Scientists take a great deal of pride in the Scientific Method, and not just because it’s a method named after them. The Method is the basis for their authority. It is the universally accepted tool for finding all facts about the universe, the unbiased straight-and-narrow path that we wish all of the world’s irrational people would find more often.

Oh, you think that’s condescending? How do you know? What are your controls?

The Society for Neuroscience recently hosted a webinar for all of its members on the topic of the budget sequestration event that will happen next year without some kind of positive action by Congress. The presentation was a call to action backed by a sense of urgency to protect American scientific research funding from a brutal, policy-induced beat-down.

Recent comments on a certain article (hey, what does that green button do?) about the future of neural interface technologies have brought up some valid ethical arguments.  Because I didn't want to go Jurassic Park and revel in the possibilities while ignoring the consequences, I thought it a good idea to break down the issues.

(I recently discovered this series of entries about fixing science journalism, begun in February.  Because I just joined up, I wasn't able to add my two cents.  So I thought I'd add it now, since, hey, who couldn't use two cents?  My apologies if I repeat someone else's sentiment.)

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. 

At Nature's Innocentive site, (a directory for X-prizes), there is an entry looking for someone who can develop a standard method of placing insects into a latent state and then reanimating them.  If you figure it out, you can win 20,000 bucks. 

What's interesting about the offer isn't that someone is willing to pay big money in order to Han Solo a housefly.  (And by the way, you can put a house fly in a freezer for a minute, take it out, tie a string around it and watch it zoom around when it wakes up, but you can't get 20,000 bucks for suggesting that.)  Anaesthesia doesn't count, either.