THE NEUROSCIENCE OF THE DEBT LIMIT CRISIS, OR WHY ELIMINATING PORK-BARREL SPENDING WAS A BAD IDEA. I've just watched President Obama plead once more for debt-limit sanity (and for sending your own plea to Congress via tweet.) He didn't strike me as terribly hopeful, and Jonah Lehrer has a troubling post at the Frontal Cortex explaining why our brain wiring may make debt-limit sanity near-impossible.
Neuroscience suggests, he writes, that trust (including political trust) is based on reciprocity. Lehrer speculates that getting rid of pork-barrel spending — the you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours favor-trading that until recently ruled Washington — destroyed the brain's basis for building trust. In short, this praiseworthy attempt at civic virtue may have backfired and landed us in today's fiscal quicksand.
Or, as Bill Clinton has suggested, the problem may simply be lack of sleep.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BRAIN. More bad news from neuroscience. Researchers are saying that we have traded our brain size as we age for our lifespan, which is much longer than that of other primates. Brain shrinkage in aging, they claim, is unique to H. sap. It was already known that the brains of macaques, for instance, don't atrophy as they age. Now, the researchers say, the same has been established in chimps, which separated from us only 5 or 6 million years ago.
The hypothesis is that the high energy costs of our big brains makes them difficult to repair. The paper is described and quoted from at length at EarthSky. Another descriptive account is at 80beats.
At Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston is more analytical, pointing out, for instance, that the study did not include really old chimps. She also notes that the brains of dogs shrink as they age too, and wonders if domestication may have something to do with it.
LIFE-AS-WE-DON'T-KNOW-IT — OR AT LEAST NOT YET. A paper described at KFC's Physics arXiv Blog at Technology Review used Bayesian reasoning to bring us additional depressing news: the probability of extraterrestrial life is likely quite small.
it turns out that the actual probability of life emerging is consistent with life being arbitrarily rare. In other words, the fact that life emerged at least once on Earth is entirely consistent with it only having happened here.
Nor is this the first suggestion that it may be a mostly lifeless universe. Geoff Brumfiel reported at the Nature news blog last March on another physics arXiv paper calculating the chance of Earthlike planets at about 1 in 100.
But no despair, please. KFC notes:
Of course, that doesn't mean that we are alone; only that the evidence can't tell us otherwise.
And that evidence could change, KFC tells us. All that would have to happen is for us to find traces of life elsewhere, or to discover that life had come into being more than once on Earth. (Quick, where did we put those arsenic bacteria? Oh, right. In the trash bin.)
I don't know whether this would count as life emerging more than once on Earth, since it wouldn't be self-starting, but a number of scientists are trying to do just that, as Dennis Overbye is reporting at the New York Times. This piece just ran Wednesday, so no blogging about it yet. Maybe next week.
PROTECTIONS FOR HUMAN RESEARCH SUBJECTS. NIH is proposing to overhaul the rules for protecting human research subjects for the first time in 20 years and would like ideas from the citizenry about how to proceed. Heidi Ledford explains it all at the Great Beyond.
LOOK FOR THE HIGGS BOSON AT HOME IN YOUR SPARE TIME! Just put LHC@home 2.0 on your own machine and you can give physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider a hand with their atom-smashing. CERN says:
you can now be part of a global effort to simulate data that physicists will use in their analysis of LHC data, by running simulations of particle collisions on your home computer.
More explanations at International Science Grid This Week. CERN is hoping for thousands of volunteer home particle-colliders to join its distributed computing network. If they get 40,000 home computers together, one of the software developers speculates, they might be able to build a virtual atom-smasher.
C'mon, you know you've always wanted to find the Higgs boson.
ERRATA SHEET %^(, The irreplaceable Bora Zivkovic, who runs the new blog network at Scientific American, points out that in my recent post describing the network, Krystal D'Costa was erroneously identified as Melody Dye. Dye is on the network, but D'Costa writes Anthropology In Practice, and she wrote the post about coffee. But wait, there's more: I also mispelled Carin Bondar's name. Arrrrrrgh! Tearful apologies to all.
HUMAN EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS GET THEIR DAY IN COURT. The stem-cell folks are dancing in the streets. The hed on Jocelyn Kaiser's ScienceInsider post says it all: "Stem Court Ruling a Decisive Victory for NIH". A federal court dismissed a lawsuit that could have shut down federally funded human embryonic stem-cell research. A particularly nice twist is that the new decision came from a judge who had ruled previously against the National Institutes of Health in this lawsuit.
See the Kaiser post for lots of background, and also Julie Rovner at NPR's Shots, John Timmer at Nobel Intent, and Meredith Wadman at Nature's news blog.
Observe researcher street-dancing at the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog at UC-Davis. And don't miss Paul Knoepfler on the flak he's been getting for blogging about stem cells — flak coming from his scientific colleagues, not fundamentalist activists.
At Science Progress, bioethicist Jonathan Moreno observes:
the larger importance of this incident lies in the fact that only research on biology has been subject to such a challenge. Even at the fever pitch of our culture wars, no advocates have thought to bring suit against the federal government for funding, say, geological studies that confirmed that the earth is more than 6,000 years old.
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