Student Report: Neurogenesis, where have you been?

Hello again! It’s amazing the things that are going on right under our noses (undergraduate noses that is). I was wondering why we can continue to form so many memories in a life time with no new cell growth after a specific age. If every memory is a new reconstruction of interacting neurons firing off with each other, wouldn’t we need new cells eventually so that the others can maintain function? I suppose this isn’t too unrealistic with billions of neurons and trillions of connections, but the idea of neurogenesis sure explains a lot.

According to a recent article from BioED, neurogenesis suggests that we can create new neurons while learning new material or having new experiences throughout life (throughout life meaning, past the age of 60). These new neurons apparently are only observed in the olfactory bulb and hippocampus of the brain, which makes sense since you are constantly creating new memories and experiencing new smells. But how neurogenesis does this is still a mystery although there are some ideas floating around out there. Check out some of these links if any of this piques your interest.

We “naive” atheists

It’s bad enough everyone is using this “New Atheists” label: various critics keep inventing new ones. Some letter writer to the Independent has decided to call us “Naive Atheists” because we are unaware of the implications of atheism.

However, let’s forget about the unfortunate history of atheism for a moment and concentrate instead on its philosophical implications.

Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.

What a silly, silly man. If anyone is naive here, it’s someone who thinks atheists must all be amoral robots, and that unpleasant consequences mean you should reject the truth value of a claim. But now he’s going to tell us he’s got evidence for his argument, straight from the mouth of an atheist.

[Read more…]

Basics: Master Control Genes and Pax-6

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

One concept that is sometimes used in developmental biology is the idea of the “master control gene” or “master switch” — a single gene whose expression is both necessary and sufficient to trigger activation of many other genes in a coordinated fashion, leading to the development of a specific tissue or organ. It’s a handy concept on which to hang a discussion of transcription factors, but it may actually be of rather limited utility in the real world of molecular genetics: there don’t seem to be a lot of examples of master control genes out there! Pax-6 is the obvious one, a gene that initiates development of the eye, and other genes may be mentioned in certain stem cell pathways, but even in the eyes of vertebrates, for example, eye development is more complicated than a single switch, and similarly, many other developmental processes seem to use multiple or redundant regulatory controls — the cases where we have a single gene bottleneck are either rare or poorly represented in the literature.

They’re still at least pedagogically useful, though — it’s a simple case of imposition of a specific developmental pathway on a patch of tissue.

[Read more…]

Two countries separated by a common idiocy

I had not known that the UK actually had a legal requirement “in all state schools for pupils to take part in a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian nature.” How … quaint. That must create a fair number of atheists, since I think I would probably have reacted with some resentment if my school had shuffled me off to chapel every day, just on the general principle. And I’ve learned something else: the UK government has an infestation of holy muckity-mucks, almost like ours! When Dr Paul Kelley tried to turn the school he runs into a a fully secular institution, he was told he couldn’t do that:

One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans. Religion, they added, was ‘technically embedded’ in many aspects of education.

[Read more…]

I’m going to ruin the punchline for you

Scott has discovered an odd little book: The Faith Equation: One Mathematician’s Journey in Christianity. Yeah, another guy finds Jesus and uses math and science after the fact to claim Christianity is the one true answer. What, you may ask, is this wonderful faith equation that leads directly to one of the Abrahamic religions?

Faith = (Mind) + (Heart)+ (Will)

Hey, who knew you could make pablum out of crap? At least now nobody needs to buy the damn book.

Where could we possibly find $4 million?

Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we’re throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let’s just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?

What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.

The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.

Shall we trade three years of science for less than an hour’s worth of war? That sounds like a no-brainer to me. The observatory doesn’t even kill anybody in normal operation. Or is that considered a strike against it?

This is how to communicate science!

The Burke Museum did good with their opening day festivities for their new squid exhibit. Geoff Arnold visited the public squid dissection in Seattle, and returned with photos. We should all do more of this: not just talk about science, but get out there and get our hands dirty with our fellow citizens and show them really cool stuff. It sounds like they got a large crowd, too, with enthusiastic kids.