This morning, Mr. F and I traveled down the coast to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where our friend Skirmantas Janusonis kindly provided an opportunity to photograph six human brains he and colleague Scott Grafton were preparing to use for the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience. Skirmantas Janusonis and I Examine Six Read more…
Most of us in higher education are struggling to understand the remarkable level of alcohol consumption evidenced by our students. One of my clicker questions this past quarter, in conjunction with a discussion of how the brain protects us from toxins, asked how many students had vomited from drinking alcohol. Read more…
As we begin to understand more of the parallels between autism and scientific reasoning, it comes as less of a surprise that people with autism completed Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM), which measures hypothesis testing, problem-solving, and learning, up to 40% faster than controls matched for IQ. According to the Read more…
Our youngest, Karla, turned 25 today, and drew this picture to commemorate the occasion! If you want to see more of her art, she has her own website. Karla has autism, so we were intrigued by a student presentation in my Sensation/Perception class this quarter on a paper by Simon Read more…
Japanese researchers have reported in Nature that they have successfully inserted the gene for green flourescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria into primates. Previous teams in the US have been successful in inserting genes into primates, but this is the first report of a genetic change in primates that is Read more…