Are you conscious? 17 Criteria for Consciousness:
A lack of clear definitions for terms like “intelligence” and “consciousness” plagues any serious discussion of those concepts. A recent article by Seth, Baars & Edelman argues for a core set of 17 properties that are characteristic of consciousness, and could be used in the “diagnosis” of [...]
Eva Lindström has a fascinating guide to travel in Papua New Guinea from her field work experiences in New Ireland:
It’s a good idea too to inform people that you are dumber than a newborn babe when it comes to their environment, so can they please tell you if you are about to step [...]
Malcolm Tredinnick found himself a great collection of international phrases to use for testing software – My hovercraft is full of eels in many languages
For the Austronesianists amongst us:
Cebuano: Puno ug kasili ang akong hoberkrap/hovercraft Indonesian: Hoverkraf saya penuh belut Malay: Sampan saya penuh dengan belut Tagalog: Puno ng palos [...]
You should be able to leave comments on things again now. Please let me know if there are any bugs!
—Simon
The shortlist for this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books has been announced:
Homo britannicus, by Chris Stringer (Penguin Allen Lane) In Search of Memory, by Eric R Kandel (WW Norton & Co) Lonesome George, by Henry Nicholls (Macmillan) One in Three, by Adam Wishart (Profile Books) Stumbling [...]
A new paper in P.N.A.S. shows that co-operation in chimpanzees is not limited to kin groups. National Geographic says:
By combining field observations with DNA analysis of fecal samples, his team found that male chimps prefer to work with their brothers by the same mother. The chimps often teamed up with these siblings to [...]
It’s April, and for some reason this means that Slate magazine’s doing a yearly roundup. Without further ado, here are Slate’s five ‘biggest’ neuroscience developments of the year:
The arrival of “mind-reading”. The neural alteration of morality. The medicalization of sexual orientation. The discovery of vegetative consciousness. The progress of artificial intelligence.
Nick Thieberger, who runs the wonderful PARADISEC project talks about what happened at The Puliima National Indigenous Languages Information Communication Technology Forum, including new software for linguists, and some new language preservation projects.
Pete Lockhart reviews some new phylogenetic methods for detecting and resolving rapid radiation events (abstract only):
A deeper phylogenetic understanding of ancient patterns of diversification would contribute to solving many problems in evolutionary biology, yet many of these phylogenies remain poorly resolved. Ancient rapid radiations pose a major challenge for phylogenetic analysis for [...]
The paper that had been causing all the noise about differential rates of gene selection in humans and chimps has finally been released:
Observations of numerous dramatic and presumably adaptive phenotypic modifications during human evolution prompt the common belief that more genes have undergone positive Darwinian selection in the human lineage than in the [...]
