Harvard’s Allan Hobson’s new paper on dreams is making the news here.
Money quote:
The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
Author: jlolds
Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University
Recognition of the internationalization of science
Good news from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton: here.
Jim
The Apollo 8 metaphor for planet earth–rebutted
Hat tip Marginal Revolution. Here’s a really interesting take on just how habitable our blue planet really is.
Very interesting reading for our origin of life scientists at the Institute.
Jim
Statins used for H1N1
As usual, Revere has an excellent post here. Bottom line: statins may reduce the intensity of a flu-induced cytokine storm.
An explanation for all those bad drivers on the beltway
Suggestions of a genetic linkage to awful driving. Hmmm. I wonder if there are interactions with environmental factors?
Abstract is here.
Money quote from the UC Irvine press release:
People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it – and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.
Public to private…
The Chronicle’s Paul Fain has a brilliant analysis of what’s happening to the large public universities here (hat tip my wife).
Best part of the article for me was about Ann Arbor in the early 1980’s when President Harold Shapiro (later Princeton’s President) made some very tough but intelligent decisions about how to restructure Michigan’s budget to be less dependent on state funding. I was there.
Jim
Still using chicken eggs….
This is pretty funny and quite germane to our current H1N1 pandemic…
Your brain after staying-up all night
From Science, Science-Signalling–your brain without sleep. Abstract is here. Shorter version: looks like PKA dependent LTP is diminished in mice forced to pull all-nighters.
Putting together a hippocampal function course
The current project is preparing a course for both undergraduates and doctoral students in neuroscience for next semester on the function of the hippocampus. For many in the field, this is an already answered question–the hippocampus is the biological substrate for human episodic memory. Others see it still as the neuronal seat of the so-called cognitive map. I’m not so sure. For all the experimental data collected on this beautiful brain structure over the years, the problem of biological function remains tantalizingly unclear.
Phenomena such as place cells, adult neurogenesis, theta phase precision, sequence learning and London Taxi Driver hypersized-hippocampi all are clues, but the detective story remains just that….a story.
