Traditionally, scientists believed that nicotine inhaled in a puff of cigarette smoke took a mere seven seconds to be taken up by the brain, but new evidence indicates that nicotine takes much longer to reach peak levels in the brains of cigarette smokers, according to a new study in PNAS.

Using PET imaging, Duke investigators found for the first time that cigarette smokers actually experience a steady rise of brain nicotine levels during the course of smoking a whole cigarette.

In the past week or two, there have been several news stories and blogs (including here on SB) written in regards to a paper that came out this month titled, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". It would be easy for the untrained eye to read such a headline and think, "Gee.... this was published in a peer reviewed journal, so this must really be something..." However, if you read through the paper in detail, and look at the longitudinal data methods used for the analysis, one begins to question the validity of such broad assumptions.

Imagine a child, standing in a school cafeteria. We'll assume that this child has reached or surpassed the age of reason (7 years old, for non-Catholics out there), meaning they can understand their choices and therefore can make the wrong choice along with the right one.

In front of this lovely child is a vending machine filled with tempting soda¹ and sports drinks and other such calorie-laden, battery-acid-by-another-name, neatly packaged consumables.

A team of Georgia Institute of Technology scientists are reporting that molecules they term "unselfish" may have midwifed the birth of life's original (sometimes called "selfish") genes. The Georgia Tech scientists are investigating the possibility that intercalator molecules such as ethidium could have assisted life's non-living building blocks in forming complex organic chains and might have entered into the selection of DNA double helix base pairs.

If you want to have staying power on the Internet, you need to have turnover, says a new analysis published in the Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work.

Not only do you need to be 'heterogeneous', you need to be diverse.   

A new study that was just released on Sunday and published online in Nature Neuroscience has found that Ritalin, a popular medication to treat ADD/HD, helps improve learning not only by improving focus, but also by increasing plasticity of neural connections.

The player involved in this new discovery is none other than that magical little neurotransmitter, one of my good friends, dopamine. As well as giving insight into to the nature of attention deficit disorders, providing new avenues to pursue for treatment, this study brings to light a few important facts about dopamine.

Social Scientist have contended for much of the last century that we cannot approach the study of human behavior with the same tools that we would use to study the natural world.  This is hogwash.  And I think Karl Popper, the great 20th century philosopher, would agree with me. Humans are animals, they are made up of chemicals and cells, their behavior is determined by a complex interaction of chemical processes and their lives are a network of cause and effect relations with other animals (some of which we’d call human).   If we are ever going to get a solid grasp on our own behavior, we’ll need to use the items from the large and well developed toolbox of natural science.

UK Parliament Debates Climate Science Report



If somebody is in favor of making our planet a better place to live, you can bet your life that somebody with a louder voice is against it. 

Demonstrating that, at least in political attitudes to science, there really is 'nothing new under the sun', I present highlights of a UK Parliament debate on the undesirability of pollution controls.
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