Scientific American - Mind & Brain

Friday Weird Science: The bears smell the menstruation!!!

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:19:00 EST

But CAN they? Head over to Neurotic Physiology to find out whether bears really care if you’re on your period . [More]

Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African Languages Are Common in English

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought.

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MIND Reviews: The Righteous Mind

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion [More]

#SciAmBlogs Thursday - tsunami debris, groundhogs, apes in suits, kakapos, butterfly drones and more

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:56:00 EST

- Harold Johnson – Tsunami Debris & North America: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?

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Remembering the Exception to the Rule: Of Mockingbirds and Morality

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:17:00 EST

This year, To Kill a Mockingbird (the movie) turns 50 (the book itself celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010). I actually didn t seen the movie until late in college, when I came across the tape while rummaging through a cardboard box of my parents old films on a snowy evening in Vermont. But I read the book far earlier, when I was around eight years old. It s one of the first real book I remember reading.

Atticus and Tom Robinson, screenshot from 1962 film. Moni3, Public domain, Wikimedia commons.

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Illusion Contest Offers Mind-Warping Visions (preview)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Jordan Suchow came to three rapid-fire conclusions as he watched his Macintosh laptop plummet toward the floor. First, in approximately 300 milliseconds he was going to be in a heap of trouble--the machine had been given to him by his thesis adviser, George Alvarez of Harvard University. Second, hoping against all hope, he decided that Harvard could probably afford to buy him a new computer. Third, he realized that the most important observation of his life was unfolding right in front of him as his laptop accelerated toward the parquet: the onscreen doughnut that he had programmed to scintillate appeared to have stopped doing so.

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7 Things You Didn't Know About Groundhogs

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Happy Groundhog Day! Today is the day each year in which we look towards a giant rodent to find out how much more winter we’ll have to endure. This year, we probably know the answer: winter hasn’t been very wintery, even for Los Angeles. Which, well, isn’t ever really wintery at all.

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Controversy: Can Repeat Concussions Cause Lou Gehrig's Disease? (preview)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:05:00 EST

Kevin Turner was a premier athlete in the National Football League, a fullback who could run, catch and block. At 6' 1" and roughly 230 pounds, he was slightly undersized for his position, but he had tremendous thrust in his legs and used all of it to launch himself into players who were bigger than he was. He played for the New England Patriots from 1992 to 1994, then joined the Philadelphia Eagles, with whom he stayed until his abrupt retirement in 1999. Some called him “the Collision Expert”--a nickname he got because of the gouges he collected on his helmet.

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Inside Story: What Happens When Brain Hits Skull

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Concussion, the most common among traumatic brain injuries, which occurs 1.7 million times a year in the U.S., represents a major public-health problem. It occurs when there is a sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head, a process depicted here in this animation.

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Apes in the Suites and the Streets: Participatory Organizing from #Scio12 to #OccupyWallStreet

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

"@BoraChimp" by Nathaniel Gold

Conferences are social grooming events for relatively hairless apes. A few will stand before the multitude, beaming with pride or shaking with nervousness (as the case may be), and present the latest research in contemporary ape thought. As their vocalizations reach a crescendo, those sitting demurely below will produce flesh-slapping noises that indicate they were paying attention (even if they weren t). Another ape will then rise and this process will continue repeatedly and at length. It looks a lot like the modern political stump speech.

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#SciAmBlogs Wednesday - #scio12 art and video, pigmy hippos, spider webs, sunfish, synchronized eating and more.

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:34:00 EST

Wednesday, the new Video of the Week day – have fun!

LOTS of good reading today:

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Synchronized Eating: Social Influences on Eating Behavior

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:01:00 EST

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky on their Sunday night call-in radio show Loveline . I listened so often that I began to incorporate one of their catchphrases – “good times” – into my daily conversations. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: behavioral mimicry .

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On My Shelf: Autophobia (A Review)

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:22:00 EST

Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age | Brian Ladd | University of Chicago Press | 236 pages | $15.00 (Softcover)

It’s an experience not at all unfamiliar to many of us: the flush of a first meeting, a growing attraction, a desire to spend every waking moment together, to visit new places and explore a world previously unknown, to create new memories together. In this blissful period of initial attraction, when the bloom is still on the rose, there are no shortcomings; everything is perfect. Enamourment drives us to passionate defenses and the abrupt dismissal of those who would impugn the virtue of the object of our affections.

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ScienceOnline2012: The Music Video

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:39:00 EST

Video of the Week #28 February 1st, 2012

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At Neurotic PHysiology: Gum chewing for weightloss?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:43:00 EST

Does it work? Well, according to this study, probably not . [More]

Concussion Is a Serious Problem for Child Athletes

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The dangers of life in the National Football League made headlines in 2009, when a study commissioned by the NFL found that retired players were 19 times more likely than other men of similar ages to develop severe memory problems. The obvious culprit: continued play after repeated head injuries. Indeed, head injury can imitate many types of neurodegenerative disease, including Parkinson’s disease and, as journalist Jeffrey Bartholet reports in “The Collision Syndrome,” on page 66, perhaps even amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

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Certain Neurons Respond Specifically to Animals

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Whether cute and cuddly or fierce and frightening, animals affect the brain in ways scientists are just starting to appreciate. In a study of people who had electrodes implanted in their brain for the treatment of epilepsy, an international team discovered neurons that respond specifically to animals. The 41 individuals in the study were shown picturesof recognizable landmarks, objects, animals and people for about one second each as tiny electrodes measured the activity of individual neurons in three regions of their brain. When the researchers analyzed the electrical data from the 400 to 550 neurons in each region, they found a marked jump in the activity of neurons in the right amygdala that was not seen in the other brain regions tested--and only after viewing the pictures of animals. The report by senior author Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and his colleagues appeared this past August online in Nature Neuroscience . (Koch also writes the monthly column Consciousness Redux for Scientific American Mind .)

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#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - Cotard's syndrome, pigeon parasite, Haeckel, clumped bacteria, aurorae, `polite' sexism, and more.

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:19:00 EST

You may have noticed a little improvement installed today – now you can see each blog post in a print-friendly form and then print it that way. Just click on the “Print” button, like this:

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Word-of-Mind: Researchers Decode Words from the Brain's Auditory Activity

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST

Oh, to be a fly on the auditory cortex!

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Editor's Selections: Thinking Outside the Box, Music and Language, and Fish Brains

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:36:00 EST

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week.

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