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Oh No You Didn't - Teen Girls Emotion Circuits Spark More Than Boys

Oh No You Didn't - Teen Girls Emotion Circuits Spark More Than Boys

Jul 15 2009 | comment(s)

As teenagers' drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations, things change in their brains - literally.    Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older - but not in boys.

So that urban legend about girls maturing faster than boys is true, if by faster maturity we mean becoming overly emotional drama queens.  

A new study says emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female brain during a developmental stage in which girls are at increased risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders.
Prenatal Brain - Fetus Has Short Term Memory At 30 Weeks, Says Study

Prenatal Brain - Fetus Has Short Term Memory At 30 Weeks, Says Study

Jul 15 2009 | comment(s)

It is known that memory begins during the prenatal period but little has been discovered about the exact timing or for how long memory lasts. A new study done in Holland has found fetal short-term memory in babies at 30 weeks in the womb. The study provides insights into fetal development and may help address and prevent abnormalities, say researchers at Maastricht University Medical Centre and the University Medical Centre St. Radboud who published their results in Child Development.
How Enceladus Got Its Stripes

How Enceladus Got Its Stripes

Jul 15 2009 | comment(s)

A new study says both the tiger stripes and a subsurface ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus are the result of the moon's unusual chemical composition and not a hot core, as previously believed.

shedding light on the evolution of planets and guiding future space exploration.

Dr Dave Stegman, a Centenary Research Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, led the study and says that part of the intrigue with Enceladus is that it was once presumed to be a lifeless, frozen ice ball until a water vapour plume was seen erupting from its surface in 2006. 
Visual Thinking By Scientists

Visual Thinking By Scientists

Jul 15 2009 | comment(s)

A page of interesting thoughts and great quotes on visual thinking in science:


[Feynman]: The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schroedinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality - or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.

The Daytime Astronomer on Classy NASA Managers

The Daytime Astronomer on Classy NASA Managers

Jul 15 2009 | comment(s)

Just a short anecdote today, as I'm suffering from mind erasure.  There's a rich history of ragging on management, ranging from Dilbert to The Daily WTF.  As a card-carrying contrarian, I therefore bring you a tale of good leadership and upbeat endings within NASA.

The story starts out as inevitable tragedy.  A NASA worker wins a federal award, but cannot attend the ceremony because she'll be at a different NASA center that week.  She asks her higher up to accept the award on her behalf.  And, of course, the higher up can now step in and take all the credit, eh?
Elasmosaurs: Predators Of Ancient Seas

Elasmosaurs: Predators Of Ancient Seas

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)


Mystery Of Landlocked Sockeye In The Fossil Record

Mystery Of Landlocked Sockeye In The Fossil Record

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Kalu ganga

112 Mercer Street: housing for a giant

112 Mercer Street: housing for a giant

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Many of you may know who lived at 112 Mercer Street, from 1936 until his death in 1955. The man and I were our for a lovely walk and some delicious frozen yogurt in Princeton Sunday afternoon (just a short drive from here) and I snapped the following two photos for your viewing pleasure. (Camera = my new Palm Pre. Not bad, eh? I like my pic better than the one on the Mercer Hill site.) I didn't see Einstein in person, of course, but you can see him smile about 27 seconds in to this clip.
Missing Links: Barriers to Academic Blogging

Missing Links: Barriers to Academic Blogging

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

In the past several months I have been intellectually consumed with the
idea of academic blogging and its potential to one day change the face
of academic communication.  I say "one day" because although there are
increasing numbers of academic bloggers, and academic blogging sites
like scientific blogging, only a small number of academics actually
blog. 
Intelligent Software Design Vs Evolution

Intelligent Software Design Vs Evolution

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Do our genomes look designed? Let's address this point, hoisted from the comments of this post:

Actually, shared genetics between chimps and humans is agnostic with respect to evolution or "intelligent design". In software engineering, you often find shared code (or even junk code) in the source of various projects as it develops from "Product 1.0" to "Product 2.0" to "Product 3.0". I.e., it's a strawman argument to assume the "intelligent designer" started from scratch for chimps and humans. That doesn't sound intelligent at all.

Like a software designer, the "designer" would have hacked up whatever existing code base he had to
Midday Science Quote

Midday Science Quote

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, "Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next". When we say, "I can't imagine," they may think we have a weak imagination. They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know; that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature.
Chris Mooney Versus P.Z. Myers And The State Of

Chris Mooney Versus P.Z. Myers And The State Of "Unscientific America"

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, who blog at Discover, have a new book out called Unscientific America.   We got a copy here but I asked them to send it to Dr.
Just One Higgs Search Plot...

Just One Higgs Search Plot...

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

...waiting for a piece I will post tomorrow, to stimulate your curiosity -and allow me to travel from Venice to Patras by ship, with no internet connection.

The subject is not only the Higgs mass, but the top quark mass. Which top mass ? The "pole" mass -the real part of the pole in the perturbative top-quark propagator. Have I lost you ? Ok, do not worry -definitions are for theorists. Let us just say that the top quark, being a complicated coloured object which thus cannot live free of the influence of strong interactions,
is measurable at a hadron collider like the Tevatron only within uncertainties of the order of a constant called "Lambda QCD", which is of the order of 200 MeV.
Australia's Top Models Certainly Know How To Compute

Australia's Top Models Certainly Know How To Compute

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Australia's top models are going to be on the main stage in Cairns this week but don't get too excited.   They're only here to show new ways to understand climate change, improve air safety and enhance agricultural sustainability - the small stuff unless you care about life as we know it.  Fortunately, these numerical models understand those things much better than actual supermodels.

The gathering is the IMACS/MODSIM Congress and will attract more than 650 experts in modelling and simulation from Australia and overseas to the Cairns Convention Centre from July 13-17, 2009.
Global Warming - Why Our Best Guess Is Probably Wrong

Global Warming - Why Our Best Guess Is Probably Wrong

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Climate science is tricky business because the atmosphere and Mother Earth are an eloborate, complex system no one understands.   So how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions is open to speculation but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming are likely incorrect.  Which means they could be high ... but they could also be really low.

The study in Nature Geoscience says that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past.
Wood Burning Stoves Making A Comeback?

Wood Burning Stoves Making A Comeback?

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

It will enrage our fellow Californians, who regard the wholesomeness and warmth of the in-home hearth as akin to fratricide, but when it comes down to it, people in the Third World, like the US is becoming economically, are going to respond to the stress of rising natural gas prices in ways that activists in cozy office buildings do not like.

How they heat their homes will be at the top of the list for everyone in the upper part of North America this winter - which means out-of-fashion alternative energy options, the kind our ancestors used; wood burning stoves. 
Robots Invade The US Senate

Robots Invade The US Senate

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Cars that drive themselves?   Being cut up by some remote hand that never touches you?  It's not a Stephen King novel, it's the latest in robotics and it's coming to a Senate floor near you.

Last week the National Science Foundation (NSF) presented took over the Hart Senate Office Building and had a luncheon briefing for Senate members and staff on cyber-physical systems (CPS).
Copernicium - Heaviest Element 112 Gets A Name

Copernicium - Heaviest Element 112 Gets A Name

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) discovered that the Earth orbits the Sun, thus paving the way for our modern view of the world.  It took a few hundred years for religion to apologize for the reception his discovery got but luckily the  the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) only took a dozen years after the discovery of element 112 to honor him.

Element 112 was discovered at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt.
Arago Hominids Last Supper Narrows Down How Long They Lived In The Area

Arago Hominids Last Supper Narrows Down How Long They Lived In The Area

Jul 14 2009 | comment(s)

Ancient nomadic hominids moved from place to place but often how has been subject to speculation.   Now researchers think they have one answer, using the dental fossils of animals eaten by Homo heidelbergensis.

In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists headed by researchers from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona has analyzed the dental wear of herbivorous animals, the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed. 

This told them some details on the vegetation in the environment and the way of life of Homo heidelbergensis.