More evidence of brain plasticity: Some blind people are able to use echolocation to perceive space and objects around them in surprising detail, even though the time differences in echoes necessary to do this are two small to be consciously perceived. An fMRI study by Lore Thaler, Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale revealed that people who are especially adept at this use their calcarine cortex (a.k.a. V1 or primary visual cortex) to process spatial information from the echoes.
The original paper. A shorter discussion. (
Previously)
posted by nangar
on Jun 20, 2011 -
13 comments
Ever since the
Women's Health Initiative published data showing
increased risk and little benefit with post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy it has become more controversial and the
FDA now recommends using the lowest dose possible for the shortest time, if using it at all. Why was HRT so popular in the first place? It now appears one reason was that what appeared to be legitimate articles in peer reviewed journals were actually ghostwritten by drug companies.
[more inside]
posted by TedW
on Sep 24, 2010 -
22 comments
For a little welcome diversion from your political, financial, climatological and other worries, how about orificial hirudiniasis? Here's a
new species of nose-dwelling leech. Its ancestors may gave lived in
Tyrannosaurus rex noses but our new friend here will be perfectly happy in yours.
(The linked fulltext research paper is from the Public Library of Science's flagship peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, but it's the Beeb's notice that has the absolutely OMG EWW pix.) Nature is so cool.
posted by jfuller
on Apr 15, 2010 -
50 comments
The Public Library of Science has been getting some good press lately.
An Editorial at the Sacramento Bee,
The New Scientist,
Washington Post and
The Boston Globe, have all written up The PLoS, the organization founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
They are committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. Check it out at
publiclibraryofscience.org.
posted by Blake
on Aug 19, 2003 -
5 comments