The Once and Future Brain

Posted on December 8, 2010August 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Psychology Today, December 8, 2010

The future is not new. By the dawn of the 20th century science was moving so fast many people were sure humans were on the verge of tremendous change. The blogger Matt Novak collects entertainingly bad predictions at his website Paleo-Future. My favorite is a 1900 article by John Watkins that appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, offering readers a long list of predictions from leading thinkers of the day about what life would be like within the next 100 years.

“A man or woman unable to walk 10 miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling,” Watkins wrote. “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet.”

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“This Paper Should Not Have Been Published”

Posted on December 7, 2010May 28, 2020 by admin

Slate, December 7, 2010

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On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.” Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand.

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A Man From Whom Viruses Can’t Hide

Posted on November 22, 2010May 16, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, November 22, 2010

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Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

Gustavo Palacios was sequencing the genes from a new strain of Ebola virus found in a bat in Spain–a worrisome development, since the fatal virus has almost never been found outside Africa.

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The “Router” in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing

Posted on November 15, 2010May 28, 2020 by admin

Discover, November 15, 2010

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Pop quiz: What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain.

Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still don’t. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration before you could discover that the answer was 103,173. I used a calculator to get that, I confess.

Our mutual failure is absurd. The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, “the most complex structure that exists in the universe.”

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Learning to love science films

Posted on November 3, 2010May 16, 2020 by admin

Nature, November 3, 2010

Link

For two years now I’ve judged science films for the Imagine Science Film Festival, a week-long celebration of the genre that runs each October in New York City. It’s a peculiar job, I confess, because I’m often underwhelmed by science on the screen. But the more I watch, the more hopeful I feel.

My association with the festival came out of an argument with Alexis Gambis, then a graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York. Over a cup of coffee, Gambis explained that when he wasn’t slaving over fruitfly cells, he made movies. He also runs the Imagine Science Film Festival (of which Nature is a sponsor). Continue reading “Learning to love science films” →