Here is a photography of William James' study. It looks very comfortable, although I would have pulled back the curtains and make the room at bit more sunny! (However, behind the curtains may lead to another room as curtains sometimes were used to close off rooms in William James' days)
Here is what I am reading today:
“For every female that has autism there are four males. To better understand this sex bias, Valerie Hu at the George Washington University Medical Center in Washington DC and colleagues studied a gene implicated in autism called retinoic acid-related orphan receptor-alpha (RORA). This gene controls a molecule that switches many subsequent genes on and off.”
“Don’t judge a bear by its temperature, or so suggests first-of-its-kind data on hibernation physiology. There’s something as-yet-unknown going on with black bear hibernation that slows metabolic rates more than lower body temperatures alone can explain, reports ecological physiologist Øivind Tøien of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.”
“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 250 million television sets in the U.S. and we can guess that the majority of them are turned on a lot of the time. All in all, this is not bad (heck, we enjoy a good movie as much as anyone else) but there are some occasions when you just need to do everyone a favor and turn the TV off. A certain portion of television content is just plain questionable and about as healthy as second-hand smoke.”
“The megapopular multi-platform game Angry Birds has inspired all sorts of weird and amazing creations, but the playable Angry Birds cake, courtesy of the folks from Electricpig, is definitely the most creative one we’ve seen so far.”
“Three-year-old Chase Britton is a medical enigma. Born without a cerebellum, Chase is able to perform activities that have long been thought to be controlled by the cerebellum. Chase can walk, ride a bike, manipulate a pencil … all of this upends conventional medical thinking. He “needs” a cerebellum to do these things, and he doesn’t have one.”
“Creating matter’s strange cousin antimatter is tricky, but holding onto it is even trickier. Now scientists are working on a new device that may be able to trap antimatter long enough to study it. Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (say an electron, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, a positron) with the same mass, but an opposite charge. The problem is that whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, the two annihilate. So any container or bottle made of matter that attempts to capture antimatter inside would be instantly destroyed, along with the precious antimatter sample one tried to put inside the bottle.”
