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SARS
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1–2 minutes·
2 comments on SARSA lot of people aren’t worried about SARS. They say, well, it’s only killed a few hundred people, that’s a drop in the ocean compared to malaria, AIDS, influenza, car accidents, smoking, etc. etc. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that you do not measure the threat of a disease merely by…
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SARS as a weapon
There is some talk on the Internet about SARS being a Russian or Chinese biological weapon. I am not particularly convinced, and I certainly don’t think it’s a helpful suggestion given that there’s plenty of worry going on at the moment. Of course it could be a biological weapon; there are plenty of research labs…
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Pinker on the Stand
Pinker on the stand – a transcript of talk and discussion given by Steve Pinker on ‘Human Nature and Its Future’. I can’t say I learned anything particularly new from the talk itself, but Pinker receives a real roasting in the discussion about the concepts of criminal justice and what implications our new understanding of…
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We’ve never had it so good
We’ve never had it so good – and it’s all thanks to science – Matt Ridley gets it damn straight in this column in the Guardian. Enough of European techno-pessimism and anti-GM fanatics!
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Speed
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…
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Artificial hippocampus
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…
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Nanosecond bats
While doing some research into neural coding, I came across a reference for a paper that claims bats have nanosecond acuity with echolocation. Say what? Nanosecond? Apparently so. I can’t really tell how they came to this conclusion by the abstract, but it’s been reliably cited in another paper. I’m definitely going to check this…
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A few good ways
Yesterday, I went to an interesting talk by Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge) – it was one of those great lectures that starts off from a simple premise, in this case convergent evolution, and then takes that idea on a wonderful journey that touches upon the inevitability of intelligence, culture, social…
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Pattern Recognition
A major part of my project involves me taking recordings of a signal (in this case, electrochemical spikes from a neuron) and discriminating them from the noise inherent in the system…
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Community Effect
Learned about an interesting thing in a developmental biology seminar today called the ‘Community Effect’. If you transplant a very small group of cells into a foreign, non-self environment, the cells will lose their identity and assume one identical to that of the surrounding cells. However, if the group of cells that you transplant is…
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