I was working on a paper recently, and my boss included a editing note that got me thinking.  The topic dealt with certain circuits in the limbic network of the brain.  The note included the line: "limbic connections are very complex".   The point of the edit was to emphasize that problems in the limbic network (like seizures) are difficult to treat in part because every part of the network is connected to every other part.  Therefore, it's hard to pin down any one effect that one part has on another. 

Freedom Of Information And UK Law



The UK's Freedom Of Information Act 2000 - FOIA - has been much in the news and public debate of late, mainly in connection with allegations that the University Of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has acted in breach of the FOIA.

Before I go further in my analysis of what law is, and what the relevant law means in the context of the allegations against the CRU, I have some important points to make.

Faint Young Sun - No Paradox


The faint young sun paradox is no paradox, according to a recent paper in Nature.


The faint young sun paradox is that the earth didn't freeze over when the sun was weaker at the time when the oceans formed.  Earth's climate has been fairly constant during the approx. 4.6 billion years of earth's existence, despite the fact that radiation from the Sun is believed to have increased by 25-30 percent over that time.

Professor Minik Rosing, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and Christian Bjerrum, from the Department of Geography and Geology at University of Copenhagen, together with American colleagues from Stanford University in California claim that there is no paradox.

We defied expectations in last week's Pepsi Throwback Challenge. We found the unusual result that our bodies, against our wills, preferred high fructose corn syrup to ordinary sugar.  Our comparison of Pepsi[TM] soda products, particularly their corn syrup 'regular formulation' against their all-sugar 'Throwback', defied our expectations.

Fossilized Weather


If you want to know what the weather is doing you can do as the candlelight fisherman in the song did, and "open the pane and pop out the flame and see how the winds do blow".  Or you could look at the nearest weathervane.  They come in all sort of designs, shapes and sizes. 

A cutting-edge UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute research project, the Infant Sibling Study, is leading the way in seeking clues to the earliest behavioral manifestations of autism. This project studies the younger siblings of children already diagnosed with autism. For reasons that are not entirely clear, these children are among the most likely to be subsequently diagnosed with the condition. While the chance that a first child will have autism is about 1 in 100, the chance that a sibling of a child with autism will also have autism is as high as 1 in 5.