January 2012
11 posts
The Cost of Knowledge →
Science should be open. If you support that sentiment, this initiative is good news. It is a call for researchers to declare a boycott of Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals in the world. Elsevier makes enormous profits off the free labor of scientists all over the world. Scientists do the research, write the papers, do the editing and peer-review, and then the paper...
Psychedelics Are Back
In the scientific limelight, that is. Sort of. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a great deal of optimism about the potential of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms, were touted as the cure for everything from depression and unhappy relationships to serious crime. As the hippie era wound down and these drugs were made illegal,...
Why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it... →
Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which being exposed to a word or a stereotype can make us more likely to later act according to the prior stimulus, even if we have no conscious recollection of it. For example, people are more likely to complete a word stem like “TH” with “think” if they were previously exposed to that word. One widely cited study published in 1996...
The Discovery of Vitamins
The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the disease. The navy was plagued by illness: between 1878 and 1881, in a sample of a thousand men, each man in the...
