It seems that evolution has been in the news a lot lately (specifically, these articles in the New York Times). That’s all well and good, but I was truly shocked when I found this Wired blog post discussing how the Republican party chose a vice presidential candidate that supports the ‘debate’ between creationism and evolution.

Seriously?  Haven’t you guys screwed up enough over the last 8 years?  I’m fine with people holding their own beliefs, but I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to posit that there is an actual debate here.  You can compare the validity of evolution and creationism no more than you can compare the soundtracks of Indiana Jones and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (to be clear, the painting).  There is no place for this.

For those of you in the Houston area, there will be a panel on teaching evolution this school year at Rice University.  I encourage anyone passionate about this to check it out.  I’ll post more information (such as who will be present, when, where) as soon as it is publicly available.

If you’re interested in the topic, check out the first Carnival of Evolution.  It’s written by the author of Biochemical Soul, a nice blog on biology and related disciplines/topics.

I apologize for the long stretch without updates, but I should be back to normal posting now.  I’ll try to work out a schedule to keep (e.g., Friday linkposts, Tuesday journal reviews, etc), and I’ll post it when I’ve come up with something I’m confident I can keep up with.  But, for today, I’ll just post a few interesting articles, podcasts, and blogs I’ve come across the past several weeks.

A New State of Mind – a very interesting and informative article on neuroeconomics research currently underway at Baylor College of Medicine‘s Human Neuroimaging Lab in Houston, TX.  It’s also a good profile of Read Montague, the director of the HNL.  He’s done some fascinating work on the role of reward in cognition.  For more, check out his book, Your Brain is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions.

On the technology side of things, Texas senator John Culberson is doing some interesting things with social media (such as Twitter and Qik) and government.  Check out this Houston Chronicle article about his new ideas – is this really the direction politics should be headed?  Barack Obama is one of the (if not the) most followed users on Twitter.  I  like the idea of governmental transparency, but I’m not sure if a 140-character message is the right way to  do it.  Anyway, I admire his innovation (if not his politics).

Teach the Controversy – these are some fantastic science t-shirts.  Can’t remember where I first saw them, though I’m sure either Digg or Reddit is to blame.

NeuroSpeculation – I finally found another undergraduate neuroscience blogger.  It looks like this is more of a research blog,  but still some very interesting and throrough discussions.  Hopefully we’ll be able to find some others and maybe create some kind of undergraduate science blogging community.

This Week In Science – a very entertaining and informative general science news podcast.  I find it especially helpful for keeping up-to-date with science policy news, an aspect of science I’m becoming more and more interested in.  If you know of any other good sources of science policy news, or any other comment/suggestsions/ideas, shoot me an email at neurotechnica shifttwo gmail dot com or drop a comment below.

Driving to the lab this morning, I was floored to hear my email (concerning this post) read on Thursday’s episode 788 of Buzz Out Loud, CNET’s podcast of indeterminate length ™.  If you don’t already listen to this podcast, I highly recommend it.  It’s a great source of daily tech news and commentary, perfect for long commutes.

Wow – this has to be seen to be believed.  I was checking Digg tonight and came across this story, which links to a Gizmodo post containing an unbelievable video of a space shuttle launch.  Really, you’ve got to see it.

Neurophilosophy (and Engadget) have some nice coverage of a cool new development – a robot with a purely-biological brain.  The team (the Cybernetics Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading) took neural tissue from developing rat neocortex and placed it in a culture filled with tiny electrodes that could both receive and send signals from the neural tissue.  The coolest part about this, though, is that there is nothing in between the electrodes and the robot (except a bluetooth wireless transmitter/receiver).  The nerve cells are directly controlling the robot’s movements, and the sensors on the robot are giving direct feedback to the tissue.  This is awesome.  And scary.  But mostly, it’s very interesting.  Check out the video on Neurophilosophy for some footage of the robot in action, it’s really quite cool.

However, we have to be careful in our interpretation of what’s happening here.  The scientists/engineers interviewed in the video are throwing around the terms “learning” and “memory”, but there’s a chance that the robotic movements we’re seeing are just the noise in the system.  This is a simple brain slice grown in culture, it doesn’t necessarily include any of the more complex bits of the brain responsible for dopamine release in response to reward or in creating long-term memories by the same mechanism that an intact mammalian brain does.  However, if the researchers can show that even this ‘brain’ picks up statistical regularities in its input/output firings and reconfigures itself in significant, reproducable ways, they’re definitely on to something big.

To be clear, I think this work is awesome, and genuinely look forward to seeing what else comes out of this research.  It would be great if this group (or Jeff Hawkins’ Redwood Neuroscience Institute) created a similar system, but with very different inputs.  For example, as mentioned in Hawkins’ book On Intelligence (by far my favorite book on neuroscience), the inputs to the microelectrode array could be weather patterns or stock market data – the neural tissue won’t know the difference.  And if the tissue can pull out the statistical regularities from the few sensors on this robot, I’m sure it could do the same w/ weather or economic patterns.

Well I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.  Soon, they’ll be using their super-predictive meteorological and economic powers to creatively destroy the human race.  Bad disaster movie on the way?  One can only hope.

Science, to me, is absolutely fascinating.  I don’t always understand everything I read, nor is it always immediately clear what a given development may mean in the big picture, but the development and attainment of new knowledge is a wonderful and noble achievement that has never failed to grab my attention.  But not everyone is quite so excited by science. That’s why we have the wonderful people at Radiolab, WNYC‘s radio program which (I know this is stereotyped) makes science fun.  The hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad have an incredible talent for bringing science to life in ways I never thought possible.  Through radio interviews, fantastic sound engineering, beautiful metaphors and vivid, detailed imagery, the two hosts carefully guide the listener away from the murky jargon of typical science reporting and into a new world, one dominated by the narrative of science.

In his recent commencement speech at Caltech to the graduating class of 2008, Robert Krulwich encouraged the new graduates to take an active role in communicating science to the masses.  The speech is recorded and distributed as a podcast episode of Radiolab, titled “Tell Me A Story” – I highly recommend checking it out.  I think it’s really great and definitely worth the listen (however, according to a commenter, parts are not necessarily accurate).  This speech, and Radiolab in general, prove that science isn’t only about fancy math and big words.  There’s the serendipity, the hard work, the new ideas – the “how” and “why” of research. That’s what can and will get the public interested.

We need more people like Robert and Jad, scientists and journalists alike, to step up to the plate and take the initiative to make science open to the public in an informative and engaging way.  I think Jonah Lehrer deserves praise for this.  His blog, along with his many articles in Seed and The New Yorker, are very successful in conveying good, solid information in a readable and interesting way.  Brian Greene is also doing some great things in New York City with the World Science Festival, an event I sorely regret being unable to attend this year.

What do you think?  What role should scientists play in publicizing science?  Is this the job of journalists, or should scientists themselves take an active role in this process?  Comment below, or email me at neurotechnica shifttwo gmail dot com.

I had to share this excerpt from a NYTimes article on boredom I read this morning:

While attending lectures on dementia, the doctors, Kenneth Rockwood, David B. Hogan and Christopher J. Patterson, kept track of the number of attendees who nodded off during the talks. They found that in an hourlong lecture attended by about 100 doctors, an average of 16 audience members nodded off. “We chose this method because counting is scientific,” the authors wrote in their seminal 2004 article in The Canadian Medical Association Journal. (emphasis added)

I feel like I should try to slip that sentence into every scientific paper I write from now on.

The article itself is fairly interesting, though it doesn’t discuss much in the way of the actual science of boredom – it just recounts some older findings from the psychology literature that creative thought seems to come when you’re bored, and it cites Dr. Mintum at Washington University in St. Louis concerning the neuroimaging of boredom.  The article claims that the brain consumes 5% less energy during a resting state than during routine tasks, which actually surprises me – that seems like a huge number.  Though the article doesn’t state which imaging methodology was used here (I’d guess it would have to be PET), 5% would be an enormous signal change for fMRI – the numbers I typically see reported are in tenths or hundedths of a percentage point.  I couldn’t find the original article, but I’ll add an update if I come across it.

When checking my ScienceBlogs Brain & Behavior feed this eveninig I came across an interesting post on Neurophilosophy about a new form of synesthesia.

For the uninitiated, Synesthesia is a harmless perceptual condition which causes automatic, uncontrollable associations between different types of perception.  For example, in grapheme-color synesthesia, a color is automatically and uncontrollably associated with a number or letter.

The general story here is that the authors are reporting on a new type of synesthesia they call “hearing-motion” synesthesia in which visual stimuli such as short flashes or moving dot patterns automatically generate an auditory percept (such as beeping or tapping).  If you’re interested in how the authors (Melissa Saenz and Cristof Koch of CalTech) tested this, I recommend checking out the Neurophilosophy post linked to above, or the (very short) research article in Current Biology.

However, what really intrigues me about this finding is the post-experiment reports that some of my subjects have given.  My behavioral experiments generally consist of showing brief (~50-100ms) flashes and asking subjects to compare their durations.  I’d say that 10-25% of people I test mention something about using “beeps” or sounds to help them make these judgments.  Were these subjects hearing-motion synesthetes?

Not necessarily.  There’s a different report from several years ago which argues that the auditory system (the system responsible for much of sound perception) encodes temporal information, while the visual system is more concerned with spatial information.  The authors used an interference paradigm to test whether irrelevant auditory or visual information interfered with performance on a rhythm discrimination task.  Not surprisingly, they found that extra auditory information impaired performance, but not extra visual information.

So if we use an auditory code to represent temporal information, why don’t we all hear beeps in response to flashes?  We know very little about the synesthetes in Saenz & Koch’s experiment.  Since the report mentions that this condition has existed for the entire life of each subject, it seems as though musical training can be ruled out as a possible explanation (though out of curiosity I’d still be interested to know each subject’s musical background).

Though I don’t have (m)any readers yet, I’d like to hear if you by chance have hearing-motion synesthesia, or any other thoughts, ideas, or criticisms.  Email me (neurotechnica <atsymbol> gmail dot com) or leave a comment here.

Update!

Upon looking around some today, I found a few other blogs discussing this finding:

Frontal Blogotomy (disclaimer: I occaisionally contribute to this blog)

The Quantum Pontiff (check out the comments – someone found out they have hearing-motion synesthesia)

Also, a big thanks to NeuroPhilosophy for including NeuroTechnica in a recent roundup of new neuroscience blogs!

2nd Update: Some text of this post was changed after publication.  I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Check out this demo of the new Wii Motion Plus add-on, which Nintendo promises will add true one-to-one motion control to the Wii remote.  Upon first hearing about this at E3 this year, I was very skeptical – especially since the demos, and much of Nintendo’s press conference in general, were pretty lousy.  But this demo by AiLive does a great job at showing off what can be done with this new technology.  There’s even a not-quite-subtle lightsaber-like demo about halfway through the video.  Once can only hope that the Wii Motion Plus will be required for the upcoming Wii Lightsaber Duel game, set to be released later this year.

Also, this kind of technology could be very useful for physical rehabilitation – there’s no reason the Wii remote has to be held in your hand, it could be attached to a patient’s leg, foot, arm, etc.  This may even be a powerful tool for training amputees to effectively use their new prostheses (at least while we’re waiting for true brain-computer interfaces).