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Copenhagen
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on CopenhagenI’ve just come out of a production of Copenhagen at the ADC Theatre here in Cambridge. A more complete post and review will have to come later, but I have to describe what I felt. Through the stages of revisions and unveiling of hidden and assumed meanings throughout the play, at the end it seemed…
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The Great Library
If and when I ever leave the world of academia, I will be very sorry. Not because of the usual reasons, but because I will no longer have free access to thousands of academic journals on the Internet. It’s simply a wonder to be able to go over to Pubmed, type in any keyword, and…
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Front Page
I was feeling a little depressed and annoyed today when I was told that my entry for the college Science Essay Prize hadn’t won. So, to cheer myself up, I submitted it to the Kuro5hin community website and to my delight, my essay about synaesthesia has met with their approval and been posted on the…
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The Drugs Don’t Work
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…
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Future stories
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…
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Gravity Assist
Finally, I understand how gravity assists for spacecraft work now! (scroll to bottom of linked page) Imagine a ball rolling down a hill. It gains speed rolling downhill, but then loses speed as it rolls up the next upslope. It’s hard to see how speed can be permanently gained this way. But now imagine that…
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Mutant Intelligent Mice!
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…
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Magnetic Attraction
Today I had an interesting and unique experience – I had my brain scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The point of this was to take part in one of my friend’s psychology research experiments, earn �27 and also (arguably most importantly) get a picture of my brain. Doing an fMRI is an unusual…
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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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