ABSTRACT

An often cited conclusion that musical chills are mediated by endogenous opioids (endorphins) is based on an experiment that showed the opioid antagonist naloxone reduced the chills rate of music in some subjects. However, we find some experimental problems with its methods, results and conclusion. Dr. Goldstein's experiment with musical chills and naloxone used 10 subjects, all music chill responders, and found that 3 had significant chill reduction related to naloxone. He did not provide the result showing if the other 7 had any reduction at all, and the assumption would be that they had no reduction in chills.

One of my son’s favorite before-bed books is a Bert and Ernie number called “Bert’s Hall of Great Inventions.” (http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Bert%27s_Hall_of_Great_Inventions) On each page poor Bert exalts in another human invention, only to be answered by Ernie that his animal friends came up with it first. The point of the book is very much true of science and human innovation in general, which is that we have and continue to rip-off nature to inspire some of our best work. It seems that we have done it again. At least this time, animals also may benefit.

Want a real Halloween nightmare? Imagine filling your child's  too-small bucket in the first three houses and going home with only a  small slice of your kid's potential rake. But if you allow your little monster (or in my case, blue whale with pink and purple barnacles), to carry a big bag, you should be prepared to spend the hours and hours (and hours) needed to fill it.

Bad news: there are nightmares on both  ends of the bag guesstimation spectrum.

Do you log into web sites from public computers, even though I advised against it four years ago? That post only scratched the surface, really: it just talked about using public computers. These days, most people have their laptops with them, and they connect them to the public wireless networks in the cafés.

Most of those networks are unencrypted. That means that you don’t have to enter a key or a password when you access the network. You just select the network name (or let your computer snag it automatically), go to a web page in your browser, and get redirected to some sort of login and/or usage-agreement screen on the network you’ve connected to.

Sharpening tools is no easy task.  If you've ever tried to do it yourself you know that prehistoric man had to have developed real skill to sharpen stone tools - using pressure flaking, no less.

Pressure flaking is a technique where implements shaped by hard stone hammers strikes and then softer wood or bone strikes are carefully trimmed by directly pressing the point of a tool made of bone on the edges of the tool.   A new study says pressure flaking was being used at Blombos Cave in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age by anatomically modern humans and involved the heating of silcrete (quartz grains cemented by silica) used to make tools. 

Unless you live in a remote mountain cabin, you might never be without an Internet connection in the world of the future.   Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile networks, by wearing sensors being researched at Queen's University Belfast. 

According to researchers, the sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations.    The engineers from Queen's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), are working on a new project based on the new science of "body-centric" communications. 

As a result of a global health campaign, polioviruses have almost been eradicated in many areas of the world but enterovirus 71 is closely related to poliovirus and was first detected in California in the 1960s. Since then the virus has spread across Asia, affecting mostly children and some adults. Serious cases of the disease can include neurological disorders such as meningitis, paralysis and encephalitis.

Can there be a genetic difference between progressives and conservatives?   Certainly we have had the discussion many times about studies, both sociological and biological, seeking to make the case that politics might be nature as well as nurture.

A new paper suggests that instead of some primates evolving in Africa and spreading out from there, they colonized it, likely from Asia.   The search for data regarding the origins of man's earliest anthropoid ancestors is obviously one of the most hotly pursued subjects in paleontology.

Men and women are different, we know that now (efforts to the contrary in the 1970s aside) but when it comes to neuroscience, differences may be speculation, no matter how many studies you read saying this imaging study or that is correlated to a hypothesis.