmarks and facts are displayed over the course of the trip. Good for kids and context.

The phrase “impossible person” was coined by James Joyce. In this post I will define the term (or at least begin to) and in the posts that follow in this section I will try to shed light on the inner logic of impossible people, and on some of the techniques that can be used to make them possible.

Many prisons in America are privately run, and wardens, making $40,000/year per inmate, have reasons to keep people in – the inmates are in a sense (unwilling) customers. So when they write that “this pattern of results raises the possibility that brain activity in regions such as the ACC, elicited by a simple experimental task, may lend incremental utility to existing behavioral risk factors in the ability to predict rearrest,” one worries about how, exactly, this information might be used.

It has long been speculated that only animals capable of conceptualizing conspecifics as selves – unique individuals – who can transition from life to death would be capable of mourning.

Consistent with the observation that electric fields have three-dimensional configurations that can be identified by their shape, bees detect the fields formed on other bees’ exoskeletons.

A joke! It’s only a joke! A totally accurate joke.

I can’t imagine the square root of number one.

It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.

Another metaphysical joke

If you’ve never seen someone drop 4 Mentos into a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke (let alone done it yourself) you’re in for a treat. And if you’ve never dropped the speed of light into an inertial frame of reference before you’re in for an even bigger one. Because the Mentos/Diet Coke thing will blow your mind […]