Medicine
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On memory (part 2).
Read part 1 here. Midway through spring, we found ourselves in Chicago for a wedding. K was asked to be best man, and since N was (is) still breastfeeding, she and I had to tag along. I’m not a big fan of weddings, but I did sneak in a lovely conversation with the groom’s younger…
analyzing a brain to see stored memories, Anthony Zador, differences between scientific findings and press releases, memory, mind reading, neurons, neuroscience, Quiojie Xiong, recovering data from broken brain, recovering data from broken computer, recovering data from dead brain, recovering memories, recovering memories from dead brain, Selective corticostriatal plasticity during acquisition of an auditory discrimination task, synaptic strength, wedding conversations -
On minotaurs (and whether or not mothers are the root of all maladies).
While reading Eula Biss’s On Immunity, I was often reminded of Rebecca Kukla’s Mass Hysteria. Both works analyze the permeability of bodies, especially mothers and children, while drawing from literature, philosophy, and medicine. Their major divergence is in tone; Kukla’s work can veer academic (which I enjoy, being a pedantic fuddyduddy myself); Biss’s writing is…
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On autism and vaccines.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first, shall we? Vaccines don’t cause autism. If you’ve got a kid with a standard operating immune system, you oughta get that sucker vaccinated. If you yourself have a standard operating immune system, and you’re considering living in a place where certain diseases that you aren’t immune…
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On the PubPeer lawsuit, scientific fraud, and anonymity.
There are some problems with academic bioscience. That much seems to be well agreed on. There are a lot of contributing factors — the pyramid-scheme-like training & employment setup, the recent propagation of soft money positions (universities hiring without setting aside money for salaries, expecting salary money to come out of research grants instead), a…
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On penis size, Sports Illustrated, and child pornography.
Another scientific study was published recently on penis size. Veale et al. aggregated data from many previous studies to attempt to provide a best current estimate for the full distribution of sizes amongst men worldwide. And, sure, you might ask yourself “why?” The authors work in urology, though. If someone feels that his penis is…
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On Ross Gay’s “The Burden” and forcing mice to swim.
Let’s say you were trying to develop a new antidepressant. Then you’d need a screen to know if your compound or cocktail of compounds was working. Eventually, you’d be doing that screen in humans – give some depressed people your medicine, see if they feel better, see if they feel better than they would’ve felt…
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On Y chromosomes, surnames, and reproduction.
For me, the most interesting section of Christine Kenneally’s “The Invisible History of the Human Race” was the section on Y chromosomes. Because, sure, if I’d spent a moment thinking about it I would have realized that sons of sons of sons carry the same Y chromosomes as their forebears… but it isn’t something I’d…
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On toxoplasma.
I was talking to K and she pointed out that I missed the point of this whole “internet” thing. Apparently the goal of writing for the internet is not to sound like a pedantic stuff-bucket? This is something I hadn’t yet realized – I mostly use the internet to watch videos of Louis Scott Vargas…
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On organ trafficking.
The New York Times has run several features recently discussing organ trafficking from living donors. As in, paying somebody to go under the knife and have an organ cut out in order to give it to you. Typically kidneys, since humans can get by with one but are born with two. And, yes, currently illegal in this…
Frank Brown Cloud 