SMF

Lemur. You either forgot what you wrote, or can't read what you wrote, in response to my comment about low ocean levels during glacial periods. SM

I can probably come up with some scheme by which someone could fall down and break their heart. SM

Speaking of flensing, I used to tell students that skin is necessary to keep people from getting ill. Everybody would get sick if they could see everybody else without their skin on. I don't know about uses, but skin is our biggest organ. It is very important for temperature control (sweat glands and surface capillary beds), it makes you water proof and prevents dehydration by keeping water in, it is a sensory organ, it protects against invasion of foreign organisms and maintains a group of immune cells ready to report and deal with a problem, and it maintains a tough surface against wear, tear, and UV light. In short, its function is to protect and serve. SM

Lemur, I don't think that plate tectonics are affected much by surface temperature. SM

I find it useful to remember that when talking about race and complicated traits that it is almost always the case that within group differences are much greater than between group differences regardless of the amount that the differences might be partitioned into genetic or cultural components. With this in mind it is inappropriate to use race as a blanket definition for what any one individual might be like. SM

The crust of the earth is less dense than the mantle, so it floats on top. Thicker continental regions of crust rock (largely granite) have a little higher altitude on top, but also depress the mantle on the bottom a little below the crust mean. Thinner regions of ocean crust rock (largely basalt) have a lower altitude on top where the ocean water collects. Crust rock is approximately 2.65 times as dense as water, so moving it around between the top of continental crust and ocean crust regions is not a zero sum game, but effect the ocean and continental altitudes differentially such that, for example, the ocean is relatively lower during glacial periods and higher during interglacials. Search for "Isostasy," which is the description for the study of these factors, and you will find research such as this- http://www.ualberta.ca/~dumberry/geoph440/papers/peltier_areaps04.pdf. SM

How can pulse rate tell what disease you are suffering from? It can't. SM

From the Swedish twin database this study finds for male homosexuality that 34% to 39% of the variance is explained by genetic background, while it is less for women at 18% to 19%- http://www.springerlink.com/content/2263646523551487/ SM

I get a small e-mail newsletter, What's New, from Bob Park (U. of Maryland physicist). In his discussion of what happened at the reactors in Japan he states the following regarding the hydrogen explosion- "A hydrogen bubble is explosive only when mixed with a critical level of oxygen. During the 1979 Three-Mile Island accident, it was feared that a large hydrogen bubble in the containment dome would explode rupturing the building. It did not happen, but I have repeatedly urged that a tuft of "platinum wool" always be attached at the high points of nuclear containment buildings where hydrogen bubbles would be expected to collect. The platinum would catalyze the oxidation of hydrogen back to water before the mixture reaches an explosive level. The one-time cost would be trivial." This suggestion seems very simple. Can someone evaluate this claim? SM

Try here- http://www.smokemachines.net/ Also I think that Zero toys sells smaller ones.

I an guessing that when historical facts are treated rigorously a resulting study might be published as anthropology, psychology, sociology, or even phenology. SM

Thinker_jeff, I retrieved the two links from a quick search and picked them because they were full text access. There is a lot of high quality information out there. I strongly recommend, if you don't already do this, that you use Google Scholar for your searching if you want just scientific articles. SM

Awesomeone, in a science forum you can check your perceptions without any doubt, at least for yourself. Simply post your dreams as they occur and then wait to see if anything comes true. This will help you decide for yourself, but this wouldn't provide evidence for the rest of us because we all have no idea who you are or what your agenda is. Give it a shot. SM

Thinker_Jeff. The second link is not a blog, it is a website where a cognitive guy is making a book chapter that he wrote available. I read about half and skimmed the rest and it appears to be a serious treatment to me. Notice that Petit cites references to support his arguments in the text and provides the full citations at the end. For me, this is the absolute minimum requirement for an online science article. In any case, I am a more mechanistic neuroscience guy and not really very interested in cognitive science, which should explain my comments so far. I would be very interested if you would research the cognitive controversy and bring a neutral summary here for discussion. That could be a lot of fun. The disappearing psych section of this forum is a part of an elaborate joke that claims that SFN has been given to the Scientologists to promote their version of science. You are going to be able to trade blog comments with John Travolta and Tom Cruise! Oh boy! SM

Thinker_jeff, you have me confused. In my first comment on this thread (#9) I commented on your original post on itchy-scratchy, and then amplified PhDwannabe’s comment regarding the error of trying to think of the brain in terms of compartmentalized regions that have the organizational sense of the output (i.e. localization of complex function). Take a look at the Wikipedia article on mirror neurons. Even though it is a decent summary it would be easy for someone seeking knowledge about this to think of a mirror neuron as a localized single processing unit with a single assigned function. I cautioned that neuroscientists don’t make this mistake, but you disagreed. So, in my second post (#11) I expanded what I said further, and to this you respond in a manner that agrees with my first post. I don’t know how to respond further. I think that you are trying to put me into the controversy between cognitive groups regarding what they think is important about the mirror neuron concept. I don’t care about this. These folks are all very smart and will be able to work out their differences as more neuroscience data become available. For your, and other’s reading pleasure (I hope you like it heavy duty) here are a couple of references to articles about this issue relative to how cognitive scientists are thinking about it. SM http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2773693/?tool=pmcentrez http://jean-luc.petit.over-blog.com/article-22972759-6.html

Thinker_jeff, you misunderstand. I am not denying that neurophysiologists have recorded from single neurons that react to both a specific activity of the self and the same activity observed in another individual, or from a yellow Volkswagon detector neuron for that matter. The problem is with how to interpret this information. By the way, the yellow VW idea is from the title of an old philosophical neuroscience paper. The problem is with how this information is interpreted. It is impossible to have a single neuron designated specifically to identify every object or activity that might have significance to ones perceptions or actions. This raises questions, such as, what happens if one of these neurons dies, or what about when someone learns something new? The big gorilla in this room is the fact that there just aren't enough neurons available to accomplish this task in this way. What is required is an assembly of neurons that make a more generalized processor that can accomplish many more tasks than the number of individual neurons in the circuit. There will be neurons in such circuits that will, in the lab, respond to specific stimuli, but there is no way to test it completely to find out what other stimuli it might be involved in processing. No one denies that we are able to recognize Volkswagons, or a mirror activity in someone else, but the brain just isn't designed around a giant library of neurons, each of which stores single concepts and objects or whatever. What the neurophysiology does is to provide data regarding the inner workings of cognitive function that can, in turn, be used for more experiments. SM

Large corporations and big investors are pretty good at making risk assessments to guide their projects. Doesn't the continued existence of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act suggest that fission plants are an unacceptable monetary risk? SM

In a group of wild humans, hunter gatherers for example, when somebody scratches it makes great sense for the rest of the group who observe this to be vigilant for some kind of biting insect and up the criteria for what of the gazillion itchies one has that should be scratched. Because we all believe that the brain is a biological computing mechanism, and not some magic organ, there has to be a calculated representation of the connections required to link someone else’s behavior with one’s own. If we explain this linkage by a neuron, such as the mirror neuron concept, we are back to ancient and silly ideas represented by Phrenology and the “yellow Volkswagen detector” neuron. This localization of function concept (exclusive of simple sensory pathways), that PhDwannabe mentions, is one of the important philosophical concepts that neuroscience dropped in the middle of the last century. But if there isn’t an evolutionarily designed neuron for recognizing every possible image of biologically significant images, there very certainly is neural processing of these data in the brain. It would require the ability to observe neural networks that might process something at the level of the itch/scratch observations in order for cognitive neuroscience to progress. I haven’t checked lately, but I think there is some progress, but what is currently ubiquitous are neurophysiological recordings of action potentials of neurons, and the signal would be detected this way, even though this neuron might have many other functions, and promote the idea of a “mirror neuron.” Most thoughtful neuroscientists are aware that this is only a placeholder for the computational concept. I don’t think that neuroscience is still at such a primitive level that major upheavals will happen every 5 to 10 years. I think it will be successive refinements of current ideas, with very few completely abandoned, but it is still wide open for creating successful scientific careers. SM

Endothermic Have mammary glands Have hair

Airbrush provided the solar day length, while Mercury's sidereal day is 58 days, 15 hours. Earth's sidereal day is only four minutes shorter than its solar day. SM

Marat, I don't necessarily disbelieve your assertion, you just haven't provided any evidence. I posted what I could find quickly that was not behind a paywall. I am skeptical of the weapons/stature idea (lacking any scientific evidence) because, although violent confrontations provide fairly strong selection pressure for the combatants it is diluted by other factors, not the least being promotion of survival of those who cooperate with their fellows best in a desperate situation. Also, very many more men die from other causes between short periods of conflict and there is a disproportionately large number of men who don't die in battle because they avoided the conflict. SM

Greippi. It is the growth phase that is 6 to 8 weeks, while the rest phase is 3 to 4 months. If you clipped off a hair at the beginning of the rest phase it could be 6 months before a new mature hair was completed. SM

Elas. It seems to me to be a little bit hasty, and bordering on conspiracy theory, to accuse a significant area of science and a whole education system of hiding scientific evidence when you can only provide gossip and no verifiable evidence to support your assertions. SM

Perhaps male stature has more to do with the tall guys, who don't go to war, but stay home and are selected by the ladies. http://www.antropo.uni.wroc.pl/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/PAWLOWSKI_ET_AL_NATURE_2000-1.pdf http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1516/709.full.pdf http://dfred.bol.ucla.edu/SalskaFrederickEtAl-2008-PAID-ConditionalMatePreferencesHeight.pdf SM

Lemur: I am unable to tell what you are saying here. SM