This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Why The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization. By David Eagleman. Published by Canongate Books, 2010.
Reviewed by Seth Mnookin
March 23, 2012
Our 80 billion neurons form an estimated 100 trillion connections. Through those links surge the signals that make thought possible. Sebastian Seung of MIT has been calling for a full-blown atlas of those connections, because he believes it will help us understand how the brain works and how the brain makes us who we are. In the April issue of Discover, I pay a visit to Seung’s lab to see what he’s up to, and what he hopes for the future. Check it out.
I couldn’t be happier that this column is available a couple weeks before Seung will participate in a public debate about the connectome on April 2, hosted by myself and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab. The tickets were all snapped up about an hour and a half after becoming available online, but I will certainly report back afterwards about how it went.
Originally published March 21, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Gems and Jewels. By Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn. Published by Touch Press, 2011.
Guest reviewed by Virginia Hughes
March 21, 2012
Discover, March 20, 2012
If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains.
WIRED, March 20, 2012
There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn’t just spreading through the culture, though. It’s killing the bacteria surrounding it.
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule.
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