From the Science-version of YouTube….Here’s Eric D. Scheef talking about my favorite family of enzymes and a new way of looking at their molecular evolution….
Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase Like Superfamily | SciVee
Author: jlolds
Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University
Fermi’s paradox revisited
Fermi’s paradox simply put is this:
If life is really ubiquitous throughout the Universe, how come we haven’t seen any evidence of our fellow biota yet?
Several of my colleagues are now finding increasing evidence that indeed, life is a natural emergent of the periodic table of the elements and therefore should be very common throughout this universe (assuming a potential multiverse scenario where our Universe is perhaps finely tuned).
If my colleagues are correct though, then this implies first, that life would be ubiquitous (given the sheer size of the Universe) but also, quite interestingly, showing no evidence at all of the technological “break out” that our own species has managed to achieve over the last several hundred years.
There are no SETI-radio signals as of yet (and it’s been several decades of searching)
Is life a natural emergent, but higher cognition much rarer?
If we look on the Earth itself, I find it intriguing that there are many big-brained species (Whales and Elephants come to mind) but only Homo sapiens have developed the technology to project evidence of themselves beyond the immediate planet (to say nothing of our solar system).
A novel argument for increasing the NIH budget
Can be found on ScienceInsider.
Money quote:
In this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton and colleagues compared death rates from 1950 to 2004 for four big killers—heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes—with the rising budgets of their corresponding NIH institutes. For all but diabetes deaths, which have risen recently because of rising rates of obesity, they found an inverse correlation between budgets and age-adjusted death rates 10 years later. And when they plotted the total NIH budget versus overall mortality rates (see graph), they found an “excellent” regression fit.
Brain reward circuitry makes you eat junk food
David Kessler, fellow Amherst College alum, and former FDA Commissioner has just completed a book on overeating. Here’s the New York Times’ take.
Money quote:
In “The End of Overeating,” Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.
When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.
Our provost is blogging!
Here’s a link to the blog of Mason’s provost, Peter N. Stearns. Dr. Stearns is not only the provost and chief academic officer of George Mason–he’s also my boss!
Modeling becomes central to policy
Modeling social complexity from today’s New York Times…
Money quote:
“The fundamental nature of modeling and simulation is to represent something that’s in the world out there in a way that you can manipulate and think about without risk and at low cost,” said Bill Waite, chairman of the AEgis Technologies Group, a Huntsville, Ala.,company that creates simulations for various military and civilian applications.
“It almost doesn’t matter what kind of world you care about; you can use simulations,” Mr. Waite explained. “If you’re a defense agency, you want to create a simulation that will allow a missile that gets built to fly up to an enemy something-or-other and detonate. The same tools and same set of skills are used in the pharmaceutical industry to figure out how the little beads in a Bufferin are going to get from your stomach to your brain.”
NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program takes a hit
Apparently House lawmakers feel that the MRI money in the stimulus package was more than enough.
Jonathan Moreno on NeuroDOD
From the ScienceProgress blog:
[the] National Research Council has released a report,Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, that suggests tailoring individual soldiers’ training to recent discoveries about the brain from modern neuroscience can provide valuable advances in military instruction. Along with traditional areas of concern to the military like leadership and decision making under stress, the report suggests that the services should also take cognitive fitness, brain-machine interfaces, and biomarkers (biological indicators of brain states) into consideration during basic training.
Flexner II Continued: AAMC/HHMI report on medical school training
Money quote:
The report, “Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians,” is based on recommendations from a 22-member committee of researchers, physicians, and science educators.
The committee members hope that by focusing on a dynamic set of competencies, rather than specific courses, they will open the door to more innovation in both premedical and medical curricula, and make it easier for premeds to take a variety of nonscience, liberal-arts courses.
Are science bloggers part of the media–or are they scientists?
Looks like there were some fireworks at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on twittered/blogged transmission of new science.
My own sense is that this needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Some science bloggers are scientists in their own right (they conduct scholarly research and publish their results in journals–among other places). Some science bloggers are in fact journalists.
When Andrew Sullivan blogs about science, he’s clearly a journalist paid by The Atlantic. When Tyler Cowen blogs about economics, he’s an academic and holds the position of professor (at George Mason).
That said, as a journal editor, I would have real problems publishing something that had had been already put up on the web in a blog. And as a scientist, I would have real problems with a journalist blogging my results in substance (rather than in summary) before I published them myself.
