BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
Cookin' babies and their brains:
How to Make a Bleeding Zombie Brain:
Brains! Build your own goopy bloody gray-matter:
Ohh my god! like... How-To Eat Halloween Brains! Beverly Hills style...
Ahh Halloween - when neuroscientists find all sorts of fake brains for sale and recipes to create them. This is our yearly reposting of the greatest brain recipe of all time.
Get the recipe below the fold! Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...This recipe was inspired by the one Alton Brown did a few years back. I liked the idea but wasn't thrilled with the recipe, so I came up with my own. By the way, I would suggest getting this mold - it looks a lot more lifelike.
Panna Cotta (brain style) with Pomegranite Sauce
Another in the hilarious vintage BBC Look Around You series, this is 4 - Ghosts. Bwa-ha-ha.
Read the comments on this post..."Our results show that the strain of virus that spawned the U.S. AIDS epidemic probably arrived in or around 1969. That is earlier than a lot of people had imagined," said senior author Michael Worobey.The research is the first to definitively pinpoint when and from where HIV-1 entered the United States and shows that most HIV/AIDS viruses in the U.S. descended from a single common ancestor. The actual ancestral HIV entered the U.S. long before the storied "Patient Zero," Worobey said.
"Haiti was the stepping stone the virus took when it left central Africa and started its sweep around the world," said Worobey, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at The University of Arizona in Tucson. "Once the virus got to the U.S., then it just moved explosively around the world."
But wait Sr. Michael Worobey! Lots of people believe (completely rightly!) that there is no definitive connection between HIV and AIDS! It is clearly a government conspiracy to kill off homosexual men and those terrible Africans! HIV is a completely harmless virus meant to scare us into submission. After all the drug companies are making billions of dollars off the medications. Why do you think they don't want to ship some cheap drugs to Africa - they know the drugs won't help the AIDS patients since HIV isn't connected! But wait... hold on... aren't the HIV drugs supposed to help turn it into AIDS? I'm sooo confused. I guess HIV does turn into AIDS - things are so complicated these days with all these conspiracies! Which one am I supposed to believe?!
Read the comments on this post...You lol'ed at science education spoof Look Around You: Brain, and now for Halloween here's Look Around You: Ghosts. In this nine minute pseudoscience mockumentary you'll learn things like, "Ectoplasm is perfectly safe to eat, and tastes like pig's milk." Spooky!
Dave Kellet jokes about a visual illusion, in his webcomic Sheldon. Click the cropped image to see the full comic strip. Thanks Dave!
Read the comments on this post...In time for Halloween:
Trailer for Central State: Asylum for the Insane. A filmmaker prowls a closed mental institution to "...uncover the mysteries left behind when the facilities closed in 1994." There's lots of shaky handheld camerawork in poorly lit tunnels, and shakier rumours of ghosts, but no exploration into the disappearance of former patients. Homelessness and prisons, that's scary, not the supposed ghosts that a supposed psychic says are "like a tornado" in the building.
What's actually "menacing and still threatening" is not an old hospital but the stigma attached to mental illness that's trotted out every Halloween in stereotypes of madness and violence. Check out some Stigma Busters before dressing up as a zombie axe murderer in a straight jacket this year.
Read the comments on this post...I really like how the hemispheres of the brain are forced to be especially separated by the physical structure of the balloon dog. I wonder if there are any behavioral implications?
-via boingboing- and here's the original.
The artist says this:
Artist's Comments
After months of observations, dissections and a 25 minute intro to clown school, I have finally successfully mapped the inter workings of the domestic balloon dog.NEWS! This piece will be featured in the next issue of "Hi Fructose" magazine.
The anti-drug people want you to think pot will make you go crazy, cause cancer, and do every other hard drug on the planet. The pot heads want you to think that its an all natural feel good drug that wouldn't hurt a fly and will single handedly ease suffering for every single chronic illness. This whole thing leaves us with a whole bunch of confusion?! Who do we believe, the short sighted religious right republicans? Or do we believe a bunch of stoned out hippie freaks?!
As usual the answer is a little of both in regards to mental health:
A new neurobiological study has found that a synthetic form of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, is an effective anti-depressant at low doses. However, at higher doses, the effect reverses itself and can actually worsen depression and other psychiatric conditions like psychosis.
So.. here's the take home message - if you're in an in-patient facility for some sort of psychotic break... don't take a lot of bong hits. However, if you're feeling a little down one day take a couple puffs and you'll feel great. Don't forget the Omni Brain disclaimer though:
The authors are not physicians, psychologists, therapists, sociologists or even remotely funny. The content on this website does not, and is not intended to constitute medical or life advice. It should not be relied upon when making medical (or any) decisions. It is not intended as a substitute for advice from your physician, healthcare provider, any anti-psychiatry crank, PETA member, religious figure, AIDS denialist, Holcaust Denier, Scientologist or really any crank at all.
You can find the article in the next issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Read the comments on this post...
Omni Brain met its fundraising goal of $1000 for music education programs through DonorsChoose. Thank you to everyone who's donated. You rock! Now 30 kids will too.
But it'd be okay, you know, permissible (haha) to exceed our goal if you'd still like to help a Lisa Simpson. A few of the programs Omni Brain earmarked are still seeking fulfillment. Here, an Indianapolis music teacher describes his/her wish to teach kids science and music together:
I want to set up a program for fourth through sixth grade having students work on the scientific method of experimenting with sound. The resources I have requested will give students in all three grades the opportunity for this program. Also, this project would satisfy the Music Standard applying Music to other subjects.A lot of times I apply Music to Math and Language Arts, but I have not had much opportunity to apply Music to Science because of supplies. You can help bridge that gap with supplying us with [several SciQuest Sound Demonstration kits] and a wave model.
More info at The Science of Sound in the Music Classroom. Alternatively, clicky here to donate. There's also a request for science videos that's close to my Channel N video heart, though I think the RIAA ought to fund this one in gratitude for the guy's honesty and restraint in not downloading the whole series off a torrent instead of paying $2300. PBS, meet the new world..
Thanks again. :-)
NOTE: the above image "Kill Bill Nye" is a joke based on a movie, please don't go killing Bill. We like him a lot.]
Read the comments on this post...You're seeing other ScienceBlogs readers donate, now join the love train*.
A rare serious post from Steve explains The Real Mozart Effect and why we should support music education with DonorsChoose. Playing an instrument has cognitive and developmental benefits.
That reason formed an episode of The Simpsons, too: Lisa's Sax. Homer wants to buy an air conditioner but Lisa needs help to nurture her brain with more than Springfield Elementary has to offer. Unsure what to do, he walks out of Moe's toward It Blows, with $200 in his pocket. He sees a music store and says, "Musical instrument? Could that be a way to encourage a gifted child? Just give me a sign!"
Just then, the music store owner places a sign in the window reading "Musical Instruments: The Way To Encourage A Gifted Child" and so Lisa's music career begins with a new saxophone. Homer's sacrifice leaves him steamy in hot weather but he's very happy since Lisa thrives.
Now, another gifted young Lisa needs help to play sax and you can use your altruism to feel as good as Homer. If you'd like her (or him) to benefit from music education, click now to help fund a worthy project.
Also! Word from ScienceBlogs parent Seed Media Group is that donors can enter to win one of these:
To enter, donors (new or previous) can simply forward an e-mail receipt from DonorsChoose to scienceblogs@gmail.com. Prize drawing on October 22nd and 29th. "At the end of the whole DonorsChoose drive, we'll take everyone who ever entered the drawing and draw one final winner for the iPod," said Seed's Ginny Hughes.
Experience it yourself: donating is full of win.
Read the comments on this post...Look Around You: Brain. "The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. ... The opposite of the brain is probably the bum." Brief vintage BBC parody of science education films about the brain. Watch through to the end, when a brain in a jar is rewarded with a special treat for performing a task.
Read the comments on this post...
brainscannr by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson. Try it with your name. Hot! :)
Read the comments on this post...
Some wonderful individual donated a large amount of money to our Donors Choose Challenge. Which means that we only have $135 to go! Please please take a few minutes out of your day to donate a few dollars toward Science and Music education in public schools!
If you don't know what Donors Choose is here's the skinny:
DonorsChoose.org is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.
I mean really! how can you not want to help out this project?!
I teach General Music in the Indianapolis Public Schools district. We are projected to have over three hundred students in the school in grades K-6.According to the Music standards, I am suppose to teach the science of sound starting in grade 4. However, I do not have any equipment to show the students the physical science of sound.
I want to set up a program for fourth through sixth grade having students work on the scientific method of experimenting with sound. The resources I have requested will give students in all three grades the opportunity for this program. Also, this project would satisfy the Music Standard applying Music to other subjects.
A lot of times I apply Music to Math and Language Arts, but I have not had much opportunity to apply Music to Science because of supplies. You can help bridge that gap with supplying us with these sound kits and a wave model.
My project needs a Wave Model and several SciQuest Sound Demonstration kits. The cost of this proposal is $549, which includes shipping for any materials requested and fulfillment.
Which way is this dancer rotating? Clockwise or Counterclockwise?
So I'm right brained according to this test which means that I'm into these things:
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling "big picture" oriented imagination rules symbols and images present and future philosophy & religion can "get it" (i.e. meaning) believes appreciates spatial perception knows object function fantasy based presents possibilities impetuous risk taking
but not these:
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language present and past math and science can comprehend knowing acknowledges order/pattern perception knows object name reality based forms strategies practical safe
Newspapers should be fined for publishing this crap.
It will only take you two clicks to take care of this one (and you could even do it from work, home, and the coffee shop!). Shelley from Retrospectacle needs your help to win a $10,000 blogging scholarship. Just think she could pay off her student loans and maybe even have a couple bucks left over for a computer and some beers!
So please head over to the voting site and click on Shelley Batts' name!
Thanks!
Read the comments on this post...Via Metacafe, here's an audio/visual illusion involving reading lips and seeing voices (nothing to do with synaesthesia) called the McGurk Effect.
Read the comments on this post...Yeah yeah - I know... I've posted every single thing that's come out of this ridiculous event.
Read the comments on this post...
I'm always proud when something wonderful comes out of the school I'm attending. Here at the University of Illinois we have this wonderful wonderful publication called The Booze News. You can find it at places like Subway, where the lines are so long you can get through the entire intelligently written piece of literature waiting for your meatball sandwich. This wonderful periodical has pictures of sorority girls making out with each other and dudes showing their muscles while practically falling on the floor. There are also great quizzes like what kind of cheater are you? All of this in a free publication!? Yes it's amazing isn't it!
Well this publication has expanded into neighboring Missouri where some pissed off people (3 or 4 at least) got the attention of CNN who has this to say about this wonderful publication:
But some Missouri students and local business owners aren't laughing. A Booze News book review about interracial gay adoption that referred to the two male parents as "freaks" drew a formal protest and request that university officials censure the paper.Several downtown business owners have thrown out the free paper, which has published seven issues, afraid of offending customer sensibilities. Even some campus fraternity houses deem the material too edgy for members.
Ohhh the Humanity!! Can't we just enjoy our stupid offensive publications in peace?!
Read the comments on this post...Head over to collegescholarships.org to vote for Shelley being the coolest awesomest blogger. We gotta get her some $$$ so she can buy me some drinks next time we hang out!
Do some voting by clicking right here!
And if you want a good reason to vote for Shelley (besides her blog Retrospectacle) she can kick some ass at Flippy Cup. That's her and I at the end of the table, after doing our drinking and flipping, watching the neuroscience flippy cup team kick the ass of the coast guards. Who ever said sailors could drink was lying - we beat them every single time.
Just because Chimps are Funny:
And no bitching about my use of the word monkey! Via Neatorama
Read the comments on this post...The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Mario R. Capecchi, Oliver Smithies, and Sir Martin J. Evans for inventing a technique called Gene Targeting.
According to the NYTimes:
The three scientists were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.To use this technique, researchers introduce a genetic change into mouse embryonic stem cells. These cells are then injected into mouse embryos. The mice born from these embryos are bred with others, to produce offspring with altered genes.
The first mice with genes manipulated in this way were announced in 1989. More than 10,000 different genes in mice have been studied with the technique, the Nobel committee said. That's about half the genes the rodents have.
''Gene targeting has pervaded all fields of biomedicine. Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come,'' said the citation for the $1.54 million prize.
So what may you ask are the real uses for gene targeting?! Yes! Making crazy freakin' animals that do stuff like glow in the dark and fly!
Ohh yeah.. this technique will lead to millions of lives being saved... but come on - glow in the dark mice! that has to be why they created this great technique, fully deserving of a Nobel Prize.
Ok... maybe there aren't flying mice yet.
Read the comments on this post...
Music education in the United States has typically been one of the first thing to be cut when it comes to balancing the budget. This is a horrible shame since music is one of those things (above any of the other arts) that has a wide ranging effect on peoples intellectual achievement. One of the holy grails in education and psychology is skill transference. Imagine being able to train one ability that positively affects the performance of many many other abilities. Sounds a bit ridiculous eh?! Well, music seem to be one of the only things that can have this effect. Psychologists have termed this Far Transfer.
According to an article in Psychological Science by E. Glenn Schellenberg from the University of Toronto, students, regardless of socio-economic status, showed wide ranging improvements in all of the sub-sections of the WISC-III (Wechsler, 1991) when they were involved in a music training program. This effect was very specific to music and did not appear for the control groups who either did nothing or studied drama. Check out this graph:
You can see this effect is relatively small but the fact that music training has this type of effect at all is absolutely incredible. So how do music lessons do this?!
According to the article,
Music lessons involve long periods of focused attention, daily practice, reading musical notation,
memorization of extended musical passages, learning about a variety of musical structures (e.g., intervals, scales, chords, chord progressions), and progressive mastery of technical (i.e., fine-motor) skills and the conventions governing the expression of emotions in performance.
Music has all sorts of other documented benefits to education. To read about many many more visit the American Music Conference site.
So how can we support music education in this country? Yes I have an answer! Donors Choose! This wonderful charity,
is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.
We have established some funds that support music and science that I think you'll be interested in. So please please help out the teachers and donate some money to one or all of the funds by clicking on the widget below!
We got an exciting new banner today from Len the creator of Monster-by-Mail! Head over to his website for some absolutely phenomenal pieces of monster art! (Ohh... and make sure you buy stuff or order your own monster.
Len's banner is now going to rotate with our wonderful old banner done by my cousin Erin.
Here they are :)
Check out the video of him drawing our brains!
It's that time of year again when the most exciting set of awards for us here at Omni Brain are announced. If you don't know what the Ig Nobels are you're missing out on a very important part of science! According to some article at MSNBC "The annual no-rules awards ceremony, where flying paper airplanes and interrupting honored speakers are commonplace, pokes fun at bizarre and improbable achievements in real-life scientific research."
This year some of my favorite prizes were:
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup. REFERENCE: "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North, Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.
Of course we can't forget the Gay Bomb!
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.
Too bad the Air Force wasn't there to accept :(
Head over to the Annals of Improbably Research for all the exciting results!
Read the comments on this post...
Have you ever wanted a pre-frontal lobotomy?! I know I have!
Just think by severing connections to your pre-frontal cortex (or just destroying the whole darn thing instead) you can have drastic personality changes! You could even skip that and go straight to mental retardation! Of course we're not sure here at Omni Brain what technique they're using up there in Canada for the lobotomies there are just so many great ones!
You could drill holes in people's heads and then inject alcohol, you could drill a hole in the head and just remove whatever brain matter happens to be sitting around there, or... you could use the classic ice pick through the tear duct then do a little hammering and wiggling. Personally I think I would go for the hammered and wiggled ice pick. I'm betting there isn't much drilling involved in the Canadian procedure. One would imagine that the insurance costs would be much higher for those techniques.
Ok.. I'm full of shit. This is really an art installation. Check out the semi not safe for work video below (there's some potty mouth):
-via Neatorama-
Also.... you cheap bastards need to donate to that there charity over in the sidebar. PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
Read the comments on this post...Via The Center for Narcolepsy at Stanford School of Medicine], this video explains:
Various narcoleptic episodes in dogs. Sporadic cases of narcolepsy in dogs is due to hypocretin peptide deficiency while the familial form is due to mutations in one of the two hypocretin receptor genes (hcrtr2). Various dogs are shown here in a clip narrated by Dr. Emmanuel Mignot.
Or for the tabloid take, watch Skeeter the Narcoleptic Poodle from Inside Edition. "Skeeter's troubles staying awake are heartbreaking..."
Visit the Sleep Foundation to learn more.
Read the comments on this post...Well... the Klingons and Furries finally got together and had battle... in a bowling alley. Here's some of the exciting (WEIRD) results:
If this girl only knew...
See the rest of the flickr set here.
Via BoingBoing
I wonder if any of the Furries went home with the Klingons? What kind of unholy being would that produce?
Read the comments on this post...I like science and music so we want to help raise a boat load of money for education through Donors Choose. This is a great organization that...
is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.Proposals range from "Magical Math Centers" ($200) to "Big Book Bonanza" ($320), to "Cooking Across the Curriculum" ($1,100). Any individual can search such proposals by areas of interest, learn about classroom needs, and choose to fund the project(s) they find most compelling. In completing a project, donors receive a feedback package of student photos and thank-you notes, and a teacher impact letter.
So help us reach our goal of $1000! Any amount of money is greatly appreciated and you can keep up with the donations on the handy cash-o-meter over there on the sidebar. Or you can come back to this post and click on this little widget:
We're particularly interested in helping charities in the sciences and music, like these:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
I Q Mind Brain Memory Self Help Library.
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