Robert L. Spitzer retired years ago but his influence has not. That’s why his recantation last month of his own paper, research purporting to show that therapy could turn some homosexuals into heterosexuals, has such extraordinary resonance. The work of Dr. Spitzer, a psychiatrist and Columbia University emeritus professor–who actually got homosexuality removed from the medical list of mental disorders in 1973–rippled across society.
Robert Spitzer has recanted his paper claiming homosexuality can be changed.
This is not the usual apology for a scientific error. “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy,” Dr. Spitzer has written in a letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which published his paper in 20…
Figuring out whether someone committed plagiarism is usually straightforward. You compare the two texts to see how much of one appears verbatim in the other. Even if some words have been changed, there is often a pattern of similarities that can’t be coincidental. It’s not that hard.
Determining whether someone swiped an idea, or a set of ideas, is another beast entirely. In a review in the June 7 issue of The New York Review of Books, the possibility is raised that Terence W. Deacon, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, borrowed heavily and failed to credit core ideas in his book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, from at least two scholars. Here’s what the NYRB reviewer, Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, writes:
One would never think from reading Incomplete Nature that the author’s …
Two phantoms have come back to life, making their presence felt in the real world. One is a phantom body locked in a paralyzed patient’s mind, which has taken control of a robot arm. The other is a research venture, locked into a company that vanished in the economic disaster of 2008, only to reappear as academic science, supported by major universities, that today scored a dramatic success.
But what’s truly amazing here are the patients, doing what you see in this photo: A woman named Cathy, who hasn’t been able to move anything below her neck for 15 years, is drinking coffee from a bottle she lifted to her lips, with a computerized arm that is wired into her brain. The connection, a plug in the top of her head, is called BrainGate, and it was developed by the Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue and his team. What BrainGate and Cathy have done, along with similar feats by a…
In one sense this is just a spat between an author and a reviewer. But it’s worth looking at closely because it’s also about how science gets communicated and translated, summarized and (possibly) dumbed-down.
Here’s a brief dissection of the back-and-forth (the quotes are from Chabris’s review):
“Visual information from the left eye does not go only to the brain’s right hemisphere; information from the left visual field does.”
Chabris points out an error. Lehrer acknowledges it. Point Chabris.
You’ve probably heard of Kickstarter, which allows would-be documentarians, video-game designers, and atheist cobblers to solicit money for their projects. A new company, called Petri Dish, gives that tool to scientists who want to finance their research projects. It’s already received significant attention considering that it has been around only since March and has raised tens of thousands of dollars.
As on Kickstarter, many Petri Dish participants offer rewards for donations. For instance, if you give $25 to Gerald Carter’s project to understand how animals “can enforce and stabilize cooperation in a complex society,” you will receive three photos of one of the vampire bats he’s studying. If you give $10 to Ashlee Lillis’s project to record audio of deep-sea habitats, you will get a five-minute compilation of the most interesting stuff she’s recorded.
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. This happened, as nearly everyone has noted, in the same state where John Scopes was tried in 1925 for exposing impressionable high-school students to the evils of evolutionary theory. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill.
But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still don’t buy it. As the comedian Louis C.K. asked in a bit about people who insist that they can’t possibly be related to monkeys: “Why are you fighting this?”
Dan McAdams offers one possible, rarely discussed reason: Maybe evolution is a lousy story. Actually, McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, doesn’t think evolution is a story at all. There is no protagonist, no…
Forget that visit to the Army-Navy store for camouflage gear. Researchers at the University of Bristol are developing plastics that change colors as fast as flicking a switch, and do it in the same way that squid and zebrafish hide themselves from predators. Check out this easily-seen, nondisguised video:
The first approach mimics what squids do: The animals’ cells have pigment sacs that squeeze and expand to create large blotches of color. The Bristol scientists created polymer bands that squeeze in the same way when triggered by an electric current, seen in the first part of the video.
Zebrafish use a different tactic for disguise. They pump pigment out to their skin from a central holding tank. Again scientists used electricity-driven polymers, but this time—as shown in the second video segment—they constructed one pump that squirts out a mixture of black ink and water, …
Birds navigate incredibly long distances using what the neuroscientist David Keays calls “a sixth sense”: the ability to detect how the earth’s magnetic field changes at different locations around the planet. The scientist, from the Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna, has been hunting in vain for the cells responsible. But in what Mr. Keays calls “a stunning piece of work,” two other researchers have found cells in the pigeon brain that respond to specific changes in magnetism.
The cells, in the most primitive brain region, the stem, “encode the direction, intensity, and polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field,” one of those scientists, David Dickman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. “These cells have the key ingredients to form maps of spatial directional heading and location, similar to the GPS in your car or cellphone.” He and his colleague…
But take heart, unjuiced undergrads—there may be a solution on the way, albeit one that sounds dubious, even dangerous, at first. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves running a weak electrical current through your brain. While tDCS has been around for decades, in the last couple of years it’s been getting a lot of attention, thanks to research suggesting that it speeds up learning for certain kinds of tasks.
Here’s an example: In a study published in January, researchers tested subjects to see how well they could detect concealed threats in a…
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