heartsyncwellness.com

News to Use

• The Hive Mind Reader: My Smithsonian profile of Thomas Seeley | The Loom
  In the March issue of Smithsonian, I profile Thomas Seeley, a Cornell scientist who has spent forty years pondering how honeybees make up their collective minds. His discoveries reveal some striking parallels between honeybee swarms and our own brains. There are even some lessons we can learn from bees about how to run a democracy. Reporting this story invol […]
• Brain Cuttings Meets the Woes of the Ebook Business | The Loom
  By weird coincidence, on the same day I announce the launch of an ebook review, I get to enjoy some of the harsh realities of the ebook business. Over the past year I’ve published two collections of my pieces about the brain, Brain Cuttings and More Brain Cuttings. I just found out that Amazon has decided, for now, not to sell them. (Here’s some background.) […]
• Separated at the Cloning Lab: Vint Cerf and Sigmund Freud | Discoblog
  One is a father of the Internet. The other is the father of psychoanalysis. They both rocked shiny-bald heads, classy three-piece gray suits, and full, lovingly manicured, white-gray beards. They were born nearly a century apart, but the similarities are simply too striking to overlook. Clearly, Sigmund Freud and Vint Cerf were created in a cloning lab, in w […]
• The hidden light: My new brain column in Discover | The Loom
  We can see because neurons in our eyes take in visible light and relay electric signals to the brain. But some of the neurons in our retinas detect light that we cannot actually see. In fact, people who lose all their other retinal cells except these neurons are blind. If you shine a light in their eyes and ask them to guess the color, however, they guess ve […]
• Quantum Dots Can Get Nearby Neurons Firing | 80beats
  The quantum dot has many super powers. It can capture light energy for solar panels, team up with LEDs to emit entangled photons, and according to new research, activate neurons in a Petri dish. Quantum dots are tiny bits of semiconductor material, and their unique properties coming from being so small—no more than 10 nanometers across—that they’re governed […]
• The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors | DISCOVER
  The mouse eye captures images via rods and cones in its retina. But behind thatgaze lies a third set of light-sensitive cells that contribute to behavior not to vision. iStockphoto There was no way the blind mice could see, yet somehow, they could. The year was 1923, and a Harvard grad student named Clyde Keeler had set out to compare eyes from different ani […]
• The Formula for Love, Plus the Best of V-Day Science | Discoblog
  Hey, Internet. It’s science here wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day. And we do mean happy—we wouldn’t be here if there weren’t any oxygen in the air right? Let’s start with a pretty picture. Copy all of the below mathematical function and enter it into Google. Just do it. sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from […]
• Cancer Drug Today, Alzheimer’s Drug Tomorrow? Hopeful Results in Mouse Study | 80beats
  Amyloid beta deposits in brain of Alzheimer’s patient. What’s the News: A drug used to cure skin cancer is also a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s, according to a new study in Science. The drug not only reduced levels of amyloid beta—a protein whose elevated levels are a hallmark of the disease—but also reversed cognitive decline. In mice, dramatic effects […]
• Animal Friendships: My cover story for Time magazine | The Loom
  I’ve got a story on the cover of the latest issue of Time. It’s about the evolutionary origins of friendship. For a number of scientists, friendship–in a deep sense of the word–is not limited to our own species. The fact that friendship may be a widespread biological phenomenon could help us better understand why it has such a positive effect on our own heal […]
• In Flies, a Prion-Like Protein Helps Maintain Long-Term Memories | 80beats
  What’s the News: When prions or amyloids make the news, it’s usually because they cause mad cow disease or Alzheimer’s—prions, after all, cause any proteins they touch to become as misfolded as they are, and amyloids, which are large clumps of wadded-together proteins, can jam the workings of cells. But a new study in Cell suggests that a prion-like protein […]