Science of Eyewitness Memory Enters Courtroom

Science has prevailed over injustice in the state of New Jersey, where all jurors will soon learn about memory’s unreliability and the limits of eyewitness testimony.

According to instructions issued July 19 by New Jersey’s Supreme Court, judges must tell jurors that “human memory is not foolproof,” and enumerate the many ways in which eyewitness recall can be distorted or mistaken.

Can bacteria fight brain cancer?

The thinking behind an approach that has caused trouble in California.

Last week, the Sacramento Bee reported that two neurosurgeons at the University of California, Davis, had been banned from research on humans after deliberately infecting three terminally ill cancer patients with pathogenic bacteria in an attempt to treat them. All three died, two showing complications from the infection. Nature explores what happened and the science behind it.

The Omega Current

Mutation of voltage-sensor domains (VSDs) can sometimes lead to ions leaking across the membrane through the VSDs themselves. Ion conduction through the mutated VSD of the Shaker Kv channel was coined the “omega current” in 2005 by Tombola, Pathak and Isacoff (Tombola et al., 2005). Many different mutations have been identified that result in current leaking through VSDs in many different channels. This current can be carried by a variety of ions including H+, Li+, K+, Cs+ and guanidinium. It has also been shown that naturally occurring mutations in VSDs that result in omega current leak can lead to channelopathies (diseases caused by malfunctioning ion channels, learn more about them out on wikipedia).  In this post I will discuss a mutation of the Shaker Kv channel that results in omega current leak. I will address how this current arises and briefly what it can tell us about the mechanism of voltage-sensing.

What links Alzheimer’s disease, the bridges of Königsberg and Twitter?

A mathematical puzzle originating in 18th century Prussia has led to insights in fields as diverse as banking, social networking, epidemiology – and now Alzheimer’s disease

The progression of Alzheimer’s is accompanied by a buildup in the brain of amyloid plaque and the breakdown of communication between nerve cells. Recent research suggests that graph theory can provide fascinating insights into the faulty wiring behind the progressive memory loss of Alzheimer’s. But what exactly is graph theory?

To discover the origins of the theory we have to go back to the 18th century and the ancient Prussian city of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad – that tiny city state wedged between Poland and Lithuania. It was here that Leonard Euler solved the long-standing Bridges of Königsberg Problem, which has had a profound effect on the development of network theory.

The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.

Opinion: Scientists’ Intuitive Failures

Much of what researchers believe about the public and effective communication is wrong.

Scientists in the United States and Europe have long been concerned with how well the public understands science, whether or not the media adequately covers science, and how the public reaches decisions on complex science-related policy issues. Given the norms of our profession, however, it is ironic that many of these debates about how to best communicate science with lay populations are driven by intuitive assumptions on the part of scientists rather than the growing body of social science research on the topic that has developed over the past 2 decades.

In May, more than 500 researchers, journalists, and policy professionals gathered at the National Academies in Washington, DC, for a 2-day forum on the “Science of Science Communication” to dispel some of these intuitive but persistent myths about science, the media, and the public.

1. Americans no longer trust scientists.  Prominent scientists warn that we have entered a new “dark age,” where the public no longer trusts scientific expertise. 

2. Science journalism is dead.  Though scientists are often critical of the news media, calling attention to perceived bias on the part of journalists, they also fear that budget cuts at news organizations have meant the death of science journalism.  

3. Entertainment media promote a culture of anti-science.  Since the 1970s, scientists have feared that entertainment TV and film undermine public trust in science.  

4. The problem is the public, not scientists or policymakers. Scientists have long believed that when the public disagreed with them on matters of policy, public ignorance was to blame.  

5. Political views don’t influence the judgments of scientists. In debating science-related policy matters, we tend to assume that scientists are not influenced by their own political views. Yet in a recent study co-authored by one of us (Scheufele), we find that even after controlling for their scientific judgments, scientists’ political ideologies significantly influence their preferences for potential regulatory policies.

Think You’re a Comic Genius? Maybe You’re Just Overconfident

No matter how badly the joke is told, it will sometimes elicit a few polite laughs.

Why?

Because social norms make us averse to providing negative feedback, says Joyce Ehrlinger, a Florida State University assistant professor of psychology whose latest laboratory research recreated everyday interactions in which people might feel pressured to withhold negative information.