You’ve probably heard about Obama’s big brain project, the BRAIN Initiative? Also the European Union Human Brain project? You might be tempted to think that these are just one last big push to figure out exactly how the brain really works. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reigning theory is that our brain works something like a computer...
Did you see the research that shows that the descendants of Holocaust survivors have elevated stress levels compared with others? It seems that trauma can be inherited. It's starting to look like that goes for a lot of other things. For example recent research shows that breast cancer risks acquired in pregnancy may pass to the next 3 generations. ...
I just read an article on astrology (Does Astrology Work? I’m Gonna Go With “No.” in Bad Astronomy). I’ve never believed in horoscopes and all the other astrological claptrap. How could the positions of planets possibly influence your personality and behavior? But hold on here. I pride myself on being open-minded to different ideas and thoughts, ev...
Scientists are always looking for the next Big Thing so they all got excited several months ago about what looked like the discovery of the long-predicted gravitational waves. I got pretty excited too. I even blogged about it (“Ripples In Corporate Space-Time: Do Companies Have An Internal Clock?”). Now it looks like it was wrong. Dust on the lens ...
This is not a plug for the Planet of the Apes prequel. It’s hackneyed and full of terrible clichés. But it does raise an interesting question about how animals think, and therefore about how we humans think too. I think we can safely say that people have higher cognitive capacity for abstract problem-solving than animals. That’s despite more recent...
I guess you read about Apple buying Dr. Dre and Beats? Something to add to the fading Apple cool factor? I think I am swimming against the tide on this one, but streaming music doesn’t sound to me like the next frontier. It’s already here, there are lots of players and it’s becoming commoditized. Amazon, of course, just got involved. Did you notice...
So now genetic testing has become de rigueur amongst the jet set, the biological equivalent of Google Glass. As well it might be since Google has invested in this area also (is there anything that Google hasn’t invested in?). What does this mean for everyone else? Well there was a time there when it looked like once you could read the human genome,...
