"The fact that those claws work by cutting through the skin of the frogs' feet is even more astonishing. These are the only vertebrate claws known to pierce their way to functionality."

wolverine frogs.

'X-Men' frogs sprout claws on demand - Science- msnbc.com

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

awesome a fresh view of the tech singularity -- AI as the birth of third generation replicators -- R3 as T1 or piggy backing on humans and dawn of the post-human and climate change etc seen from new perspective -- I find it interesting that Susan Blackmore sees a choke point ahead --- I know I do and have done for some time but she weaves it into a larger narrative

Does this mean that women will someday choose a mate judging by the size of his robot?

TED | Talks | Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes" (video)

While we are still far from a full understanding of the nature of memory, perception, and meaning, it is nonetheless because of the work of scientists such as Changeux, Edelman, and Rizzolatti that we have a better grasp of the complexity of subjective experiences. Perhaps in the future, questions about higher brain functions will be better understood because of new genetic and neurophysiological discoveries and brain imaging. An unexpected scientific discovery can give us a new insight into something we thought we had always known: mirror neurons, Rizzolatti tells us, "show how strong and deeply rooted is the bond that ties us to others, or in other words, how bizarre it would be to conceive of an I without an us."

How the Mind Works: Revelations

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YouTube - Shark vs Octopus

Words failed me. I stuttered as Prof Vincent Walsh turned off the speech centre of my brain for a few thousandths of a second to demonstrate the power of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a popular way to interfere with the most complex known object in the universe.

How a magnet turned off my speech

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

Organic molecules – in the form of methane – have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The giant planet lies too close to its parent star for the methane to signal life, but the detection offers hope that astronomers will one day be able to analyse the atmospheres of Earth-like worlds.

Organic molecules found on alien world for first time - space - 11 February 2008 - New Scientist Space

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however.

The only thing that is real is in your mind and that is not verifiable.

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times

Ever wondered where your opinions come from, how you manage to be creative, or how you solve problems? Well, don't bother. Psychology studies examining these areas and more have found that while we're good at inventing plausible explanations, these explanations are frequently completely made-up.

In this series of posts, I examine some of the classic findings in psychology that show we have precious little insight into our own thought processes.

Really interesting series.

PsyBlog: What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds: 6 Introspective Insights From Psychology

Kumar and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School have developed a potentially revolutionary drug delivery method, taking advantage of a known master infiltrator of the brain: the virus responsible for rabies, also known as the rhabdovirus. Rabies viruses travel from the site of infection (a local wound bite) to the nerves, through which it gains access to the brain. It is one of the few viruses known to be nearly 100% deadly to mankind, when vaccination has not been administrated. Kumar and colleagues took advantage of the virus’ neurotropic ability by isolating a protein from the viral outer layer used to bind to the brain cells. They then attached an experimental drug to the purified fragment of protein, a small-interfering RNA. This RNA-peptide complex showed highly specific ability to access neurons in the brain that expressed receptors to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This high specificity of drug action was demonstrated to only occur in the brain, and not in other tissues of the body.

Rabies Virus Helps Deliver Drugs into the Brain | GNIF Brain Blogger