Twenty students from 14 schools across Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia braved the snow and ice to participate in the DC Regional Brain Bee on Wednesday. Before the competition, Bee judge Dr. Ben Walker of Georgetown University asked how many participants are contemplating a career in the sciences. All twenty competitors raised their [...]
Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are [...]
We are in final edits on a cute little video showing some of the fun stuff people do to celebrate Brain Awareness Week, which this year will be March 15–21. It’s my first foray into video-making since the early 1980s, and I am quite a bit rusty, so this will be an “unauthorized” version, but [...]
The brain of Henry Molaison, the most famous amnesic and perhaps the most-studied neurological patient in history, will go under the knife starting Wednesday morning. Mr. Molaison, who died in December 2008, donated his brain to science; as part of the Brain Observatory Project, his contribution will help thousands of researchers worldwide.
Brain Project scientists [...]
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter [...]
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Posted 03 November 2009
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While the recent deluge of stimulus money to fund science research is very welcome, the chief of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday, the devil is in the details—will the support continue?
“Science is not a 100-yard dash—it’s a marathon,” said Francis Collins during an address at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual [...]
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Posted 21 October 2009
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For a peek into the life and past of famed neuroscientist Eric Kandel, check out the new documentary “In Search of Memory” (which also happens to be the name of his well-regarded memoir). Here in Chicago, it’s playing through the week of Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, at the Facets Cinémathèque in [...]
It’s time for Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, Oct. 15-22 in Chicago. I arrived last night, and swung up to the Hancock Building’s 95th floor for a reception for members and friends of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives tonight. The hostess commiserated with me that it wasn’t sunny enough to see [...]
Someday, socially engaging robots that provide an individualized curriculum for every student could transform the future of education, Terrence J. Sejnowski tells the Dana Foundation in an interview this week. Sejnowski founded Neural Computation, the top journal in neural networks and computational neuroscience, and has developed pioneering algorithms for decades.
In this Q&A, he talks about [...]
If you are in New York City on Friday, Sept. 11, consider spending the day being mindful of morality. The United Nations will play host to a free all-day conference, open to those who pre-register and sponsored by the Nour Foundation, Georgetown University, and Blackfriars Hall at Oxford University, called “Toward a Common Morality.”
It’s the [...]