We always enjoy home science experiments and it was fun the other night to learn about a new experiment we could try with our teenage daughter and an iPhone.
As it turned out, the joke was on us.
My husband is an enthusiastic fan of the iPhone store. Last night, he downloaded this application called "Army Knife."
This application has, I kid you not, the following nine items:
unit converter - these are always helpful, especially if you travel
Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company (23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene.
I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers (here, here, ... Read more
Hey high school teachers! Are your students interested in the brain?
Who isn't?
Three winners will win all-expense-paid trips to present their work in a poster session in Seattle at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. Their teachers get to come too! I can tell you, Seattle is a fun place to visit.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a paper in Science(1) that I read on a connection between a mutation in the dopamine D2 receptor and the genetics of learning.
Only, it turned out that when I looked at the gene map...
the mutation mapped in a completely different gene.
I presented the data here and wrote a bit about my surprise at finding this mistake and even greater ... Read more
Right or wrong, the word "dopamine" always conjures up images in my head of rats pushing levers over and over again, working desperately hard to send shots of dopamine into their tiny little rodent brains.
Dopamine, like many other neurotransmitters (chemicals that send signals in the brain), works by binding to proteins on the surface of brain cells and sending a signal ... Read more
In a recent post, I wrote about an article that I read in Science magazine on the genetics of learning.
One of things about the article that surprised me quite a bit was a mistake the authors made in placing the polymorphism in the wrong gene. I wrote about that yesterday. The other thing that surprised me was something that I found at the ... Read more
In its simplest sense, we imagine that learning occurs through a series of positive and negative rewards. Some actions lead to pleasure, others to pain, and it seems reasonable to expect that people will repeat the actions with pleasurable results and avoid those that ended in pain. Yet, we all know people who aren't deterred by the idea of punishment. We all know people who never seem to learn.
Could there be a physical reason, hidden in their genes?
In December 2007, Science published a study by Klein et. al. (1) where they asked if a specific genotype at a location ... Read more
Dopamine, like many other neurotransmitters (chemicals that send signals in the brain), works by binding to proteins on the surface of brain cells and sending a signal ...