Much of Sacks's meat in between is concerned with the great variety of ways musicality and a startling appetite for music can be present in those afflicted by appalling and often all too common brain degenerations and dementias. Among the weirder stories from his long clinical experience are those that show how memory for melody or rhythm can exist where other forms of memory have been destroyed.

The sounds of music

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? "Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Thick Description

"Systems biology" represents a significant shift both in the way biologists think about their field and in how they go about investigating it.

A central tenet of most scientific endeavour is the notion of reductionism—the idea that things can best be understood by reducing them to their smallest components. This turns out to be immensely useful in physics and chemistry, because the smallest components coming from a particle accelerator or a test tube behave individually in predictable ways.

In biology, though, the idea has its limits.

A complete understanding of biological processes means putting the bits back together again -- and that is what systems biologists are trying to do, by using the results of a zillion analytical experiments to build software models that behave like parts of living organisms.

Ultimately, the aim is to build an entire virtual human for researchers to play with.

Biology: All systems go

File under Joy [2, 3, 4]:

As concerns about threats and terrorist activities have become global, so have the rapid transfer of information and communication. The confluence of the globalization of business and the revolution in information storage and transmittal has changed the landscape upon which to build national and international security. This requires a re-examination of the security measures developed during the days of the Cold War to assess whether those tools are still appropriate and to determine how they are affecting the current science and technology enterprises.

...

Moreover, there is concern that terrorists aspiring to apply advanced technology to the development of weapons might develop the technical capability to do so through a university education.

Hence, it is argued that there is a need for special programs to screen foreign students from a range of countries who might be pursuing studies in "sensitive" fields.

Science and Security in a Post 9/11 World

“We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Keep a copy of this study on your desk, so you can point to it the next time your boss catches you napping in your cube.

An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play

Make no mistake: biotech is the next IT.

The busy life of a stem cell (biotech) startup founder

Would you like to sequence your genome in your garage? To grow your stem cells in the kitchen-lab? To hunt for point mutations just for your own sake? Welcome to the coming world of personal biotech.

Biotech DIYers, do not hesitate

One trip to this gruesome Bangkok museum will change what you think about Thailand forever.

Thailand's terrible macabre museum

All round the world, women live longer than men. Why they should do so is not immediately obvious.

Most students of ageing agree that an animal's maximum lifespan is set by how long it can reasonably expect to escape predation, disease, accident and damaging aggression by others of its kind. If it will be killed quickly anyway, there is not much reason for evolution to divert scarce resources into keeping the machine in tip-top condition. Those resources should, instead, be devoted to reproduction.

The paper, Ecological correlates of extra-group paternity in mammals, is rather more technical:

Extra-group paternity (EGP) can form an important part of the mating system in birds and mammals. However, our present understanding of its extent and ecology comes primarily from birds. Here, we use data from 26 species and phylogenetic comparative methods to explore interspecific variation in EGP in mammals and test prominent ecological hypotheses for this variation. We found extensive EGP (46% of species showed more than 20% EGP), indicating that EGP is likely to play an important role in the mating system and the dynamics of sexual selection in mammals. Variation in EGP was most closely correlated with the length of the mating season. As the length of the mating season increased, EGP declined, suggesting that it is increasingly difficult for males to monopolize their social mates when mating seasons are short and overlap among females in oestrus is likely to be high. EGP was secondarily correlated with the number of females in a breeding group, consistent with the idea that as female clustering increases, males are less able to monopolize individual females. Finally, EGP was not related to social mating system, suggesting that the opportunities for the extra-group fertilizations and the payoffs involved do not consistently vary with social mating system.

Live fast, love hard, die young