Sci does not celebrate Valentine’s Day in general. I prefer to celebrate tomorrow, February 15th, otherwise known as the day when all the chocolate goes 50{9f43b4361d9a125bc126dd2a2d1949be02545ec69880430bc4fed2272fd72da3} off and I wallow in glorious sugar. But for those of you who want to celebrate Valentine’s Day SCIENCE-STYLE, head over to the Stanford website and twitter feed, where […]
Sci is at SciAm Blogs today, talking about a new study in humans looking at normal, every day social interactions and cytokines, one of the important signaling molecules in inflammation. IS you competitive spirit bad for your health? Head over and find out!
This word of the week has meanings both in science and in normal, every day language. Bromide: An anion of the element bromine, element 35. Bromide: A word used to indicate a platitude, especially one used WAY too often, and which has no real use or meaning, except that meant to make you feel better, […]
I saw Kevin’s post about his son on SciAm Blogs the other day. It just about broke my heart seeing all the hard decisions, the fear, and the suffering that Kevin and his family have gone through. I think his story should be read by as many people as possible, especially those in charge of […]
After last week’s post on whether the bears can smell the menstruation (hehe, I can’t get over that quote), I was inundated with questions and tips for papers. People asked if menstruation attracted sharks (answer: no one has tested it, right now shark attacks are 9.2:1 male:female, but that’s probably due to differences in being […]
…and unfortunately, that’s all this paper is. Check out your brain on drugs, and read why I really wanted something better, over at The Scicurious Brain. Check it out!
Sci is at SciAm today, talking about using neuronal transplants in genetically altered mice, to treat their severe obesity and diabetes. The work tells us a lot about how appetite and metabolism are controlled by the hypothalamus, and it also gives a hint as to how much we don’t know. Head over there and check […]
Today’s word of the week is actually an acronym: CREB, the c-AMP response element binding protein. CREB is a very popular protein in studies of things like addiction and mood disorders, and particularly interesting to people to study memory. It binds to specific bits of DNA (called, easily enough c-AMP response elements), and by binding […]
While Sci was listening eagerly to Kate Clancy’s appearance on Skeptically Speaking last Sunday (you’ll be able to download the episode soon), I was flabbergasted to find out that there is a rumor out there that, if you go out hiking on your period…you might attract BEARS. (I totally forgot about this until someone on […]
As preparation for this post and in the interests of full disclosure, I felt the need to pop in a piece of gum while writing. Never mind that the only gum I could find was caffeinated. That gives this post a little extra…zest. Anyway, in talking with several friends over the years about methods of […]