We just got the news that, as expected, Dr. Francis Collins has been nominated to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health.
And succeeding Tony Tether?
Dr. Regina Dugan will be the next director of DARPA. With a doctorate from Caltech, Dugan served as a DARPA program manager from 1996 to 2000. Her background is in explosives detection.
Jim
Nicholas Kristof on our reptilian brains
Money quote:
If you come across a garter snake, nearly all of your brain will light up with activity as you process the “threat.” Yet if somebody tells you that carbon emissions will eventually destroy Earth as we know it, only the small part of the brain that focuses on the future — a portion of the prefrontal cortex — will glimmer.
Meeting Obama
I had the honor of representing our university at the Healthcare Townhall meeting that President Obama held yesterday at the nearby campus of Northern Virginia Community College. The video is here.
Jim
Junuary–when June meets Cape Cod weather
That’s what they call June in Woods Hole because it’s usually pretty rainy and chilly. The ideal weather really starts in July but carries through late October.
Tomorrow I’m off to Woods Hole for a short trip. This summer I’m proud to report that the Krasnow Institute, young as it is, has its third generation in residence. One of our neuroscience Ph.D. Students is taking the MBL’s Neural Systems and Behavior Course.
I’m going to be meeting tomorrow with MBL’s Chief Academic and Science Officer, Josh Hamilton, about our century-plus year old journal, The Biological Bulletin, which just reported it’s fourth straight year of increased impact factor.
Maira Kalman’s take on Mr. Jefferson–NY Times on-line
As a Virginian who has never visited Monticello, this makes me want to go there soon.
It’s also a demonstration of how powerful and beautiful a blog can be.
Jim
UCLA’s Daniel J. Siegel at Google on Mind
The details of the Placebo Effect
Here’s a wonderful new blog that I’ve found with a great article on the gradations of the placebo effect.
Money quote:
We not only know placebos “work,” we know there is a hierarchy of effectiveness:
- Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
- Placebo injections work better than placebo pills
- Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
- Capsules work better than tablets
- Big pills work better than small
- The more doses a day, the better
- The more expensive, the better
- The color of the pill makes a difference
- Telling the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”
Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase-Like Superfamily | SciVee
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
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).
