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.

ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum, obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) - one of Herschel's three innovative instruments - demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel-HIFI will provide on how organic molecules form in space. Several German Institutes contributed essential parts to the HIFI instrument: the Universität zu Köln and two Max Planck Institutes: Radioastronmie (Bonn) and Sonnensystemforschung (Lindau).

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.

Godfrey Bloom Demands Re-evaluation Of IPCC Re-evaluation


Godfrey Bloom MEP bemoans the fact that:

"There appears to be a woeful lack of candour and commonsense in modern day politicians."