Mssv

I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the lack of quality of writing in newspapers these days, and specifically, newspaper supplements. I have no problem with the main reporting, but the ‘lifestyle’ sections are just awful. Maybe they’ve always been this dull and boring, or maybe my standards have been risen by culling the best of the […]

E-Ink announced their prototype electronic book display last week. Finally, the dream of a portable, long-lasting electronic book reader may finally be upon us. The contrast and resolution of the display (160dpi) look quite acceptable and I’m not really bothered about the fact that it has no colour; neither do any of my paperbacks.
As long […]

A couple of days ago over dinner, I was having one of those typical university conversations about whether the Internet had really changed the world. As was pointed out, “We’re still not buying all of our groceries over the web.” I replied with something about delivery of large perishable goods and how in fact the […]

Japanese scientists want to make robots part of the family - ‘Nuff said, really.

Yesterday I had an interesting debate about whether science is suffering from diminishing returns these days; i.e. that it costs more than it used to to get answers. On the face of it, this seems true; we spend billions on particle accelerators, space telescopes and medical research programmes. We never spent that amount of money […]

Idea Stores - apparently these are the libraries of the future in the UK, doing more than just lending out books. Sounds like an interesting idea although I will withhold judgement for now.

There’s a fair amount of excitement on the Internet about efforts to make an artifical rat hippocampus. This idea strikes me as, well, pretty weird. I am a little doubtful as to whether it could work (I can think of a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t) but to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether […]

Over the past two days I’ve had an excellent two-part workshop in my neuroscience course on addiction, covering what we know about the causes of drug addiction at a molecular, cellular and cognitive level, reward pathways in the brain and possible treatments, vaccines and cures for drug addiction. Definitely one of the most thought provoking […]

An illustrated speculative timeline of future technology and social change - one man’s work to create a future universe that covers the next thousand years, all based on real scientific and technological speculation (albeit often tenuous speculation). A fascinating read.
Along with reams of timelines and explantory material, the author has written some very original story/timelines […]

Now this is why I love neuroscience. In a recent weekly paper presentation, one of the groups in my class presented a paper called Genetic enhancement of learning and memory in mice. After altering a single gene in mice, the authors of the paper managed to improve their learning and memory significantly, by up to […]