This all-day workshop focuses on assessing the findings and recommendations made in the recently released report, Integrity in Scientific Research: Creating an Environment that Promotes Responsible Conduct, and discussing strategies for implementing those recommendations. Scientists, scholars, educators, research administrators, government officials, representatives of scientific societies, professional and institutional associations, and the public are invited to participate in the assessment and discussion.

Just in time ... maybe Dr. Schön would like to attend.

Town Meeting on Integrity in Scientific Research

The Fifth Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension is a meeting of scientists and individuals who are working toward the expansion of human health and longevity.

The Foresight Institute sent me an announcement for this conference, which offers the following speakers, among others: Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, and scientist; Gregory Benford, author and UC Irvine physics professor; Robert Freitas, author of _Nanomedicine_ and chief scientist at Zyvex; Ralph Merkle, formerly at Zyvex, now an Alcor director, and a VP for the Foresight Institute; Max More, of the Extropy Institute; Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology.

Fifth Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension

From the back cover:

To those interested in a life in science, Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate, speaks with warmth and pride of his calling. He deflates the myths surrounding scientists -- invincibility, superiority, genius; instead, he argues that it is common sense and an inquiring mind that are essential to the makeup of a scientist.

This book, published in 1979, was the second in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series; Amazon has ten sample pages available for your review. The first book in the series was _Disturbing the Universe_, by Freeman Dyson.

Advice to a Young Scientist

Written for anyone wondering why we are the way we are, this book is a timely and important collection that spans the science, the promise, and the potential pitfalls of a field moving so quickly that its achievements may alternately delight and trouble us, but almost always surprise us.

This new book is freely available online.

The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

A Biological Understanding of Human Nature: A Talk With Steven Pinker | Edge

Many interesting properties of the working human brain can be studied, including spontaneous activity and signal processing following external stimuli.

A subscription to _Reviews of Modern Physics_ is required for access to the full text, but this study is comprehensive -- 93 pages in length.

Magnetoencephalography: theory, instrumentation, and applications to noninvasive studies of the working human brain

This article gives an overview of the different functional brain imaging methods, the kinds of questions these methods try to address and some of the questions associated with functional neuroimaging data for which neural modeling must be employed to provide reasonable answers.

Neural Modeling and Functional Brain Imaging [PDF]

From Nanochick: This is an article that talks about how caffeine works. It's pretty interesting stuff. I think I have somehow overloaded my DARPP-32-like-protein, because I can drink caffeine right up until I fall asleep.

Me, too! And yet it still works as desired in the morning. Why is that?

New clues about what gives caffeine its kick

The analysis indicates that language, on the evolutionary time scale, is a very recent development, having evolved only in the last 100,000 years or so.

NYT covers the Nature publication.

Language Gene Is Traced to Emergence of Humans

FOXP2 is the first gene relevant to the human ability to develop language.

Subscription required for full text.

Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language