Björn Brembs

"How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities." - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

Nice overview, IMHO. The author only misses one important contributing factor to the evolution of religion: the impression of being able to control fate. Lack of control leads to depression (in humans and animal models). Most religious rituals (likely acquired by superstition-conditioning) confer the illusion of control (think rain dance). This hypothesis is corroborated by the finding that religious people have a lower incidence of depression. - Björn Brembs

Nature, Vol. 462, No. 7269. (05 November 2009), pp. 51-57. Explanations of cooperation between non-kin in animal societies often suggest that individuals exchange resources or services and that cooperation is maintained by reciprocity. But do cooperative interactions between unrelated individuals in non-human animals really resemble exchanges or are they a consequence of simpler mechanisms? Firm evidence of reciprocity in animal societies is rare and many examples of cooperation between non-kin probably represent cases of intra-specific mutualism or manipulation. Tim Clutton-Brock - Björn Brembs

"The generous funding agreements for universities and research agreed by the previous government last June will be maintained. So the budgets of major research organizations, including the Max Planck Society and the DFG, Germany's main research granting agency, will rise by 5% a year until 2015. Universities will receive a €5-billion (US$7.4-billion) supplement between 2011 and 2015 to improve teaching and research." - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

Hmmmm. I'm begging for one ^_^ - Cassie peakie

I think those who received the invitation from Google itself got 20 invites to give (there is a wave with them). People invited by a regular user that had invitations can't invite others. - Bruno C. Vellutini

Another article on hype - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

Some of us do actually know that IFs are crap. :) Nor are they what we uniquely rely on when considering cancellations. Cost-per-use is a big one, and I don't wonder that the heinously expensive journals fall down. Ask your library about document delivery for the articles you need. - D0r0th34

This month's SOAN is remarkably apropos: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters... - D0r0th34

J. Neurosci., Vol. 29, No. 41. (14 October 2009), pp. 12729-12734. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4366-09.2009 Marcus Raichle - Björn Brembs

"Scientists — and their institutions — should resist the ever-present temptation to hype their results." - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

I agree Daniel - Open Science is the ultimate hype killer - Jean-Claude Bradley

J. Neurosci., Vol. 29, No. 43. (28 October 2009), pp. 13524-13531. Humans and animals are endowed with a large number of effectors. Although this enables great behavioral flexibility, it presents an equally formidable reinforcement learning problem of discovering which actions are most valuable because of the high dimensionality of the action space. An unresolved question is how neural systems for reinforcement learning--such as prediction error signals for action valuation associated with dopamine and the striatum--can cope with this "curse of dimensionality." We propose a reinforcement learning framework that allows for learned action valuations to be decomposed into effector-specific components when appropriate to a task, and test it by studying to what extent human behavior and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity can exploit such a decomposition in a multieffector choice task. Subjects made simultaneous decisions with their left and right hands and received separate... - Björn Brembs

Nat Neurosci, Vol. 12, No. 11. (04 October 2009), pp. 1450-1457. Quentin Gaudry, William Kristan - Björn Brembs

Nat Genet, Vol. 39, No. 9. (12 August 2007), pp. 1140-1144. Ralph Haygood, Olivier Fedrigo, Brian Hanson, Ken-Daigoro Yokoyama, Gregory Wray - Björn Brembs

"like" as in "wtf?" - Bill Hooker

Perhaps that's their undercover advocacy for Open Access to the methods sections? - Daniel Mietchen

PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, No. 10. (21 October 2009), e7527. The question of how people recognize themselves and separate themselves from the environment and others has long intrigued philosophers and scientists. Recent findings have linked regions of the ‘default brain’ or ‘intrinsic system’ to self-related processing. We used a paradigm in which subjects had to rely on subtle sensory-motor synchronization differences to determine whether a viewed movement belonged to them or to another person, while stimuli and task demands associated with the “responded selfâ€� and “responded otherâ€� conditions were precisely matched. Self recognition was associated with enhanced brain activity in several ROIs of the intrinsic system, whereas no differences emerged within the extrinsic system. This self-related effect was found even in cases where the sensory-motor aspects were precisely matched. Control conditions ruled out task difficulty as the source of the differential self-related... - Björn Brembs

Dave McKean is my favorite artist/illustrator! I just have to get the book! - Björn Brembs from Bookmarklet

"Why does a scientific society have to go to Facebook for social web technology? Why doesn't it have that technology built-in? After all, social and society don't share the same etymological ancestry for nothing (i.e., the Latin word socius meaning "companion"). I'm sure over 40,000 members are a large enough base where most current tools would work fine. For instance, imagine you could have a buddy-list of other SfN members. Then, when the program of the next meeting is available, you can choose to pre-populate your itinerary automatically with all the presentations by your buddies." - Björn Brembs

Bjorn, I think you're right, if SfN (or ISMB) made a FB app to track the program, speakers, and attendees, I think that would be pretty fricken cool. And, I think, more productive than trying to reimplement a social networking site from scratch. - Andrew Su

Have you read the Cell paper about light-evoked memory formation? It cites you http://www.cell.com/abstrac... Here's my summary: http://bit.ly/14QAgS - Mo

as soon as I discovered that chemistry did not require killing rats I switched :) - Jean-Claude Bradley

cellular data connections seem like one of the few alternatives - Mike Chelen