The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-root-of-thought-what

Mechanical geekness

The Gömböc is a mono monostatic static shape with one stable point and one unstable surface of equilibrium.

This means it'll end up with the same edge up no matter how you place it to begin with.. :)

The shape was developed by Gábor Domokos, at a challenge from a mathematician friend, unsurprisingly, the shape was later found to have been developed through natural selection indiviually by a wide variety of insects and shelled vertibrates (turtles), one could see how that can be useful...

Gömböc for sale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn811yIALPw

Curing color blindness.

Researchers at the university of Washington have used virus vectors to manipulate the gene producing L-opsin to give male squirrel monkeys the ability to distinguish red and green.

This might be one step on the way to curing not only color blindness, but to restore or revitalize sight with humans as well..

Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys

wtf!

I think the title of this link speaks pretty much for itself:

Effects of language on perception stronger for information that comes in through the right eye

.. also about the mind, but quite unrelated:

The future of cognitive augmentation.

Most interesting reads of the day:

I've been reading a bit, in a desperate attempt to catch up with the torrents of new articles on my Google Reader page..

• In case you didn't know, the brain is in a state of self-organizing criticality with 13 degrees of separation, balancing the opposing state sof phase shifts and phase-locking.

• Salamanders and limb regeneration.

• Growing a heart, from skin.

• Gaming and the mind.

• Spanish flu mystery; solved!

• Dinosaur skin analysed.

Pop-psych!

A short post, linking to a pretty long read;

50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive!

and some more pop-psych:

Teaching kids to argue

Apa.org

Whenever I'm wondering about something related to

psychology,health, society and so on, the best site

for objective and informed summaries is apa.org,

the American Psychological Association's homepage.

Here are a few examples:

• The nature of true love.

• Information on the psychology of sexual orientations.

• Co-rumination not good for girls

.. the same as Samsyting ikke sunt for jenter ..which I suddenly remembered having read :)

• The price of affluence and narcissism.

(this article also ties in with a Fora.tv-talk I saw recently

about the triple bind, a book written by psychologist

Stephen Hinshaw about pressures facing American girls

in todays society; getting good grades, having good

friends, looking good, and making it all seem effortless)

• The dangers of multi-tasking.

(this also ties in with a Fora.tv-talk i saw recently, by

Winifred Gallagher talking about attention, she's got

a new book out, which is now on my wish-list; 'Rapt'.

• Teenagers and sleeping routines.

I might not be a teen, but I can relate to most of what's

written here (it is 04:40 AM after all)

• Pre- and post-natal differences wrt. recall and learning.

(lots of technical language here, but it's still a good read)

• Jerry Burgers re-run of Milgram's classic study on obedience.

In case you haven't heard of Milgram's study, here's a

Wiki-summary, and here's ABC's article on the replication

(they cooperated with Burger on conducting the study)

• Art and aesthetics crossing species boundaries

..really speaks volumes about animal intelligence,

which reminds me of a NG-article I'll have to post later...

It also mentions some research some by Vilayanur

Ramachandran on seagulls, here's his TED-talk.

Google Reader favourites

Looking through my 'starred' list of articles, there's a large amount of good articles on the brain and psychology, and some other interesting stuff, here's a bunch of nice reads:

• An article about engineers attempting to make computers think more like human brains, flexibly, efficiently and with a wide range of methods.

• A short Discover-article about the left/right division of the brain.

• More fun-facts, and some speculation, schizophrenics aren't fooled by optical illusions!

• Some advice for anyone working at a consultant agency, or studying business.. ;)

• Octopuses can be pretty damn smart.

• Brain boosting advice: doodling.

• Some more behavioral economics.

• Even more brain boosters.

• One of my favourite, and most startling articles; apparently, surrounding yourself with certain colors has a measurable effect on different performance measures(such as recall, concentration and creativity)

• Another great article; I think it looks awesome, but I'm surprised people aren't more paranoid about this technology..

How we decide

Jonah Lehrer talks about how we make decicions, his new book and about a wealth of experiments and funny anecdotes, very entertaining :)

Jonah Lehrer: Inside my mind

New look

Got some red goin' on!

Use of language

another Fora.tv lecture, about the use of language in politics etc. Lots of good facts and observations.

Geoffrey Nunberg about language.

Can't sleep!

I can't sleep, so here's some good reading material I found:

the NY-times blog 'Ideas' constantly features great articles on just about everything, in one of their recent posts they features these excellent reads:

Quack remedies spread by virtue of being useless

What Is The Best Way to Turn Plants into Energy?

By popular demand, Fora.tv

PeBe requested some more Fora.tv lectures, I'll post some now.. Fora.tv is a really great site, which presents both sides of most of the interesting debates going on, from all over the lecture cycle.

Here's a list of lectures, mostly about Natural Science, Evolutionary theory, and Religion:

• Nassim Nicholas talks about probability, his book "Black Swan" and what we think we know, and what we really don't.

• Here is a talk about Parasites of all kinds (gross pictures included), quite enlightening, both about Malaria, Dengue fever, African river blindness (yes, it sound really bad, but it's worse than you think), Chagas' disease, and Schistosomiasis ('Snail fever', affecting 200 million people) and other fun stuff.

• Next, a lecture tied to a book about genetic and environmental influences on lour behavior (sex, sociology and war).

• Another talk about contemorary evolutionary theory, and some history.

You can find plenty of lectures on evolutionary theory, since it's 150 years since the publication of 'On the Origin of Species' and 200 years since Darwins birth

• A very calm and measured discussion about the threats and promisses of synthetic biology.

• Kenneth Miller on the Intelligen Design movement and the Evolution "controversy".

• Gary Marcus on the haphazard evolution of the human mind.

• Naomi Tickle talks about 'Personology', something I think is complete bullsh*t, judge for yourself.

• Another 'debate' about the Evolution 'controversy'.

• Jeffrey Sachs talks about the crisis we're in, and what it might consists in.

• Dan Ariely talks about the why's and how's of irrational behaviour, very interesting!

• A three-part panel talks about the science of longevity, health-span, youth-span, and some moral and tecnical issuess involved in prolonging life.

• Sam Gosling talks about 'snooping', psychology, and what your immediate suroundings and stuff can tell you and others about yourself.

• Douglas Erwin (a paleonthologist) talking about one of the great extinctions, and how it's different from all the others, it's quite tecnical, but very interesting.

• Kevin Padian talks about evolutionary theory, and answers questions.

• Adam Savage, and his incredible persistency in following his passions and obsessions, a must-watch!

• Stephen murdoch on the history of IQ and psychologial testing, some fun bits about Francis Bacon in there, and quite a few fun facts.

• David Plotz talks about when he first read the Bible, and the stuff he found there.

• Stephen Mitchell lightheartedly talking about his translation The Second Book of the Tao.

• Allan Chapman on the history of science and religion.

• Richard Dawkins in well know style about religion.

• A.J. Jacobs and his year of following every law in the bible.

• Sam Harris talks calmy and eloquently about rationality, faith, religion and menacing escatology.

• Another great lecture from Mr. Harris on the clash between faith and reason.

• An investigation into FLDS by Stephen Singular.

• Carolyn Jessop and her escape from FLDS.

• A multi-speaker session talking for and agains the House proposition: "would we be better off without religion?"

• Cristopher Hitchens holding a lecture, and debating Al Sharpton, and Alister McGrath, with predictable results.

• William Lobdell on loosing his religion.

• Mark Bittman on the state of our diet, and on food in general.

• Mike Rowe talks about some of his discoveries while working with the TV-show on the Discovery Chanel called 'Dirty Jobs', quite funny at times.

Wow, I've seen more stuff on fora.tv than I though,

I don't recomend powering through all of them at once! :)