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carolinewren

National Geographic Asks 'Is Religion Harmful Superstition?' - 0 views

newsbusters.org/...-religion-harmful-superstition

religion superstition bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In a recent piece for National Geographic, Book Talk curator Simon Worrall entitled his headline, “In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'?” For the answer, he gave platform to Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.
  • Coyne, an atheist and University of Chicago professor of Ecology and Evolution, answered, among other questions, why “are religion and science incompatible.”
  • “[T]here are a number of things about evolution and science that undermine religion,” Coyne responded, including “the fact that the Genesis story is wrong.” “There’s no evidence that there’s any qualitatively different feature about humans from other species, except maybe for language” – language that “could have evolved via culture.”
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  • “We’re not special products of God’s creation,” he concluded
  • As far as the “dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice,” Coyne decided, “Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make.”
  • “We are creatures of physics, made of molecules,” he persisted. “Therefore, our thoughts and behaviors are also the results of molecular motions.”
  • “[T]hey both compete to find truths about the universe,”
  • “Religion doesn’t have a methodology to weed out what’s false.” (And maybe that’s why it’s called faith.) “[I]t’s a way of fooling yourself,” he said, through “methods” of “authority, revelation, dogma, and indoctrination.”
  • religion is, as Coyne claims, “the most widespread and harmful form of superstition.”
  • “Since I see all religious belief as unfounded and irrational,” Coyne responded, “I consider religion to be superstition.”
  • “People get killed because they don’t share your beliefs.”
  • “The less a religion has to do with a tangible God, the less it hands out moral dictates and the better it is,” he pushed
  • (On a more legitimate note, Coyne then addressed the devastating story of Ashley King, who died after her parents decided to treat her bone cancer with prayer instead of medical treatment.)
  • “It doesn’t have anything to do with God,” he insisted. “It has to do with a commonality of feeling prompted by nature and the arts.
  • National Geographic has produced God-related stories before, including ones that boast “intolerant attitudes” in the Bible.
carolinewren

Running on religion could turn off young voters | More Opinions | The Sun Herald - 0 views

www.sunherald.com/...arker-running-on-religion.html

religion voters opinions

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Duggars have been further differentiated from Mainstream America 2015 by being frequently associated with, and embraced by, the Quiverfull movement.
  • The tenets of this Christian patriarchy sect are fairly obvious: Men rule; women serve. Although the family says they are not affiliated with the movement, they mirror many of its principles.
  • Into this perverse auto-da-fe have waltzed two Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, presumptively the two most devout Christians among the -- hey! -- 19 likely Republican presidential candidates. Numerologists? Both men have been political favorites of the Duggar family, though Santorum has now begun distancing himself.
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  • Nationally, neither has a ghost of a chance of becoming president for the simple reason that Americans in increasing numbers find the convergence of religion and politics distasteful if not loathsome
  • especially true for political moderates and millennials, according to a just-released Pew Research Center study.
  • Young people, who missed the Golden Age when most people didn't talk about their religious beliefs or their politics -- and never in combination -- perceive that to be religious is to be politically conservative
  • They're saying "no thanks" to that and, by extrapolation, to anyone with an (R) after his or her name.
  • Pew demographic projections forecast that Muslims eventually will surpass Jews as a religious minority owing to immigration and birth rates
  • one religious group is flourishing -- Muslims.
  • Republicans wishing to become president might steer clear of religious grandstanding
carolinewren

Supreme Court boosts workers who claim religious bias - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...27391343

religion ethics supreme court

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court ruled Monday that companies cannot discriminate against job applicants or employees for religious reasons, even if an accommodation is not requested.
  • a victory for workers who want to exercise their religion on the job, from their wardrobe to transportation to time off
  • it could have major implications in the future for other job applicants and employees who seek time off for religious observances, as well as those who adhere to strict dress codes.
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  • Muslim women who cover their heads encounter some of the biggest problems. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which sued Abercrombie on Elauf's behalf — saw a 250% increase in religion-based discrimination charges involving Muslims. In 2012, more than 20% of its 3,800 religious discrimination claims were filed by Muslims
  • The ruling continued the high court's practice of providing legal protection for religious beliefs and customs. In recent years, it has allowed employers with religious objections to avoid covering some forms of birth control, upheld the practice of opening local government meetings with a prayer and allowed a Muslim inmate to keep his beard in prison.
  • In his dissent, however, Thomas defended the company, claiming that its "neutral look policy" did not constitute intentional discrimination.
  • The court's decision — hailed by virtually all religious groups, from Baptists to Jews to Sikhs — could have implications for religious minorities' job opportunities as well as companies' hiring practices.
  • rule for disparate-treatment claims based on a failure to accommodate a religious practice is straightforward," Scalia wrote. "An employer may not make an applicant's religious practice, confirmed or otherwise, a factor in employment decisions."
  • American Muslim community is facing increased levels of Islamophobia
  • Businesses, on the other hand, claim that requiring them to cater to all religious minorities' observances is an undue hardship.
  • "Shifting this burden to employers sets an unclear and confusing standard, making business owners extremely vulnerable to inevitable discrimination lawsuits,"
  • "Whether employers ask an applicant about religious needs or not, there is a good chance they will be sued."
  • 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
  • Must the job applicant request a religious accommodation, or should the employer recognize the need for it? During her job interview, Elauf never brought up her religion, and her interviewer never asked.
  • The federal government maintained that Abercrombie discriminated "when it intentionally refused to hire Samantha Elauf because of her hijab, after inferring correctly that Elauf wore the hijab for religious reasons."
carolinewren

A 'paradigm shift' in cancer research and treatment - 1 views

www.stuff.co.nz/...-cancer-research-and-treatment

paradigm shift cancer research

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • US National Cancer Institute has announced the launch of a nationwide research study that will sort patients into treatment groups based on genetic mutations in their tumours , rather than by cancer type.
  • Researchers believe that treatment could be more effective if directed this way.
  • "precision medicine" efforts and a larger shift in the field toward designing cancer trials that are faster and more efficient and that better match drugs with patients most likely to benefit from them. It could receive additional money from the precision medicine initiative the Obama administration is hoping Congress will fund.
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  • "We are truly in a paradigm change,
  • Now research is asking "when is histology [the microscopic structure of cancers] important, and when isn't it?" he said
  • the effort is "the largest and most rigorous precision oncology trial that's ever been attempted"
  • It no longer makes sense to categorise and treat cancer based on the site in the body where it originates when we know it is a disease of DNA mutations that modern technology allows us to understand, he said.
carolinewren

Media Bias - 0 views

www.studentnewsdaily.com/types-of-media-bias

bias media

shared by carolinewren on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • Since citizens cannot cast informed votes or make knowledgeable decisions on matters of public policy if the information on which they depend is distorted, it is vital to American democracy that television news and other media be fair and unbiased.
  • the majority of Americans believe that the mass media slant reports in favor of the liberal position on current issues.
  • A reporter’s job is to present a balanced story.
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  • bias by omission can occur either within a story, or over the long term as a particular news outlet reports one set of events, but not another
  • Experts in news stories are like expert witnesses in trials.
  • Journalists often go looking for quotes to fit their favorite argument into a news story
  •   If charges of impropriety are leveled at two politicians of approximately equal power, one liberal and one conservative, compare the amount of coverage given to each.
  • Story placement is a measure of how important the editor considers the story. 
  • Bias by placement is where on a website (or newspaper) or in an article a story or event is printed; a pattern of placing news stories so as to downplay information supportive of either conservative views or liberal views
  • tagging of conservative politicians and groups with extreme labels while leaving liberal politicians and groups unlabeled or with more mild labels, or vice versa.
  • bias by labeling occurs when a reporter not only fails to identify a liberal as a liberal or a conservative as a conservative, but describes the person or group with positive labels, such as “an expert” or “independent consumer group.”
  • the reporter imparts an air of authority that the source does not deserve.
  • Bias by spin occurs when the story has only one interpretation of an event or policy, to the exclusion of the other; spin involves tone – it’s a reporter’s subjective comments about objective facts; makes one side’s ideological perspective look better than another.
carolinewren

Sarah Palin dives in poll ratings as Tina Fey impersonates her on Saturday Night Live -... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...er-on-Saturday-Night-Live.html

politics media bias

shared by carolinewren on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • Palin's poll ratings are telling a more devastating story.
  • engage with the process much earlier on – not least with their Sunday morning political talk shows
  • It currently commands 10 million viewers – a creditable figure for a primetime drama, let alone a late-night sketch show.
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  • Other satirical shows, such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, are also enjoying record ratings, as well as influence far beyond their own viewers.
  • Even bigger than Saturday Night Live have been the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Sarah Palin's set-to with Joe Biden on October 2 attracted nearly 70 million viewers – a record for a vice-presidential debate and the highest-rated election debate since 1992
  • It is impossible to imagine a similar level of engagement with political television in this country. Gordon Brown and David Cameron would not only have to debate each other on TV – an unlikely scenario in itself – but pull in an audience bigger than the finals of Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing put together
  • American networks do have some advantages over the BBC and ITV in planning and executing their political coverage
  • four-year timetable, avoiding the unholy scramble when a British general election is called at a month's notice.
  • In a Newsweek poll in September, voters were asked whether Palin was qualified or unqualified to be president. The result was a near dead-heat. In the same poll this month, those saying she was "unqualified" outnumbered those saying she was "qualified" by a massive 16 points
  • "I think we're learning what it means to have opinion journalism in this country on such a grand scale," says Stelter. "It's only in the last six to 12 months that those lines have hardened between Fox and MSNBC. I think the [ratings] numbers for cable have surprised people.
  • I think that shows that people are looking for different stripes of political news."
  • American political TV certainly is polarised. When Governor Palin attacked the media in her speech at the Republican convention last month, the crowd chanted "NBC"
  • Gwen Ifill, a respected anchor on the non-commercial channel PBS, who moderated the vice-presidential debate, saw her impartiality attacked because she is writing a book about African-American politics that mentions Obama in its title
  • America's networks comprehensively outstrip this country in both volume and quality of political coverage.
  • All three major US networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – offer a large amount of serious (and unbiased) political coverage, both in their evening network newscasts and in their morning equivalents of GMTV
  • Impartiality and the public service ethos hardly characterise Tina Fey's performances. Tonight's presidential debate forms part of a series driven largely by commercial networks, not publicly funded channels. Neither Fox News nor MSNBC was set up as a sop to a regulator
carolinewren

Comment: If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different | SBS News - 1 views

www.sbs.com.au/...-mandarin-your-brain-different

brain science language

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language.
  • Untangling the brain’s mechanisms for language has been a pillar of neuroscience since its inception. New research published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences about the different connections going on in the brains of Mandarin and English speakers, demonstrates just how flexible our ability to learn language really is.
  • Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury to either of these crucial areas on the left side of the brain exhibited profound disabilities for producing and understanding language.
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  • six to ten months children have already learned to be sensitive to the basic sounds, known as phonemes, that matter in their native language.
  • language requires real-time mappings between words and their meanings. This requires that the sounds heard in speech – decoded in the auditory cortex – must be integrated with knowledge about what they mean – in the frontal cortex.
  • Modern theories on connectionism – the idea that knowledge is distributed across different parts of the brain and not tucked into dedicated modules like Broca’s area – have compelled researchers to take a closer look.
  • Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language in which the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different things based on the tone with which it is spoken
  • non-tonal language such as English, tone might convey emotional information about the speaker, but indicates nothing about the meaning of the word that is spoken
  • found that these differences between Mandarin Chinese and English change the way the brain’s networks work.
  • researchers took advantage of the basic differences between Mandarin Chinese and English to investigate the differences between the language networks of native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. Thirty native Chinese speakers were matched on age, gender, and handedness (they were all right-handed) with a sample of native English speakers. All participants listened to intelligible and unintelligible speech and were asked to judge the gender of the speaker.
  • The first difference was the operation of the brain networks shared by English and Chinese speakers
  • English speakers showed stronger connectivity leading from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area. This increased connectivity was attributed to English relying more heavily on phonological information, or sounds rather than tones.
  • Chinese speakers had stronger connections leading from an area of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus – which has been identified as a “semantic hub” critical in supporting language – to both Broca’s and Wernicke’s area.
  • increased connectivity is attributed to the enhanced mapping of sound and meaning going on in people who speak tonal languages.
  • second difference showed activation in an area of the brain’s right hemisphere, but only among the Chinese speakers
  • findings emphasise the importance of developing a bilateral network between the two brain hemispheres to speak and understand languages, particularly for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese.
carolinewren

Politicians, others on right, left challenge scientific consensus on some issues | The ... - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...-consensus-on-some-issues.html

politicians science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Often, pronouncements about either subject are accompanied by the politician’s mea culpa: “I’m not a scientist, but ... ”
  • It’s the butthat has caused heartburn among scientists, many of whom say such skepticism has an impact on public policy.
  • “They’ve been using it as if they can dismiss the view of scientists, which doesn’t make any sense,”
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  • ‘Well, I’m not an engineer, but I think the bridge will stand up.’  ”
  • “Not just as a public figure, but as a human being, your fidelity should be to reality and to the truth,”
  • Among those agreeing that climate change is both real and a man-made threat are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the Defense Department, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society
  • giving parents a “measure of choice” on vaccination is “the balance that government has to decide.”
  • murkiness of those comments caused alarm among public-health officials, who say the impact of the anti-vaccination movement is being seen in a measles outbreak in a number of states and Washington, D.C.
  • Climate change also sparks tension.
  • He said he was galled by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s recent assertion that the government should not require parents to vaccinate their children because it’s an issue of “freedom.”
  • As for the caveat I’m not a scientist, “What they’re saying they implicitly think is that scientists don’t even know about climate change,”
  • However, Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul all voted against another amendment that said human activity contributes “significantly” to the threat. Cruz has asserted to the National Journal that climate change is “a theory that can’t be proven or disproven.”
  • In a separate vote, 98 senators — including Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul — acknowledged that climate change is “real and not a hoax.”
  • The group that denied climate change is occurring has pivoted, acknowledging that it exists. Still, the group questions whether it is a man-made phenomenon.
  • “There is an unwritten litmus test for GOP officeholders” to express some form of skepticism about the phenomenon, he said.
  • Conservatives felt more negative emotions when they read scientific studies that challenged their views on climate change and evolution than liberals did in reading about nuclear power and fracking, but researchers believe that’s because climate change and evolution are more national in scope than the issues picked for liberals.
  • “The point is, to a very high level, scientists do know.”
  • didn’t stop 39 Republicans — including GOP presidential contenders Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — from opposing an amendment last month that blamed changing global temperatures on human activity.
  • He said the disconnect between the public and scientists isn’t necessarily a bad thing
  • Such a slowdown “gives the science time to mature on some of these issues.”
  • most would-be candidates want to appeal to as many people as possible.
  • “And if you can sort of try to obscure your actual position but not offend anyone, that’s what I think they try to do,”
  • But it’s possible that their comments reflect a growing disconnect between the views of the public and the scientific community.
  • 86 percent of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said childhood vaccines such as the one for measles-mumps-rubella should be required, 68 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
  • larger gap on the subject of climate change: 87 percent of the scientists said climate change is caused mostly by human activity, while 50 percent of U.S. adults did.
  • The divide is not necessarily a conservative one
  • For example, while 88 percent of scientists said it is generally safe to eat genetically modified foods, only 37 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
  • And the vaccine issue is one that has united some liberals, the religious right and libertarians.
  • The study found that conservatives tend to distrust science on issues such as climate change and evolution. For liberals, it is fracking and nuclear power.
  • Even those who agree that climate change is real and is man-made might not support government action
  • liberals showed some distrust about science when they read about climate change and evolution
  • “Liberals can be just as biased as conservatives,” he said.
  • Rosenberg said the Internet can provide affirmation of pre-existing beliefs rather than encouraging people to find objective sources of information, such as peer-reviewed journals.
  • Often, attacking science is the easiest way to justify inaction, Rosenberg said.
carolinewren

Pain Really Is All In Your Head And Emotion Controls Intensity | WFSU - 0 views

news.wfsu.org/...ead-emotion-controls-intensity

pain science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • When you whack yourself with a hammer, it feels like the pain is in your thumb. But really it's in your brain.
  • perception of pain is shaped by brain circuits that are constantly filtering the information coming from our sensory nerves,
  • In 2003, Turner was unloading supplies when his unit came under attack. He was wounded by a grenade. "He took shrapnel in his leg, in his side — and he didn't even notice that he had been hit,"
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  • Despite his injuries, Turner began giving first aid and pulled other soldiers to safety. As he worked, he was shot twice — one bullet breaking a bone in his arm. Yet Turner would say later that he felt almost no pain.
  • "Soldiers in the heat of the moment don't recognize the pain that's happening," Linden says. But once that moment is over, those same soldiers may feel a lot of pain from something minor, like a hypodermic needle, he says.
  • brain also determines the emotion we attach to each painful experience, Linden says. That's possible, he explains, because the brain uses two different systems to process pain information coming from our nerve endings.
  • One system determines the pain's location, intensity and characteristics: stabbing, aching, burning, etc.
  • there is a completely separate system for the emotional aspect of pain
  • positive emotions — like feeling calm and safe and connected to others — can minimize pain. But negative emotions tend to have the opposite effect. Torturers have exploited that aspect for centuries.
  • they want to accentuate pain during torture they can do this with humiliation [or] with an unpredictable schedule of delivering pain
  • Those things will make the emotional component of the pain experience stronger."
  • CIA interrogators used both tactics after Sept. 11, according to a Senate report released late last year.
  • One thing scientists are still trying to understand is precisely how the brain regulates the perception of pain
  • The team studied low-frequency brain waves in a part of the brain that responds to sensations in the hand,
  • Earlier research had shown that these rhythms increase when the brain is blocking sensory information from the hand.
  • reseasrchers monitored the brain waves of a dozen people who were asked to pay attention only to their hand or only to their foot. During the experiment the scientists delivered a light tap to each person's finger or toe.
  • ocused on their feet, low-frequency rhythms increased in the brain area that responds to hand sensations — because participants were asking their brains to ignore sensory input from the hand, and it's these low-frequency rhythms that do the blocking of such information.
  • low-frequency rhythms also increased in a different brain area — the region that ignores distractions, the team discovered.
  • The two areas became synchronized
  • "There's coordination between the front part of the brain, which is the executive control region of the brain, and the sensory part of the brain, which is filtering information from the environment," she says.
  • suggests that at least some people can teach their brains how to filter out things like chronic pain, perhaps through meditation
  • It found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks greatly improved their control of the brain rhythms that block out pain.
carolinewren

Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills | Andrea... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-social-progres_b_6826108.html

science social progress

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Common sense tells us that social and emotional skills -- such as perseverance, self-control or agreeableness -- help individuals have more fulfilling lives
  • Those who work hard are more likely to follow healthier lifestyles and remain fit. Individuals who are capable of coping with their emotions and adapting to change are more likely to cope with job loss, family disintegration or crime.
  • social and emotional skills matter because they help develop and enforce cognitive skills.
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  • Extensive research in many countries has demonstrated that we can build metrics around social and emotional skills that help to make them tangible for educators and policy makers
  • The OECD is about to publish the report "Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills", that integrates available evidence on the importance of social and emotional skills for achieving positive life outcomes. It documents methods to measure social and emotional skills and it uses innovative analytical methods to show how social and emotional skills are drivers of social outcomes, such as health, civic engagement, and subjective well-being.
  • social and emotional skills are not just measurable, but also malleable. That means that schools, families and communities can play an active role in fostering these skills, they can be taught at home and school through adequate practices.
  • the report provides a range of examples of learning practices that worked in developing social and emotional skills. For example, teachers can enhance children's motivation, self-esteem and emotional stability by becoming effective mentors and learning facilitators.
  • Parents can provide warm, supportive and interactive environments through day-to-day home activities or routines
carolinewren

Dogs Can Discriminate Emotional Expressions of Human Faces : TECH & INNOVATION : Scienc... - 0 views

www.sciencetimes.com/...expressions-of-human-faces.htm

dogs science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A group of cognitive neuroscientists have shown conclusively that dogs are able to differentiate between happy and sad human faces.
  • In this study, 20 pet dogs were presented with happy and angry human faces side by side. The dogs were divided into 2 groups: one of the groups was trained to touch happy faces with their nose while the other was trained to touch an angry face.
  • "We can rule out that the dogs simply discriminated between the pictures based on a simple salient cue, such as the visibility of teeth,"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It was found that the dogs were able to select faces more often than what would be expected as random chance
  • not only were the dogs able to identify emotions in human faces but were able to transfer what they have learned to identify emotions in new faces.
  • "Our study demonstrates that dogs can distinguish angry and happy expressions in humans, they can tell that these two expressions have different meanings, and they can do this not only for people they know well, but even for faces they have never seen before,".
carolinewren

Mess: Emotion can be good; science can be bad | Pork Network - 0 views

www.porknetwork.com/...can-be-good-science-can-be-bad

emotion science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • While facts and science are the backbone of what we do as agriculturalists, numbers and statistics tend to be dry and not very convincing when presented by someone who doesn’t first connect to the audience they are speaking
  • While the first two examples may stick in someone’s mind for a while, the third example, which brings emotions into the conversation, is the one that will get the most people riled up.
  • For some, it seems emotion is fine when we want people to understand us, but should be frowned upon when brought to us by our customers.
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  • there has been an uptick in the online discussion on what roll emotion plays in the art and science of raising animals.
  • The old saying that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” applies to agvocacy just as much as anything else. Animal rights activists gained ground because, rather than lead with the facts and figures, they tell stories that tug at the heartstrings of those who don’t know better.
  • Dropping science from the discussion saves time. Think of all the time it takes to spout off some numbers and paste a link to a study. We can use that time to truly listen to our customers and answer them with our own personal stories.
  • sticking with just the science of what we do is simply not effective. When it comes to talking about how we care for our land and animals, cutting corners straight to the facts and playing it safe hasn’t been working for us. We must show the softer side of farming.
carolinewren

Book Review: 'A New History of Life' by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-and-joe-kirschvink-1425677187

biology Evolution

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I imagine that physicists are similarly deluged with revelations about how to build a perpetual-motion machine or about the hitherto secret truth behind relativity. And so I didn’t view the arrival of “A New History of Life” with great enthusiasm.
  • subtitle breathlessly promises “radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on earth,” while the jacket copy avers that “our current paradigm for understanding the history of life on Earth dates back to Charles Darwin’s time, yet scientific advances of the last few decades have radically reshaped that aging picture.”
  • authors Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink are genuine scientists—paleontologists, to be exact. And they can write.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • even genuine scientists are human and as such susceptible to the allure of offering up new paradigms (as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn put it)
  • paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould insisted that his conception of “punctuated equilibria” (a kind of Marxist biology that blurred the lines between evolution and revolution), which he developed along with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge, upended the traditional Darwinian understanding of how natural selection works.
  • This notion doesn’t constitute a fundamental departure from plain old evolution by natural selection; it simply italicizes that sometimes the process is comparatively rapid, other times slower.
  • In addition, they have long had a peculiar perspective on evolution, because of the limitations of the fossil record
  • Darwin was a pioneering geologist as well as the greatest of all biologists, and his insights were backgrounded by the key concept of uniformitarianism, as advocated by Charles Lyell, his friend and mentor
  • previously regnant paradigm among geologists had been “catastrophism
  • fossil record was therefore seen as reflecting the creation and extinction of new species by an array of dramatic and “unnatural” dei ex machina.
  • Of late, however, uniformitarianism has been on a losing streak. Catastrophism is back, with a bang . . . or a flood, or a burst of extraterrestrial radiation, or an onslaught of unpleasant, previously submerged chemicals
  • This emphasis on catastrophes is the first of a triad of novelties on which “A New History of Life” is based. The second involves an enhanced role for some common but insufficiently appreciated inorganic molecules, notably carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.
  • Life didn’t so much unfold smoothly over hundreds of millions of years as lurch chaotically in response to diverse crises and opportunities: too much oxygen, too little carbon dioxide, too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide, too hot, too cold
  • So far, so good, except that in their eagerness to emphasize what is new and different, the authors teeter on the verge of the same trap as Gould: exaggerating the novelty of their own ideas.
  • Things begin to unravel when it comes to the third leg of Messrs. Ward and Kirschvink’s purported paradigmatic novelty: a supposed role for ecosystems—rain forests, deserts, rivers, coral reefs, deep-sea vents—as units of evolutionary change
  • “While the history of life may be populated by species,” they write, “it has been the evolution of ecosystems that has been the most influential factor in arriving at the modern-day assemblage of life. . . . [W]e know that on occasion in the deep past entirely new ecosystems appear, populated by new kinds of life.” True enough, but it is those “new kinds of life,” not whole ecosystems, upon which natural selection acts.
  • One of the most common popular misconceptions about evolution is that it proceeds “for the good of the species.”
  • The problem is that smaller, nimbler units are far more likely to reproduce differentially than are larger, clumsier, more heterogeneous ones. Insofar as ecosystems are consequential for evolution—and doubtless they are—it is because, like occasional catastrophes, they provide the immediate environment within which something not-so-new is acted out.
  • This is natural selection doing its same-old, same-old thing: acting by a statistically potent process of variation combined with selective retention and differential reproduction, a process that necessarily operates within the particular ecosystem that a given lineage occupies.
carolinewren

Scientist helps develop new tools to probe mysteries of the brain - 1 views

medicalxpress.com/...ols-probe-mysteries-brain.html

brain science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A University of Otago researcher is part of an international collaboration that has developed an exciting and expansive new set of tools to probe cell types in the brain
  • involves using techniques that manipulate the genes of a small subset of cells so that the cells glow under fluorescent microscopes. By manipulating unique gene markers for each cell type into fluorescent labels or probes, the structure and function of various types of neurons can be visualized and studied
  • making certain cell types fluorescently glow, is the ability to use light to make the cells actually fire a signal, using a technique called optogenetics
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  • Associate Professor Ruth Empson of Otago's Department of Physiology says these innovations are powerful new techniques that will greatly advance worldwide efforts to understand how different parts of the brain connect and communicate during behaviour
carolinewren

Modified immune cells show promise in treating brain cancer, Penn scientists find - New... - 0 views

www.newsworks.org/...in-cancer-penn-scientists-find

science cancer modified immune cells

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a personalized immune therapy that redirects T cells to seek and destroy a type of glioblastoma, or brain tumor.
  • About 30 percent of glioblastoma patients have tumors with a mutation in a growth receptor called EGFR.
  • "Patients that have that kind of mutation tend to have a worse prognosis than patients who don't have it."
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  • because the mutation is specific to the tumor — and can serve as a sort of beacon to properly designed immune cells — it might actually be this cancer's Achilles' heel.
  • treatment involves taking patients' T cells, then inserting a new gene that allows the cells to recognize the mutant protein.
  • the cells can be reinfused and begin their task of zeroing in on and eliminating cells with the mutation.
  • "It's taking an antibody, which is typically a kind of molecule that's circulating around in the blood," said Maus. "And it's fusing it to proteins that will cross the membrane and that then will signal to T cells to replicate and kill."
carolinewren

How movies influence perceptions of brain disorders - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article23081874

movies influence brain

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Blockbusters, from the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity to last year’s Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, reinforce pervading misconceptions about how the brain works.
  • “Watching movies about neurological disorders, if they’re done well, I think gives people an appreciation for what the characters may go through,” she says, while films that promote stereotypes “can actually be a little bit more hurtful to people who have those disorders.”
  • this 2003 Disney film offers surprisingly solid insight about a neurological disorder.
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  • Dory, voiced by comedian Ellen DeGeneres, suffers classic symptoms of anterograde amnesia, which is typically associated with damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in encoding memories.
  • the portrayal of the condition is spot on. She has difficulty remembering names and retaining new information, but her condition doesn’t affect her sense of identity.
  • it’s just a perfect example of the neuromyth
  • Jason Bourne, the amnesiac main character of this action flick, exhibits no trouble with short-term memories, but wakes up after suffering an unspecified injury to the brain with no recollection of who he is.
  • explaining that the “double conk” myth – the idea that someone can lose their identity after being hit in the head and regain it after a second blow or psychological trigger – is actually a conflation of two ideas.
  • Identity loss is more closely associated with psychogenic amnesia, an extremely rare and controversial diagnosis, whose origins, some experts believe, may be influenced by culture.
  • This sci-fi action film relies on the conceit that humans only use 10 per cent of their brains.
  • Sure, filmmakers may take artistic licence, she says, but the trouble is many people actually believe we only use a portion of our brains.
  • she notes that due to its success, the film may have inadvertently contributed to the stereotype of the autistic savant – the notion that people with autism excel in a specific area, which, in the case of Hoffman’s character, involved dealing in numbers. In reality, Spiers says, this is very rare.
carolinewren

Laser-Controlled And See-Through Brains Get Biomedical Prize | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/gh-brains-get-biomedical-prize

brain science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The mouse brain above has undergone a process called CLARITY
  • Through a series of chemical reactions, CLARITY stabilizes organs taken from an animal or human and makes them transparent to the naked eye.
  • allows scientists to look into organs in a whole new way.
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  • The rodent at the top of this story is being studied with a technique called optogenetics, which Deisseroth pioneered.
  • genetically engineered the mouse so that its brain cells turn certain genes on or off when scientists shine laser light onto them. The light enters the mouse's brain through that optical fiber you see in the photo.
  • For example, say 20 percent of people with autism don't have Gene A, but scientists aren't sure what Gene A does. They could turn off Gene A in a mouse's brain and see what happens next. The mouse's reaction could provide a clue about what Gene A does in people and why it's missing in certain patients
carolinewren

Scientists See How Brain Areas Communicate - 1 views

www.laboratoryequipment.com/...ee-how-brain-areas-communicate

brain science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Carnegie Mellon Univ. neuroscientists have identified a new pathway by which several brain areas communicate within the brain's striatum.
  • the findings illustrate structural and functional connections that allow the brain to use reinforcement learning to make spatial decisions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal (DLPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC).
  • Knowing how these specific pathways work together provides crucial insight into how learning occurs
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  • The hope is that more knowledge of how the connectivity is related to behavior will help scientists develop therapeutic interventions that focus on strengthening potentially weakened or damaged pathways.
  • They found that the pathways from all three areas projected to similar areas within a forebrain region called striatum, a part of the basal ganglia pathways that are most commonly associated with Parkinson's disease. The patterns were consistent across all participants
  • The results showed that the convergence zones were not only structurally connected but functionally connected as well. More importantly, the areas at the surface of the brain in all three cortical areas showed a high overlap of structure and functional connectivity
  • there may be a structural and functional network in the brain that allows us to integrate information about where we are focusing our attention in our visuospatial environment with reward and punishment signals associated with our past action choices in order to learn how to update and, hopefully improve, our future action decisions,
  • An additional implication for this study is a deeper understanding of how reinforcement learning occurs.
carolinewren

The Brain Science of Keeping Resolutions - 0 views

www.td.org/...Science-of-Keeping-Resolutions

brain science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • After one month, only about 64 percent of resolutions are still in force and by six months that number drops to less than 50 percent.
  • In a previous post, we explored applications of neuroscience to change management and consulting. One of the key points in that article is that our brain is structured with one primary purpose: to keep us alive so that we can transmit our genes to the next generation.
  • Historically, change has often been dangerous. So we have become hard-wired to avoid and resist it at every turn.
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  • when faced with a change that has the potential to make us more likely to survive, some brains are able to adapt more easily than others.
  • Daniel Amen has studied over 63,000 brains using brain imaging to study blood flow and activity patterns.
  • One interesting conclusion of his studies is that a healthy brain is much better equipped to make positive changes and stick to them.
  • The discovery of brain plasticity has proven that you can help people change their brains almost immediately, by providing an environment to support learning
  • brain learns better when it is healthy, adopting a healthier lifestyle can help learners develop brains that are more receptive to change and new ideas.
  • Even a few drinks a week can reduce overall brain function and create areas of reduced brain function.
  • Prolonged exposure to high blood pressure not only restricts blood flow to the brain, but increase the risk of dementia, heart attack and stroke.
  • a physical pattern, in the form of neural connections, is formed in the brain. Every time we go over this pattern by revisiting this thought, we make the behavior stronger.
  • Brains with a high degree of new activity tend to stay that way. Brains that are slow to learn new things gradually lose some of their ability to change.
  • In our sleep-deprived world, the average adult is walking around in a brain-induced fog. The brain uses sleep to rebuild and reorganize. Sleep deprivation can result in lower brain performance and less ability to change.
  • Counter to previous beliefs, meditation has been shown to activate the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of conscious thought.
carolinewren

YaleNews | Yale researchers map 'switches' that shaped the evolution of the human brain - 0 views

news.yale.edu/...s-shaped-evolution-human-brain

brain

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Thousands of genetic “dimmer” switches, regions of DNA known as regulatory elements, were turned up high during human evolution in the developing cerebral cortex, according to new research from the Yale School of Medicine.
  • these switches show increased activity in humans, where they may drive the expression of genes in the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain that is involved in conscious thought and language. This difference may explain why the structure and function of that part of the brain is so unique in humans compared to other mammals.
  • Noonan and his colleagues pinpointed several biological processes potentially guided by these regulatory elements that are crucial to human brain development.
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  • “Building a more complex cortex likely involves several things: making more cells, modifying the functions of cortical areas, and changing the connections neurons make with each other
  • Scientists have become adept at comparing the genomes of different species to identify the DNA sequence changes that underlie those differences. But many human genes are very similar to those of other primates, which suggests that changes in the way genes are regulated — in addition to changes in the genes themselves — is what sets human biology apart.
  • First, Noonan and his colleagues mapped active regulatory elements in the human genome during the first 12 weeks of cortical development by searching for specific biochemical, or “epigenetic” modifications
  • same in the developing brains of rhesus monkeys and mice, then compared the three maps to identify those elements that showed greater activity in the developing human brain.
  • wanted to know the biological impact of those regulatory changes.
  • They used those data to identify groups of genes that showed coordinated expression in the cerebral cortex.
  • “While we often think of the human brain as a highly innovative structure, it’s been surprising that so many of these regulatory elements seem to play a role in ancient processes important for building the cortex in all mammals, said first author Steven Reilly
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