Here I go…

… like a lamb to the slaughter.

I guess I’m one of the last of PZ’s sacrificial students. As you may have gathered from my clever alias my name is Katie and I’m a senior biology major. I’ve actually known PZ for a number of years–I’m a Morris native and went to high school with his son, Connlann. When I was thirteen I met Connlann in an upper level math class (something esoteric called “algebra”) and learned that Connlann’s dad was a biologist (cool!) and an atheist (he puts people to sleep before surgery??) I soon adopted him as my personal biological encyclopedia and would pester PZ with questions of science any chance I got. When I decided to stay in Morris for college, PZ became my academic advisor and I’ve been harassing him for knowledge ever since.

This year I am applying to medical school and busy preparing my senior seminar on hypothermic treatments in preserving brain cells in cardiac arrest patients. This new treatment is already in use in some hospitals across the country and completely revolutionizing the way we manage cardiac arrest victims. If you’ve come across studies on this in the literature, I’d appreciate your input. I’m especially interested in research on the way brain cells die. Apparently cells that have been oxygen deprived commit apoptosis even after re-oxygenation. For some reason, induced hypothermia after or during resuscitation increases brain cell viability.

Well that’s all I’ve got. Now go ahead. Eviscerate me (bleat!).

Hey folks

Hello. I’m a student in PZMyers’ Neurobiology course. I’ve never blogged before, but hey, there’s a first for everything I guess. My major is Biology. My strengths are ideas and problem solving; weaknesses include porcrastination. When I’m not in class, I enjoy swimming, swing dancing, and Rock & Roll.

I don’t really have any reason for taking neurobiology over any other bio elective I just figured that it would be fun. I’ve found that I have more interest in studying the micro level over the macro level. If I decide that I like neuro, maybe I’ll look into a grad program with neuro, though I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’ll catch you all later.

A Very new kid on the block!

Hello again, it has not even been a day yet, but I feel that I should quick post something. Some of the comments from my previous blog have pointed out interesting ideas as to the correlation between protein folding and memory storage.

Proteins inside neurons would work well in storing and possibly managing information, but they don’t work quickly enough and I suppose it would be fairly difficult to research proteins in the hundreds of thousands of specialized neurons. I was also informed that much of the “protein hypothesis” is old news that was torpedoed in the 60’s for the “synapse hypothesis” due to lack of technology to model such interactions. However, the “protein hypothesis” has reared its head once again in recent years and (I feel) is worth looking into further, although it may still be hard to conceptualize. Also, it was pretty insulting to say that little research has been done in this field and that Allan Pack is the sole researcher still working on this. Many researchers are still busy working away on this subject (don’t believe everything MPR tells ya’).

I haven’t had a chance to read some of the research recommended to me yet as I am still just a kid (a fact that some have pointedly stated to me, thanks for the insight) and still have a life before graduate school (i.e. I run Cross Country, talk to girls, and watch movies outside of studying). Continue to post further links on this please! I will do my best to be more to the point (shorter blogs) spell correctly (sorry Myers) and stop feeding you heathens further fuel for the spiritual flames of damnation :P (I’m a Christian, get over it!). Thanks for the comments, continue to inform me on how I can do a better job at this.

This is the last time I’ll say it and will truly stick to science after this, but I can’t resist, God bless!
~Bright Lights

Note to self: don’t go easy on ’em

I see that Matt Nisbet has organized a panel for the AAAS meetings, in which he has picked a squad of people sympathetic to religion to ‘argue’ that “scientists must adopt a language that emphasizes shared values and has broad appeal, avoiding the pitfall of seeming to condescend to fellow citizens, or alienating them by attacking their religious beliefs”, and he doesn’t have a single person on the panel that might actually challenge them on that recommendation to muzzle the godless. He’s also presenting a paper on “The New Atheism and the Public Image of Science,” and we all know precisely how competent he is on that topic. Unless you’re one of those god-soaked apologists who welcomes a chance to nod approvingly at yet more whining about bad ol’ atheists, that session sounds like a real snooze. We already know what they’re going to conclude.

Remind me to show no mercy.

I’ll give this a shot…

I am currently taking the neurobiology course offered by Dr. Myers, and being as this is my first blog entry on his site, I will give a little introduction about my interest in neurobiology and why I am taking this class.
To begin, I will say that I really do not know much about neurobiology. I know the basic idea: that the brain is responsible for transmitting signals that tell the rest of the body what to do. What I would like to learn more about is the act of signal transduction, specifically the propagation of the action potential down the axon and the role of the sodium-potassium pump. This pump is involved in membrane potential and depolarization, and is also linked to HYPP, or hyperkalemic periodic paralysis. In this disorder, muscle attacks or paralysis occur due to elevated levels of potassium in the bloodstream. I wish to know more about this disorder, and I hope that learning more about neurobiology will help me to accomplish that.
I also hope that Dr. Myers’ experiment will toughen up my skin a bit.

Deranged creationists: here are your instructions

Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He’s all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he’s displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks.

President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley’s decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic freedom.

One amusing bit of background, though: the Evolutionary Informatics Lab didn’t exist. It was a web page, nothing more, so it’s a little strange to complain that it doesn’t have a place at Baylor. What’s actually been refused is that the Evolutionary Informatics Lab doesn’t get to pretend that it’s a Baylor initiative. It’s a bit excessive for Baylor to refuse to host a faculty member’s wacky web page, but there’s nothing to stop them from putting it up on, say, the DI’s servers. It’ll be just as effective there as anywhere. Or, hey, does geocities still exist and offer free hosting?

The other thing, though, is that Dembski then goes on to list all the members of the board of regents, including home phone numbers and addresses. I guess Dembski responds to the fact that he has been Expelled with Intimidation and Incitement, which must be the next two movies in the creationist trilogy.

Oh, and no more links from me to UD while Dembski has his hit list online.

About student posts appearing here

I expected that my students would get a little trial by fire in the furious life of the public intellectual, and the commenters here certainly provided that. Maybe a little too much of that. Dial the ferocity back a notch, OK? Constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated, but the nasty stuff is not. I suppose it’s useful in the sense that it’s going to toughen up the students, but it doesn’t reflect well on you. One thing I’ll be doing in class next week is making up some lists and handing them out in class: a list of the jerks (“You can ignore these commenters, they’re wasting your time”) and a list of the good people (“These commenters say useful stuff, pay attention to them”). That’s right, we’ll be talking smack about you.

Here are some other clarifications and concerns.

[Read more…]

An Introduction

To be quite honest, I’ve never written for a blog before. That seems as good of a sentence as any to start off with. Each week my fellow neurobiology students and I will be writing about something to what we’re studying in class. We may write thoughts on our discussions of the non-fiction books we’re reading, or perhaps things in our everyday lives that pertain to neurobiology that we may not have noticed before. The only instructions we’ve been given are to have fun writing about anything that relates to neurobiology.

Backtracking a bit, I’m a college sophomore majoring in chemistry and biology. The reason I’m taking neurobiology is that I would like to learn more about the biophysics behind nervous systems. So far our neurobiology class is very interesting and enjoyable. I hope that everyone enjoys reading and/or critiquing our compositions over the next few months.